The Healing Power of Shakti:

My Own Story

By Teri Degler

© 2010

Reprinted with permission from SageWoman Magazine

The extraordinary images below are paintings by Sandy Brand

that express for me both the healing and the creative power of light.

The year from hell started right after the year from Hades…

I’d spent six months on crutches and gone through a minor – but painful – surgery to correct a problem with a badly damaged knee. It was September, the weather in Canada was beautiful, and I was walking again! During the months on crutches I’d managed to keep swimming a little with the masters swim team I’m on and was expecting to get my old fitness level back fairly quickly.

But instead I found myself getting weaker and weaker and beginning to have trouble eating. I contacted a holistic practitioner, but the treatments didn’t help.

As I lost strength, my brain began to fog. I was in the middle of writing an article for a parenting magazine – a publication I’d written for on and off since my now college-age daughter was a baby – and had, for the first time in all those years, the piece returned for a major re-write. And I do mean major! When I read it over I couldn’t believe I’d turned in such a disjointed piece; I understood what the editor wanted but the “writing” part of my brain didn’t seem to work, and I wasn’t able to make the necessary changes.

An image of the divine feminine fireBeginning to feel desperate, I went to my family doctor and was actually relieved when blood tests showed I’d lost a considerable amount of blood. I wasn’t imagining things! What’s more, my doctor assured me that it was probably just a bleeding ulcer. A problem he said that could, of course, be serious but one that was generally easy to correct with medication. Calmed and reassured, I called my editor to explain what was happening and to say that with any luck I’d be working up to my old standards in a few weeks.

Did I Really Believe in the Power of Shakti?

But I continued to get worse. The medication wasn’t working, and I was beginning to vomit frequently. Somehow between struggling to take care of my family and work, I managed to turn in an acceptable rewrite of the article – but it still needed editing and it had taken me, literally, more than ten times longer than it should have.

When it finally dawned on me that I really couldn’t write either well or efficiently, panic set in. I had just signed a contract with a book publisher who had assigned me a fabulous editor, and I had only six months in which I was supposed to work with her to get the lengthy manuscript polished and to write two chapters that were still needed. I knew I couldn’t do it, and I was frantic.

But then I shook myself. Why was I so panicked? For more than two decades I’d been researching and writing books and articles about the ancient yogis’ teachings on the cosmic divine feminine force they called Shakti and how these teachings related to personal transformation and divinely inspired creativity. This was, in fact, the very topic of the book I was working on! Didn’t I believe that any of this true? Wasn’t I sure that this great cosmic force – not my own puny brain – was the true source of creative inspiration?

I Knew the Power of Kundalini Shakti and Creativity

I was clearly being called upon to put my money where my mouth was. Certainly I knew it was possible to tap into this creative energy. My first experience of this had been decades ago when I had begun to have spiritual experiences that were followed by prodigious amounts of creative output. Naturally I had wanted to know what was happening to me, and because some of these first experiences were related to doing yoga postures, I was eventually led to researching Hatha Yoga – the tradition where the classic poses known as āsanas originated – to find answers.

As I researched and wrote about this topic over the years, I discovered that in the texts that come to us from Hatha Yoga and Tantra, the cosmic force known as Shakti is believed to take on a personalized form and, in a sense, “embody” herself in us as human beings. In this manifestation she is known as kundalini-shakti – or often just kundalini. One of her jobs in this embodied state is to propel us along our evolutionary paths, transforming us and bringing us ever closer to an awareness of our oneness with the Absolute.

Shakti as the Divine Feminine – The Creative Force of the Cosmos

In doing this research I had been thrilled to discover that these ancient texts held very clear references to kundalini-shakti as the source of inspired creativity. I found one example in a text called Panchastavi that was written in Kashmir in around 800 A.D. A verse honoring the goddess Tripura – another name for kundalini-shakti – says:

O Mother of the Universe, Goddess Tripura, the sphere of Thy surpassing beauty…becomes the means of granting…the talents of a poet (to Thy devotees)….

