Brahmacharini

The second form of Durga honored during Navratri is Brahmacharini. She is commonly depicted simply, dressed in white, barefoot, carrying a japa mala, or prayer beads, in one hand and a kamandalu, a water vessel associated with spiritual practice and ascetic life, in the other. There is a starkness to her compared with some of the other forms of Durga. No lion, no tiger, no collection of weapons.

Brahmacharini is traditionally associated with devotion, discipline, spiritual study, austerity, and the long practice through which Parvati seeks Shiva. I am cautious about turning the Goddess into a metaphor for my own life. She belongs to a tradition much larger and older than my individual interpretation. Still, she offers me a useful lens because after the invitation comes practice. After curiosity comes study. After saying yes once comes the more difficult question of whether I am willing to keep saying it.

That is the part of becoming I am deeply experiencing and researching now. What happens after something changes, when the experience becomes a choice and the choice has to be made again?

The ordinary work of transformation

There is something seductive about transformation when we tell the story afterward. We remember the moments that changed everything. The dream. The diagnosis. The decision. The plane ticket. The conversation that shifted the direction of a life.

We are less likely to remember transformation as the mundane repetition that makes up most of the work. Getting up. Sitting down. Reading. Meditating. Noticing. Reflecting. Showing up. Choosing new behaviors. Writing. Showing up again when nothing particularly remarkable happens, which is, most of the time.

I think that is one reason doctoral study was calling to me. I did not want another credential. I wanted to put myself somewhere that would require expansive exploration, deep understanding, and determined follow-through.

I remember my program director in my Communication undergrad sitting with me and discussing the future as I reviewed final graduation requirements. He believed in my ability to pursue a higher degree and shared with me a little of the process. He suggested an internship I eventually pursued and helped me understand what I would need to do to prepare for the GRE. There are people along our path who sometimes help us believe in ourselves before we fully believe in ourselves. For me, that has also been part of becoming: learning to receive another person’s belief in me until I was able to claim more of it for myself.

When I began looking seriously at doctoral programs, I had become increasingly interested in consciousness, human development, coaching, and the relationship between inner experience and outward transformation. By then, I already had a master’s degree in education, but I was not looking for another version of the academic world I already knew.

After going back to college in my thirties with a previous 1.7 college GPA, I am really proud of my magna cum laude graduation status, and annoyed that the one class that brought my GPA down was a Bible class required by my university. I could have done better in the class, but it certainly wasn’t an open philosophical exploration of the Bible. This was a Christian education at a private, Christian university. I appreciated the academic foundation, and that particular program director from my college experience, but I wanted a place where questions about consciousness did not have to be translated into safer language before they could be taken seriously. I also wanted to know whether those questions could survive serious examination. I was not looking for a place that would skirt questions or default to one theological perspective. I wanted somewhere that viewed all inquiry as worthy, sacred even.

Thanks to the algorithm, my search eventually led me to Maharishi International University.

Finding an academic home

MIU was unusual in ways that immediately caught my attention. Meditation was not treated as an extracurricular wellness practice. Consciousness was not something politely relegated to philosophy or spirituality while the “real” academic work happened elsewhere. The university’s approach to Consciousness-Based Education placed development of the person alongside development of knowledge.

I was drawn to that immediately, partly because it challenged a division I had already begun questioning in my own life. Why should intellectual development and inner development be treated as unrelated projects? Why should education ask what I know without also asking what kind of person I am becoming through what I know?

Maharishi’s teaching that knowledge is inseparable from the consciousness of the knower gave language to something I had already begun to recognize. I did not yet know what I thought about all of the claims surrounding consciousness, and I still do not. But the question itself felt worth taking seriously.

By then, I had spent enough time crossing between worlds to know how exhausting it could be to divide myself into acceptable pieces. There was the spiritual part of me. The parent. The academic. The teacher. The person interested in psychology and research. The person who had experienced things that did not fit comfortably inside the categories I had been taught to use.

At MIU, I found an environment that at least attempted to let those parts remain in conversation with one another. For me, it meant allowing spiritual experience, scholarship, psychology, consciousness, and lived experience to sit beside one another long enough to see what each might illuminate and where each might be limited.

I wanted scholarship. I wanted questions. I wanted evidence where evidence was possible. I also wanted enough intellectual humility to recognize that human experience has always exceeded our ability to explain it completely.

In my application interview process, I had prepared extensively and I was ready to play the part. I ended my interview with the program director in tears. Mask off, performative shield disarmed. I had completely unraveled as he reassured me that this program was about me, above anything else.

What unsettled me was not the promise that the program would transform me. It was the realization that I might not be able to hide behind competence. I knew how to be a good student. I knew how to perform academically. I was much less certain about what would happen if the work required me to notice myself with the same attention I gave everything I studied.

That interview was my first indication that this degree might ask me to participate in my own education in a way I had not experienced before.

Meditation as something practiced

I had already begun meditating before coming to MIU, but Transcendental Meditation became part of the structure of my life through the university.

The recent direction of my spiritual life had begun through an experience that felt extraordinary. Meditation invited me into something almost opposite. There was no woman in red arriving beside my bed. No message to decipher. No revelation required. There was simply the practice and my willingness to return to it.

Some days meditation feels spacious, deep, profoundly spiritual. Some days my mind is loud, I struggle to focus, and every itch and twinge in my body pulls me away. Some days I feel deeply connected to myself. Other days I am mostly aware that I am tired and thinking about everything I need to do.

Yet I show up because I have come to understand how crucial it is to my own well-being.

There is something about Brahmacharini’s simplicity that makes sense to me here. She is not armed with powerful weapons. There is no lion or tiger, and no elaborate clothing. Just practice, repetition, discipline, devotion, and the willingness to continue.

