The Shape Of Protection

Chandraghanta

Chandraghanta feels harder for me to write about than Brahmacharini did. I can sit down and meditate. I can read another page, go to class, write something I would rather avoid, come back to the question tomorrow. I know what it means to keep doing something even when I am tired of doing it.

Protection is more complicated. So is being seen.

I had assumed this essay would mostly be about courage and visibility. Chandraghanta is the third form of Durga honored during Navratri, and she is strikingly different from the quiet simplicity of Brahmacharini. She is commonly depicted riding a tiger, with ten arms, carrying weapons as well as sacred objects, prepared to protect and confront. She embodies a kind of visible strength and readiness to protect that feels very different from Brahmacharini’s quiet discipline.

I thought I would write about what it means to stop making myself smaller or finding my voice.

Then, during the first few days of Navratri, I had a coaching session that took me somewhere I was not expecting to go and the timing made it difficult not to pay attention.

I had spent the beginning of Navratri writing about practice, devotion, becoming, and the choices that slowly shape a life. I was already thinking about Chandraghanta and what courage might mean for me when I went into coaching carrying something much more immediate: I was hurt and angry because I felt inaccurately seen by someone I love.

I wanted to talk about that. I wanted to figure out what to say, how to respond differently, how to stop getting pulled so deeply into the reaction. But my coach George did not let me stay there very long.

When being misunderstood becomes something else

What began as frustration about being misunderstood slowly became a conversation about why being misread can feel so threatening to me in the first place. There is a difference between someone misunderstanding you and feeling as though your reality has disappeared in the misunderstanding.

When I feel unseen in an important relationship, I can become intensely focused on correcting the record. I explain. I defend. I offer context. I want the other person to understand what I meant, what I did, what I was trying to do, all the invisible things they may not have noticed.

Some of that is normal communication. But there is another layer underneath it that I am beginning to recognize. If I can get the other person to see me accurately, maybe everything will be okay.

Maybe they will understand.

Maybe they will stay.

Maybe I will be safe.

That is a lot of responsibility to put on being understood. During coaching, the conversation moved from the immediate relationship into something much older.

The pattern underneath

There have been many times in my life when safety became something I had to figure out for myself. Some of those experiences happened when I was very young. Others came later, through violence, sexual assault, frightening relationships, abandonment, and long stretches of carrying responsibilities largely on my own. I learned, over and over, how to assess what was happening, make decisions, keep moving, and protect myself.

I do not want to tell those stories here as a catalogue of what has happened to me. They are part of my life, but I am increasingly resistant to making trauma the organizing principle of my identity.

What matters for this particular reflection is the pattern that formed underneath them. When something felt dangerous, I learned to protect myself. When there was no obvious person coming to help, I figured out what needed to happen next. When I was afraid, I kept functioning.

There is real strength in that. I do not want to diminish it simply because I can now see some of its costs, but somewhere along the way, self-protection stopped being only something I knew how to do and became something I expected to have to do.

I have to hold myself

At some point in the coaching session, the bottom line became very simple: I have to hold myself because nobody else will.

I did not arrive at it as some grand realization. It was another exposure of an already familiar pattern. What was difficult for me was imagining the alternative.

What would it mean to believe that someone else could hold me? Not solve things for me. Not rescue me from my own life. Not make every difficult thing disappear.

Just hold me. Protect me. Stay present when I am afraid without requiring me to first become easier, calmer, more agreeable, more competent, or less complicated. That was surprisingly hard to imagine.

I can talk about vulnerability. I can write about vulnerability. I can tell people extremely personal things.

Receiving care without performance or proving myself is apparently another skill entirely, and one that I haven’t integrated yet.

Strength I already know

This is where Chandraghanta began to feel different to me. I expected her to challenge me to become stronger.

I know something about strength already. I know how to keep moving when things hurt. I know how to solve problems. I know how to take care of people. I know how to do what needs to be done when I am exhausted, afraid, overwhelmed, or angry. Sometimes I am probably too good at it.

When I look at Chandraghanta now, my perspective of her weapons has shifted from charging warrior to equipped protector.

I am interested in understanding protection. And maybe, even more uncomfortably, I am interested in what it means to believe I am someone worth protecting.

The core work that emerged from coaching was: I matter, and I deserve to be held and protected.

I can type that sentence. I can understand why it should be true. Actually receiving it into myself is much harder. I am writing about something I deeply encountered a few days ago and am still trying not to immediately intellectualize. It is an early edge of becoming for me.