He (Thy devotee), who perceives Thy form, like the white rays of the full moon…acquires the gift of limitless flow of words, rich with the ambrosia of sweetness and beauty of expression.

Even Shankara, one of the most venerated sages in all of Indian history, wrote about this relationship between the divine feminine and creative inspiration:

Oh! Mother he who meditates on you…becomes the creator of great works of art, using expressions fragrant like the lotus-face of the goddess of learning…

In addition to discovering verses like these, I’d been collecting the stories of individuals who had experienced this type of inspired creativity for several years. So, under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have had any doubt that I could tap into this cosmic source of creativity. But these weren’t normal circumstances. By this point, tests had revealed that something – they couldn’t determine quite what – had caused the opening between my stomach and my small intestine to become almost completely closed off. I was now suffering from violent nausea, throwing up even more frequently, and losing weight rapidly. Worse, the scheduled surgery that would hopefully fix the problem had to be put on hold because large tumors had been found in my thyroid gland. Tests on whether they were malignant were inconclusive, and so, in fear that the blockage in my intestine was a malignancy that had spread from my thyroid, the specialists decided to remove it first.

Once the thyroid surgery was done – and the tumors were found to be benign – I waited to recover enough to have the next surgery. Each day I got out of bed as often as I could and struggled to my computer. Using a technique I think of as an invocation to the divine feminine, I would meditate, pray, and visualize the divine feminine as a radiant white light that was flooding my body, intensifying around my heart, flowing down my arms, and out my hands into my creative work. When I was able to become completely immersed in this light, the overwhelming nausea would vanish, energy would flow through me, and I could write.

An expression of prana-shaktiAlthough science can’t tell us what this white light is, mystics, saints, and visionaries from every spiritual tradition have been writing about it for centuries. The 12th century Benedictine nun Hildegard von Bingen, for instance, writes about what she called the “Living Light”. In Sister of Wisdom, a book on this beloved saint, author Barbara Newman tells us that from the time Hildegard was a little child she could see some degree of this light radiating everywhere and in everything at all times. “The light,” Hildegard writes, “I see thus is not spatial, but it is far, far brighter than a cloud that carries the sun. I can measure neither height, nor length, nor breadth in it.” She adds that in this light her soul “rises up high into the vault of heaven and into the changing sky and spreads itself out among different peoples, although they are far away from me in distant lands and places.”

Shakti – The Cosmic Light

A surprisingly similar description can be found in a passage in the Chāndogya Upanishad, a Hindu sacred text that states: “Now, the light that shines beyond the heavens, upon the backs of all, upon the backs of everything, higher than the highest – verily, that is the same as this light that is here within the person”.

The Jesuit priest and renowned scientist Teilhard de Chardin often wrote about a living divine light that he could see shimmering at the very heart of the rocks and cliffs he explored in his work as a paleontologist. In books like The Heart of Matter he makes it clear that he saw all of creation as a pulsing, living web of light that not only connected us to the earth but made us one with each other.

In traditions like Tantra and hatha yoga, the radiant cosmic energy that permeates and connects all things is known as prāna-shakti, or simply prāna. If you’ve taken many yoga classes you may know that the word prāna is used to refer to both “life force” and breath. You may also know that the Sanskrit word shakti means “power” or “energy”. Thousands of years before physicists came to the conclusion that all matter was made of energy, the ancient yogis were saying that the universe and everything in it was made of energy. They believed that this energy – this prāna-shakti – was, like kundalini-shakti, simply another way the divine cosmic Shakti manifested in the physical world.

As I sat at my computer, struggling to work on my book, I was so grateful for the moments of grace when I could sense this light flowing through my body that I would weep. This was especially true once the second surgery was completed, and I was supposed to be on my way to reks it became clear that the surgery had not worked. The doctors had warned me that this might be the case. By this point they knew the blockage in my intestine was caused by a rare condition I had been born with – one that was extremely difficult to repair if it wasn’t caught in childhood. In my case, the surgery had not only not worked, it had made me worse. I was now vomiting as much as five times a day and living on what little liquid meal replacement I could hold down. I’d lost the extra twenty-five pounds I’d had to lose and was still losing a few more pounds every week.