I believe that willingness matters more than whether any particular meditation feels profound. Practice does not ask me to manufacture an experience. It asks me simply to return.

The patience, stress release, clarity of thought, increased capacity, and deeper knowledge of self that I associate with my Transcendental Meditation practice are difficult to quantify. I can describe what I notice in myself, but I do not need those observations to become universal claims for them to matter in my own life. What matters most to me is that meditation has become one of the places where I repeatedly choose to participate in the life I say I want to live.

Consciousness as part of education

Something else was happening alongside the practice of meditation. I was being introduced more deeply to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s teachings about consciousness and education. Maharishi’s approach placed consciousness at the center of the educational process. The quality of the knower mattered alongside the quality of the knowledge, which was at the heart of the creation of MIU more than fifty years ago.

That proposition stayed with me because it expanded my understanding of education. I had spent years thinking about curriculum, instruction, learning, and what people know. It guided me into asking more seriously what was happening in the person doing the knowing, including and especially, myself.

I had spent much of my academic life learning how to analyze information, construct arguments, synthesize research, and demonstrate what I knew. At MIU, I was being asked to consider what happens when education also attends to the consciousness through which all of that knowing occurs.

It creates more responsibility for critical thought. What is consciousness? What does it mean to develop it? What can be measured, and what remains experiential? How do ancient philosophical claims sit alongside contemporary psychology and neuroscience? What happens when education is concerned not only with what a person knows, but with who that person is becoming? I do not have settled answers to those questions, but they infuse my willingness to let them shape the way I teach, coach, research, and examine my own life.

Learning beyond information

My doctoral program in Transformational Leadership and Coaching has also challenged my assumption that learning primarily means acquiring more knowledge. Certainly, I have learned theories, frameworks, research methods, coaching competencies, and ways of thinking about systems and human development. But some of the most consequential learning has occurred in places that were harder to measure: group process and labs, exercises in recognizing and being with my emotions, coaching conversations, meditation, reflective writing, relational discomfort, honest feedback, and assignments that asked me not simply what I understood intellectually, but what I was actually willing to notice about myself.

There have been moments when I wanted the work to remain academic because academic work is comfortable for me. I know how to read, analyze, synthesize, and write. It is much more vulnerable to discover that the subject being examined is also me.

The program has repeatedly asked me to notice the distance between what I believe and how I live. Between insight and behavior. Between understanding a pattern and actually changing it. Between saying I value connection and recognizing how difficult reaching toward another person can sometimes feel. Between describing transformation and participating in my own.

That gap has become more interesting to me than the appearance of having mastered anything. I can understand a pattern and still repeat it. I can value something and still avoid it. I can know what kind of person I want to be and still make choices that move me away from her.

Practice is where those contradictions stop being theoretical. Knowledge can change the way I think, but practice changes the way I live.

What practice has changed

My doctoral program has not given me a final answer about consciousness, or anything else for that matter. Meditation has not removed every difficult emotion. Spiritual practice has not made me endlessly calm, certain, or wise. If anything, these practices have made me more aware of complexity and nuance.

I notice more. I question more. I recognize contradictions in myself that I once might have ignored. I am more interested in the relationship between what happens inside a person and what becomes possible in the way that person lives.

Becoming is much less glamorous than the edited, three-minute reel of transformation we are often shown. It is not something you finish in a weekend workshop, find in a book, or accomplish through a method and emerge from as a finished and polished version of yourself. For me, becoming is not evidence that I have finally overcome everything that happened to me, nor does it erase the ways my own choices have shaped my life. It has increasingly meant recognizing that I have agency even when I do not have control.

I cannot choose everything that happens to me. I can choose how I participate in what comes next.

Often, that looks like repetition: reading another page, sitting for another meditation, returning to a difficult question, writing something I would rather avoid, showing up to class (three times a week, including every Saturday!), showing up to temple, showing up to a relationship, showing up to myself.

None of those choices guarantees an outcome. They are simply ways I keep practicing the life I want to inhabit. That is what Brahmacharini helps me see most clearly. The path did not continue because I had one extraordinary experience. It continued because, afterward, I began to practice.

And practice, at least as I am learning to understand it, is not punishment for who I have been or a project designed to finally make me worthy. It is participation. It is the repeated choice to move toward the life I want while remaining willing to see myself clearly along the way.

I still make choices every day that move me along this path of becoming. The point is not that I have become the person I intended to become. The point is that I am no longer waiting to become healed, certain, disciplined, or enlightened before I allow myself to participate fully in my own life.

Becoming does not require me to begin from deficiency. I can be responsible for my growth without treating myself as a problem to solve. I can continue to grow, question, practice, and change while also recognizing that I am already whole.

Brahmacharini: Cultural and Devotional Context

Brahmacharini is the second form of the Navadurga traditionally honored during Navratri. Her name is commonly associated with brahmacharya, a Sanskrit concept connected with disciplined spiritual conduct, study, and a life oriented toward realization of the sacred.

She is typically depicted walking barefoot in simple white clothing, carrying a japa mala in one hand and a kamandalu in the other. Unlike several other forms of Durga, she is not usually shown with a mount or weapons. Her imagery reflects simplicity, devotion, tapas, spiritual discipline, and sustained practice.

Within narratives of Parvati, Brahmacharini is associated with the period of intense spiritual discipline through which she seeks union with Shiva. Devotional interpretations often emphasize perseverance, self-restraint, commitment, and the willingness to remain devoted over time.

Further reading

Explore Brahmacharini at KaalPanchang for an accessible traditional overview of her iconography, attributes, and place within the Navadurga.

For broader scholarly context on Navratri and the diversity of Goddess traditions, Nine Nights of the Goddess: The Navarātri Festival in South Asia remains a useful academic companion to this series.