How to Connect To Goddess Kali

Welcome to the Kali Blog Series

Creating the Kali Oracle was an absolute act of love and joyful dedication to our wild mother. Goddess Kali, the pure and ever-watchful, yet wrathful goddess of supreme spiritual protection beckons all those who wish to welcome their hearts to her, of which there are apparently and yet not surprisingly, many!

Because of the beautiful and insightful questions regarding the Kali Oracle that some of you have asked, we opened a Q&A on my social media channels, and the response was overwhelming. We have decided to expand this into a larger blog series around Kali so that your practice can evolve in a deeper way, encouraging you to dance, revel and rejoice in the presence of the Great Mother.

Ways to connect with the Goddess Kali

Make an offering

As an expression of the Divine Mother, Kali’s inner nature is enlightened wisdom, and she will accept any offering. Keep in mind that any offering we make contains an energy that will be amplified, and therefore, it’s wise to choose offerings that are positive in nature.

However, you can also offer up some pain or attachment and allow for Kali’s grace to help you on your healing journey. Here, the intention behind the offering is very important. You must keep this positive ideal outcome in mind. If you can add to your intention that in healing yourself you will benefit others too (by becoming kinder, more open, generous and loving, for example), then it will become even stronger. This is because your compassion for others will mirror the Divine Mother’s wish to liberate all beings from suffering.

Consider your intention

When considering the intention for your offering, reflect on what feels pure and meaningful for your heart. Some examples include wanting to open your heart, to heal from a painful experience, to express gratitude or to generate positive energy to benefit all beings.

Once you have clarified the intention for your offering, then you can choose your preferred method for expressing that intention and making your offering.

A very simple method of offering is to state your intention and visualise offering your words on a silver dish that rises up and is then released into the darkest depths of the Universe. If you would like to take the visualisation further, you can imagine that the darkest depths of the Universe are an emanation of Kali’s body. She can receive your silver dish and the offering upon it, perhaps choosing to wear it as a pendant over her heart.

There are many ways to make an offering. You could read a poem, sing a song, create a prayer or even perform a conscious dance. The intention that it will become an offering is what transforms the method from mundane to sacred. You could also offer a flower or a lit candle if you like. Making a donation to charity on her behalf is another option.

And most of all – just love her. Love others. Do so with a thought of her in your heart. She will know this, recognise it, receive it and repay it with her joyful love and protective presence.

Sing a mantra

For me, singing the goddess Kali’s mantra is the clearest and most direct path to experience her. Mantras create a psychic imprint of sorts, a soundwave that if repeated enough becomes part of your energy body. Then the deity invoked through the mantra is part of your being too.

You can join me in singing some mantras on the Kali track of the Kuan Yin Transmission™ album, which is also available on Spotify and other streaming platforms. I sing Om Kali, Sri Ma Kali, Jai Ma Kali, Jai Jai Ma. While part of understanding a mantra is to experience its effect gradually over time, we can roughly translate that this mantra is celebrating the goddess Kali as the primordial wisdom, the Divine Mother, the holy one, the victorious one, overcoming all obstacles and helping all beings.

Another mantra that I like, which includes the seed syllable for Kali, is Om Krim Kaliyei Namaha. This is a great mantra for support in owning your power and securing potent spiritual protection (whether from your own negativities or the negatives that you may sense around you).

Connect with your heart

To have an experience of the deity, we need to move beyond intellectual knowledge into experience. And so, we need to access the dimension of the heart. Connecting with your heart may be natural and familiar for you, but if not, then I suggest that reflecting on what you’re grateful for can help you connect to the feeling of gratitude, which is a wonderful ‘trick’ to attune to your heart.

The heart dwells in a realm of feeling, and positive feeling strengthens the heart. Cultivating spiritual devotion – which we might call positive feeling on spiritual steroids – can be a potent pathway into the heart’s dimension. Through heart-connection with the divine, we increasingly embody that presence in ourselves, and our world. This can be enormously protective and encouraging.

The Indian sage Sri Ramakrishna was a devotee of the goddess Kali. He taught that devotion was the most successful spiritual pathway for our era, if only because for many it was the most accessible. It does not require difficult training or mastery of obscure teachings. One simply needs to learn how to feel the love in one’s heart and increase or amplify that love.

As we discover and deepen our understanding and capacity for love, our hearts will show us the way into deeper spiritual experience. We may find our love for the Divine Mother in her many forms, including Kali, increases and we start to sense her presence in our lives and the world in unexpected ways. Our capacity to trust life opens up and our spiritual path becomes more than our specific practices – it becomes part of how we choose to be in the world.

Create an altar

When we create an altar, we also create a beautiful heart space of devotion. From such a heart space of devotion to the goddess Kali, we invite her presence to grow within. This increases as we ponder her nature.

Within your altar, you could add images or offerings to build a focal point for your devotional contemplation. Kali is associated with red flowers and skulls, so you could include a red hibiscus flower or a crystal skull, or a black coloured crystal, to match her skin black like the night sky. Engaging heart and mind into creating an altar can be a powerful support for developing our devotional capacity.

Once we have that feeling of devotion, we allow it to infuse our cells. The body then increasingly becomes an instrument to receive and vibrationally communicate that divine presence.

Adopt a stance

If you want to ground the experience of embodiment in a stance, you could model Dakshina Kali. Dakshina Kali is the most popular form of Kali in Bengal and is embraced as the benevolent mother who protects us from mishaps and misfortunes. She is depicted in her unique stance with her right foot forward and her arms lowered or raised.

By adopting this stance as you wish, you can embrace this as a benevolent and beautiful form of the goddess Kali for meditation and devotional offerings. By integrating her stance with her chant and intending that her beautiful fierce love fills your soul, you can shine for the benefit of all beings.

Experience her in your dreams

Goddess Kali, like all forms of the Divine Mother, will assume the form that will resonate and be effective for each being who needs her.

For me, I have experienced her in my dreams in a number of different ways. I’ve sensed her presence and sung her mantra. I’ve seen her as a book of Kali Tantra. I’ve seen her as a model wearing Dr Martens combat boots stomping along a catwalk in a tiny white dress. She can be a red hibiscus, a black midnight sun, a shining moon, a seemingly endless black abyss, the awesome power of a black hole and the velvety red tongue that unfurls in your mind’s eye. You will just know when she is there, no matter what form she takes.

It’s helpful to remember that dream knowing is pure intuition. When you sit with images and symbols from dreams and allow them to speak to you, rather than trying to force an analysis upon them, there will be moments when you realise the meaning and recognise the divine ones who appear in your dreams. It happens spontaneously at the right time.

Leave some space to contemplate your dream images and allow them to breathe. Journal if you like. Dance your dream image. Sing it. Paint it.

Sometimes the meaning of a dream comes suddenly, and you must trust that. Other times, you can imagine or intend that you’re feeding the dream images into your soul, like eating an energy-rich meal, meditating on the energy or image.

The intellectual, rational mind doesn’t have to understand how this works. Dream work is intuitive, right brain food. It strengthens the soul and can provide extremely valuable life guidance. Some of my most major and life-changing (in a positive way) choices have come about as a result of intuitive knowing inspired by my dreams.

Embrace the goddess Kali for transformation

The goddess Kali is here for us – but not as something to be afraid of. She is the goddess of transformation, and her work brings death to ego and attachment, and allows us to bloom into enlightenment and freedom. She can be scary because she brings change, but evolving, shedding of old ways and embracing the new is the key to becoming the humans who can bring light for the benefit of all souls.

Read Next: Understanding Kali: Destroyer or nurturer?