Tonight, I’m going to pull a Meredith and Christina and dance it out. When my heart is broken, I need to take myself to the church of my body and pray. Moving my body, feeling the heat and the sweat of it, flowing with the unpredictable rhythms of the beat of the music, calls my pain to the surface of my skin, breaking it into pieces as droplets of saltwater.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been broken. It’s happened before and it will happen again. Brokenness, though, has secrets. There is a little bit of space between the fragments of myself where something new will happen that I can’t quite see yet. And this process, honoring the fragments, sweating through the pain, and stepping into the space between who I thought I was and whoever I’m going to be next now that my heart is broken—has a patron saint.

Well, sort of—she’s actually a Tantric goddess.

Klinna Nitya presides over the third night from the new moon, when it’s still a thin sliver in the sky. She is one of the 16 Eternal Moon Phase Goddesses. I started learning about these goddesses through yoga teacher Eric Stoneberg’s lectures a few years ago. The goddesses from this tradition—Shakta Tantra—represent a spirituality that sees god as Shakti, as pure, divine feminine energy.

This isn’t the energy of reward and punishment, and it isn’t the energy of rules. Shakti is chaos and flow, the urge that makes you tap your foot unconsciously when you hear a good beat. The goddesses are manifestations of some aspect of this energy, and they act like a story that wants you to become the main character.

This year, I wrote a book about Klinna and the other Nityas called Secrets of the Eternal Moon Phase Goddesses: Meditations on Desire, Relationships, and the Art of Being Broken. The following is an excerpt from the book, all about Klinna Nitya and the value of physically moving through pain, whether it’s for a new heartbreak or a very, very old one.

Klinna Nitya: Goddess of Embodiment.

Klinna’s body is red, her clothing is red, and she is smeared with red sandal paste. She sits in the middle of a lotus flower, wearing glistening unfinished stones that are irregularly cut and come to points. The half moon sits above her forehead. Her eyes are glassy, she is wet with sweat, and she is smiling, “listless with desire,” according to her source text, the Tantraraja. In her four hands she holds a noose, a goad, and a drinking cup that catches the “beads of sweat, shining like pearls,” that emanate from her brow. One hand is held up, palm forward, in abhaya mudra, a gesture for protection that is often seen in Hindu deities.

Klinna is exuding; her insides are coming out. She offers us the ability to be fully present with the fears, insecurities, and traumas from our pasts that we often hide deep inside our bodies. She is able to bring these old hurts to the surface, catch them playfully in her jeweled cup, and turn them into nectar that she can drink, and maybe even share. This is the nectar of healing.

Klinna is surrounded by several other female figures. These represent all her other selves: selves that lived in the past, selves that were wounded and hurt, selves that she might have tried to hide in the dark. In order to heal, we must bring these past selves to light, allowing our whole, complicated, fragmented beings to arrive to the vulnerability of connection. This moment is necessarily tinted with all the other moments, all the other connections that have made their imprint on our bodies. Klinna’s invitation to intimacy is so complete that she offers herself plus her previous loves, her mistakes, her ecstasies, her violations, her fears, and everything else that is a part of her body, past, present, and future.

Working with the Body: Movement (& Sex) as Forms of Healing.

Our old hurts live in our bodies. As much as we might try, we can’t think ourselves free from what lives in our flesh. Yoga teacher Ana Forrest came to her practice from a place of long-term childhood stress, trauma, addiction and abuse. She believes the body has a reason for hiding its traumas, and that the body is where we will find the clues toward the path of healing. As she explains in her book Fierce Medicine,
“The body locks our traumas inside and archives them for future discovery, and, hopefully, healing. Each trauma needs to be unraveled and eased, the scars opened, massaged, and broken down.”

This process must be gentle, and can only happen in a safe environment: “The body can become like a tree that’s root bound and not dying: the roots need to be very gently pulled apart, not just hacked off,” Forrest writes. Memories and emotions can be hidden away in very deep places—commonly the hips and the space around the heart—and doing yoga or dancing it out can send energy into these areas and give the physical or emotional scar tissue an opportunity to break apart.

Then, of course, there’s sex. There may be no deeper or more intimate way to move and feel inside our bodies than having sex with another human being. Especially if the emotional scar tissue has to do with sex, it may be buried right at the heart of the violation, deep in the center of our bodies. Sex and relationship coach Kim Anami writes, “The deeper you go, the deeper you go. The further you go into the vagina, the more physically, emotionally, and spiritually intense it is for the woman.” The special sweat that can arise in both sexes while making love is not only from the vigorous workout, but also what exudes from us when we are touched, literally and metaphorically, in our deepest places. The physical act of sex with someone you feel safe with can be one of the most healing experiences in the world.

As we move the body and stay present with what we feel, we chase the pain, the inarticulate memory. We bring it into the surface and we breathe with it. Much of the time, we don’t even need to mentally articulate the old experience in which the sensation is rooted—there is a time for thinking and analyzing, but that’s not how the body heals. The body often just needs to move, to create space, to let the old emotions arise and be felt. This healing power is not about any specific emotion or sensation, it’s about movement and flow, being able to access every part of ourselves, no matter how broken and stuck those parts may seem. Our practices—yoga, meditation, dance floors—teach us to understand what’s coming from our bodies. We learn how to jump into the deep water of our own broken hearts. We learn how to get wet.

Always Empowering Tears.

Klinna’s always empowering wetness is not only about sweat and sex, but also about tears. When we are truly able to connect with our past and present selves and all that lives in our bodies, sometimes we have to grieve.

This isn’t always sexy, of course; sometimes it’s scary and gross and sad and means we have to blubber uncontrollably lying on our bedroom floors (we’ve all been there). This is not a sign of weakness or that those who hurt us still have power over us. On the contrary, trauma psychologist Dr. Judith L. Herman insists:

“Reclaiming the ability to feel the full range of emotions, including grief, must be understood as an act of resistance rather than submission to the perpetrator’s intent. Only through mourning everything that she has lost can the patient discover her indestructible inner life.”

Klinna encourages us to find a way to get wet, whether it is through the deep sweat of moving our bodies in ways that feel good or through sobbing uncontrollably in mourning what’s been stolen. Acknowledging what has happened, communicating about it, grieving about it, finding a safe place to cry in and perhaps also a safe person to be with—these are ways to coax our bodies from the fear state back toward of love and connection. Allowing these waves of wetness to move through us is what can help us begin to heal what still hurts. When we can let all our old selves show up, we get to choose which ones to embody. This is the act of catching our tears and sweat in a cup, as Klinna does. We do not fear our pain, rather, we drink from it, and let it give us back our power.

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Excerpt from Secrets of the Eternal Moon Phase Goddesses—Meditations on Desire, Relationships & the Art of Being Broken by Julie Peters. Permission granted by SkyLight Paths Publishing, Woodstock, VT.

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Author: Julie Peters

Editor: Toby Israel

Photos: Used with permission from Nora Grace Photographer. // Pixabay

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