Things were getting desperate. Friends and acquaintances from far and wide were praying for me, meditating on me and, of course, sending me white light. Just like others claim who have experienced the power of prayer claim, I could quite literally feel this healing energy flowing through me when people were meditating on me.

Prana Shakti as the Healing and the Creative Force

Astounding as it may seem – especially for someone who had spent years researching Shakti in all her various manifestations – during this period of illness I never once made the connection between the healing light that people were “sending” me and the light I was visualizing during my invocations to the divine feminine. Of course, I thought the light I visualized flowing through my body when I was writing was prāna – I’d been writing and teaching creativity workshops about this for years. But it wasn’t until several months after my illness, when I was writing an article on the similarities between white light and prāna, that it occurred to me that the light people “sent” during healing meditations might also be prāna.

An image of the divine feminine bursting forth as healing light

After all, I thought, this field of radiant life energy is believed to connect us all and make us all one. If this is true, the time-space continuum we hold so dear dissolves, and there seems to be little reason that we can’t activate the life force in someone else simply by “seeing” it to be so….

There is, of course, no way to prove any of this. Western science is only now beginning to accept the idea that prāna – and its Asian equivalent chi – might actually exist. However, in both the yogic tradition and healing practices like acupuncture that are based on chi, the existence of this life force is taken for granted. And there is no doubt that, at least in yoga, prāna is held to be the healing force. In the classic yogic text, The Hatha Yoga Pradipika, the healing aspects of prāna and prānāyāma – the breathing exercises that control the flow of prāna through the body – are clearly referred to. One bold statement even goes so far as to say, “By the proper practice of prānāyāma… all diseases are eradicated.”

For now all I really have to go on is my own unshakable personal conviction that the radiant light I felt flowing through my body was a healing energy. At the time of my illness I was certainly aware of the powerful sensations I experienced when others were praying for me and sending me light. But looking back on the experience, I think that the experiences I had when writing were at least as important to my healing. There were hours spent at my desk when the violent waves of nausea were completely stilled, when – in spite of my horribly weakened condition – my mind worked at peak efficiency, and most significantly perhaps, when I was filled with an almost radiant bliss.

Shakti – Working Magic on the Unsuspecting!

I even have a little evidence that sending light to those who are completely unsuspecting works, too: When the surgeon was preparing me mentally for the second surgery on my intestines, he explained that it had only a small chance of working and there were simply no studies or prior examples to tell him exactly what to do. He was, he told me, simply going to have to do a lot of guessing. Given this, when friends called to tell me they would be meditating and praying for me on the day of the surgery, I cried, “No! No! Send all your prayers and light to the surgeon! Don’t even think about me!” My friends did as instructed.

When I met with the surgeon for a follow-up three weeks later, I was visibly better. I hadn’t thrown up once and I was beginning to gain weight. The surgeon seemed as thrilled as I was with the results. He told me a strange thing had happened during the surgery. At some point he suddenly changed what he had been planning to do and did something completely different. “I just had this intuitive feeling,” he said, “And I went with it.”

Now, ten healthy months later, I can only say that I am thankful he did – and immeasurably thankful for both the friends who showered me with light and the radiant blessing that, I believe, was a gift from Shakti, the cosmic divine feminine fire.

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1. Krishna, Gopi, Secrets of Kundalini in Panchastavi (Darien, Connecticut: Bethel Publishers, 2010), 196 & 202.

2. Degler, Teri. The Divine Feminine Fire: Creativity and Your Yearning to Express Your Self (Pennsylvannia: Dreamriver Press), 2010, Chapter Fourteen.

3. Newman, Barbara, Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 6-7.

4. Nikhhilananda, Swami, trans. and ed., The Principal Upanishads (New York, Courier Dover Publications, 2003), 299.

5. Subramanian, V. K., trans. and commentary, Saundaryalaharī of Śańkarācārya (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 2006), 10.