The Union of Shiva and Shakti

Shiva and Shakti are two archetypal deities found in Hinduism.

They are similar to concepts like Yin and Yang, Form and Emptiness, Heaven and Earth, and lend themselves perfectly for poetic expression, as a dramatic eternal love-story that expresses the metaphysics of this universe and consciousness.

Archetypal is a key word here. They are indeed Hindu deities, but in essence, they are non-secular, non-religious, and nothing that we do not already know.

They in fact represent something that we know very intimately. Two polar opposites, yet symbiotic, inseperable forces of this universe. Forces that live within us. Consciousness, and energy.

Shiva is the eternity of the present moment.

Shakti is the impermanence of everything within the present moment.

If it moves, has a duration, a beginning and an end, it is Shakti.

If it is seen, tasted, smelled, sensed, heard, or perceived, it is Shiva.

Shakti is wild, untamable, unpredictable, beautiful, sensual, mesmerizing, and mysterious.

She is the mother—and daughter—of all things, lovingly taking care, yet also able to sweep anything and everything away within less than a second if that is what she is moved to by her spontaneity.

She is nothing that the mind imagines her to be, and in fact, the more we try to conceptualize and understand her through our intellect, the more we disconnect from her, and the more she withers away, unable to nurture and love us in her incredible ways.

All Shakti wants is to be felt and experienced.


And when we feel Shakti, she opens like a flower and shows us her infinite faces and personalities like a endless fountain of nectar that we can drink from. Never twice the same. But ever more impressive.

The moment we think we understand her, or the moment we think we like her exactly this way and want to keep her like this for our own convenience, is the moment that she will surprise us, sometimes gently, and sometimes fiercely, dependent upon how unconscious we went.

She doesn't like to be put in a box. Even if we would try, she simply cannot be put in a box.

All that would lead to is endless suffering on all sides. All she is asking for is to be held with presence, so she can keep changing into infinite blissful, sensual and artful shapes. While being intimately held in the eyes of her beloved, Shiva. This is her way of making love, and this way she initiates the masculine into the secrets of life itself.

Shiva, her symbiotic counterpart, is stable, composed, reliable, powerful, spacious, meditative, and does not fully belong to the realm of space and time. He is the very creator and destroyer of space and time.

He does move within it at times, and even incarnates into a body, but his ultimate existence is beyond form. He simply is.

As the master of all things and all living beings, he possesses the universe as his infinite kingdom, yet without any pride, tyranny, or claim, his love more vast than what we could ever fully comprehend.

With unbroken devotion, Shiva is holding everyone and everything inside the safety of his spacious awareness and heart, no matter how good or bad things get.

Shiva, similarly to Shakti, has so much glory to share with us, yet in his own way also becomes veiled by our thoughts, presumptions and lack of presence.

To forget Shiva is to forget ourselves. It is to forget that we exist. It is to walk in a dream, not knowing one is dreaming. To remember Shiva is to remember who we are. It is to become lucid once again. Usually it takes meditation, and emptiness, and closing our eyes, to fully remember him.

Yet matter Shiva's state of remembrance or forgetfulness, Shakti continues to dance in all her colours.

The more Shiva retracts, the more powerfully she will try to wake him up, in many artful and sometimes very painful ways. Not because she is mad at him (although sometimes she is). Her attempts to wake him up or her greatest devotion to return their marriage, and thus the world, back into balance.

Because when Shiva remembers who he is, and thus remembers Shakti, they both implode into ecstasy, make love until infinity, and the world returns into balance.