Being seen

This coaching session also changed how I think about the visibility piece I originally intended to write about.

I have spent a lot of my life learning how to read a room. What is expected here? What version of me belongs in this space? What can I say without creating discomfort or disconnection? What needs more context? How much explanation will make this easier for someone else to understand?

I can be very open while still doing all of that. That has been uncomfortable to recognize.

Publishing this series has made it visible in a new way. These stories were mine when they lived in journals and private conversations. Publishing them means people who knew me as a Christian can read them. People at temple can read them. My family can read them. My professors can read them. People who know one version of me can encounter another.

I notice how quickly I want to manage that. I want to make sure I am understood correctly. I want to explain every nuance. I want to anticipate objections before anyone can make them. I want enough context around the story that nobody can casually decide who I am based on one part of it.

Some of that makes me a better writer, but most of it is fear.

I am beginning to wonder whether being accurately seen has become connected, somewhere in me, to whether I believe I will remain safe in the relationship.

If you understand me, maybe you will not leave.

If you understand me, maybe you will not hurt me.

If you understand me, maybe I will not have to protect myself from you.

That is a much deeper question than whether I am comfortable being visible.

What I am learning from Chandraghanta

I do not want to turn Chandraghanta into a convenient metaphor for my own psychology. She belongs to a devotional tradition much older and larger than my personal interpretation. Still, she gives me something to sit with.

Her strength is visible. She is protective. She does not appear fragile, but neither do I understand her fierceness as the absence of love. The protection is part of the love.

That is the part I am thinking about. I have tended to understand protection as something I provide for myself or for other people. I am much less practiced at truly receiving it. Maybe courage, for me, is not primarily about becoming louder or taking up more space.

Maybe there is courage involved in allowing myself to matter enough that I do not always have to be the person holding everything together. I am not sure yet.

I do know that the coaching session happening in these first days of Navratri made this particular reflection feel unusually immediate. I was already asking what Chandraghanta might reveal about courage, protection, and visibility. Then I found myself confronting how difficult it was to imagine feeling fully protected at all.

Rethinking protection

I am very much at the beginning of this. I am not suddenly better at trusting people. I have not stopped trying to explain myself when I feel misunderstood. I still notice the urge to manage another person’s perception of me, especially when the relationship matters. And I still feel safer being the person who can handle things.

What has changed, at least for now, is that I can see some of what is underneath it. There is fear. There is anger. There is the little Megan, the teenage Megan, and the adult Megan, over and over again, figuring out how to protect herself because she believed she had to.

And somewhere beside all of that is a possibility I do not know how to inhabit yet: I matter, and I deserve to be held and protected.

I think, for now, my work is simply to sit with it. To notice the tightness in my chest, my flushed face, and the hot tears that come when I confront the underbelly of my life, where so many patterns are knit together from the ways I have felt unprotected. And to notice how those patterns still leak into my relationships, my connections, and my willingness to be vulnerable.

Maybe that is where I begin with Chandraghanta. I already know what it is to protect myself. What I am only beginning to explore is whether protection has to look the way I learned it.

Can I protect myself without always being on guard? Can I allow someone else to care for me without giving up my own agency? Can I be misunderstood without immediately trying to manage someone else’s perception of me? Can I believe that I am worth protecting before there is a crisis that requires me to prove how strong I can be? I do not know yet.

What Chandraghanta gives me, at least for now, is another image of strength. Fierce, visible, prepared, and protective. Her strength does not exist simply for the sake of demonstrating that she is strong.

The protection is part of love. I am only beginning to understand what that might mean for me.

Chandraghanta: Cultural and Devotional Context

Chandraghanta is the third form of the Navadurga traditionally honored during Navratri. Her name is commonly understood in relation to the crescent moon on her forehead, which is shaped like a bell, or ghanta.

She is typically depicted riding a tiger or lion and with ten arms holding a range of weapons and sacred objects. Common representations include a trident, mace, sword, bow and arrow, lotus, water vessel, prayer beads, and gestures of blessing and protection. Her iconography reflects strength, courage, protection, and readiness to confront forces that threaten peace or righteousness.

Within devotional traditions, Chandraghanta is often understood as a powerful and protective form of the Goddess. Her fierceness does not erase the gentleness associated with Parvati, but exists alongside it, expressing the capacity to protect, respond, and act when needed.