By: Danesh Thirukumaran
On the first day of Navaratri — nine nights to celebrate the divine feminine — I feel reminded to embrace the femininity within me. This, to me, is the freedom to connect to the world in various ways. Simply allowing myself to be receptive, without my logical mind’s ambitious nature budding in to try and understand everything. This tendency to overwrite an experience as not making sense or not fitting into my current framework of life is limiting, as my logic at a given moment cannot reach beyond what I know in that moment.
Here are some of the things I made connections to this morning, not caring if it made sense or not:
- The weather, and specifically this photo below felt like femininity
- Typically I do an annual ancestral ritual (Shraddha) for my mom in Canada, but this year I did it in the US. I felt nervous about doing it because usually I do it with my older brother. On the way there I felt frantic because I was late, and I kept thinking to myself did I bring all the right supplies for it? I just wanted it to go well. When I walked into the building, I surprisingly encountered a friend of my fiance’s who I had not yet met right before I did the ritual, and I felt that even in unfamiliar territories, there is a force out there looking out for me.
- Doing the ritual for the first time in the US is clearing any residual impressions from my mom as now I have done at least one ritual for her in all of the places she lived in her life.
- A few years ago when my dad unknowingly had metastatic cancer and had a burning stomach pain and could hardly eat, we visited the temple for Tamil New Year. On the way back he felt hungry but was afraid to eat. I took him to Wawa and we got a bagel, which he normally would pass on because he did not like how bagels have an overly chewy and hard texture. However, he thoroughly enjoyed this bagel and felt happy that he could eat it without it causing much after-effect, unlike most food at the time. On the way to the temple this time, again on a weekday morning, I passed by the same Wawa and thought of him. Later in the day, my fiance wanted a bagel and I suggested if she wants one from Wawa and she happily said yes. It felt like his presence was here.
- After doing the ritual it felt like a new opportunity to move back into my house because now I was liberating mummy from this place and she could look after me and the house from a new place of freedom instead of stagnation. I re-setup her framed photo along with my dads after many months of them sitting packed away after doing renovations. I placed them in a specific spot in my house and then thought maybe I should check the right placing of them according to Vastu Shastra. After checking, I saw that I intuitively placed it in the right place. The southwest location of the house conveys a grounding feeling and it is recommended to keep ancestral photos there, and I naturally gravitated toward it, again feeling empowered by my own sensitivity to these subtleties.
Later in the morning, when I was discussing my connection to friendships and understanding how I am in them, I felt willing and able to discuss my experience in ways that didn’t seem to make sense logically to me. For example, I described how I sometimes tend to be less direct with people in my energy even though the words may be of substance when it feels like the topic may lead to a strong response in them, especially when the topic feels close to home. I described the feeling as below:
In retrospect, the feeling is wide, almost like casting a net.
The words I say may be the same in substance from one situation to the next, but the way I am saying it feels different depending on the topic and who I am saying it to. I talked to my fiance about this, and she said it sounds like I am essentially gearing up to receive a range of responses. This may be due to the lack of directness with myself around a sensitive topic and how it sits with me, or just a general discomfort for holding strong responses from others and internalizing their discomfort as my own. I was only able to even get to this level of understanding because I embraced the feminine (graceful, gentle, right in front of me) within me to approach something illogically (intuitively) and then backtrace it with the masculine, logical mind (brute force, step by step).
Receiving insights bypassing the slow, at times grueling process of logic is a gift, and training my ears to listen to these insights, just like sharpening my mind’s logic, is a skill I want to continue to cultivate. The first step is to feel free in allowing myself to connect with everything and anything no matter how seemingly nonsensical.
It feels like I am receiving insights slowly but surely. After mummy passed, I remember constantly trying to connect my experiences in the world with her. Her passing sparked the rise in my own femininity.
I am seeing that my experience thus far in medical school is training my logic. Embracing the logical mind is something that society already agrees with, so its easy to grow that. From my experience though, there is a subtle undertone to discredit feminine energy, as if something is not already claimed with substantial evidence it is not heard. This may be true when it comes to offering population level advice. When offering advice to a population, that which supports the most at risk is best as it is all inclusive. When it comes to individuals, it is important to utilize both the practitioner’s and patient’s intuitive understanding of what is going on as a clinical tool. That is the art of medicine. When entertaining new ideas to shift the field, becoming receptive to profound insights without overriding their plausibility with our limited logic is what will bring liberation to individuals from whatever currently holds them back. Instead of denying something, instead by saying, this could be true, and we have yet to prove it false so we can state that we are uncertain instead of immediately discrediting grand and disruptive ideas. Similar to the court system’s innocent until proven guilty.
Training my intuition is something I have to embrace daily. Its experiential and up to the individual. In order for me to transcend whatever my current self is at every step in life, I need to embrace this. Sharpening my logic is important as it will help me share my intuitive insights by being able to backtrace them step by step. Combined, these will empower me in utilizing both mine and an individual’s intuitive insights about their health as a clinical tool in supporting their journey. These experiences today reinforced my value in femininity and I am grateful.
