The Wisdom of Shiva

We were about to interview psychologist Davina Kotulski about her new book, The Manna Paradigm Shift: Creating the Consciousness of Abundance and Freedom on our podcast, The Mystical Underground. The book is about taking chances, stepping off the cliff, to find your true self and to pursue your dreams. Essentially, it requires destroying the old ways to create the new.

But Mercury Retrograde kicked in and a technical glitch with Skype resulted in a delay. While our tech magician/producer Jon Posey worked on the problem, we took a break. As I headed back to my office, I stopped at a bookcase in the family room and for some reason I snatched a book off the shelf that caught my eye and opened it at random. The book is called, The Wisdom Codes: Ancient Words to Rewire Out Brains and Heal our Hearts, by Gregg Braden. I thought the title sounded somewhat harmonious with the wisdom our guest was providing in The Manna Paradigm Shift.

On the page I opened was a sub-heading called The Hindu Mantra of Strength. It was about a well-known simple Hindu mantra: Om Namah Shivaya. It honors Shiva, one of the three primary deities in the Hindu tradition. Shiva is often referred to as the destroyer god who works in concert with Brahma, the creator, and Vishnu, the preserver. She balances energies and provides powerful harmony among the three primal forces.

Braden writes: “While it’s true that Shiva is frequently described as the destroyer, a deeper exploration of Hindu tradition reveal that the name is often appended with the name transformer as well. And while the qualities, destruction and transformation, are often used interchangeably, it may be more accurate to describe them as part of a sequence rather than substitutes for one another.”

In other words, what might be seen as destruction of the old ways leads to transformation, the new way of being. As Braden put it: “By invoking the power of Shiva in our lives, we destroy our old ideas of self-limitation and free ourselves to transform into new expressions of ourselves that embody our deepest strengths.”

I was interested in talking to Davina about these concepts and how they relate to The Manna Paradigm Shift, but like I said it was Mercury retrograde. Jon told us the problem with Skype was continuing, so we postponed the interview for three weeks. When the time comes, we’ll see how “manna from heaven” and the destroyer god Shiva fit together. That podcast episode will be up here in The Mystical Underground some time in March.