Choosing the Path, Day One: Shailaputri

A note before beginning

For most people who know me now, the person I am today probably does not require much explanation. I am a mom, a teacher, a student, a traveler, a writer, a spiritual being, and a Sanatani by choice. I meditate. I practice Reiki. I am pursuing doctoral work that frequently brings me into questions of consciousness, psychology, embodiment, and human transformation.

And yet, I would not have predicted this version of my life.

I was raised in a charismatic Christian tradition in Oklahoma, USA, the granddaughter of a Pentecostal preacher and part of an extended family of deeply committed believers. Christianity shaped my earliest understanding of God, belonging, morality, prayer, spiritual experience, and what it meant to live a faithful and purpose-driven life. Even as my theology changed in adulthood, I spent years trying to find a version of Christianity capacious enough to hold the person I had become.

I did not leave one religion because I had discovered another one waiting neatly on the other side. What happened was much less orderly. It involved traumatic experiences, broken relationships, illness, a second failing marriage, spiritual experimentation, questions I had previously been afraid to ask, my own failures in judgment, choices I regret, and patterns I eventually had to take responsibility for. It also involved an experience I still cannot fully explain.

This series begins there.

What is Navratri?

This Navratri marks three years since I began following Sanatana Dharma, a traditional name for the religious, philosophical, and spiritual tradition more commonly known as Hinduism. The term is often translated as “eternal dharma” or “eternal way.” Because this is a path I came to by choice rather than through family or cultural inheritance, I prefer to describe myself as Sanatani rather than by the more widely known term Hindu.

Navratri literally means “nine nights.” It is a Hindu festival devoted to the Divine Feminine, though its stories, rituals, names, and forms vary considerably across regions and communities. The autumn Navratri is celebrated throughout India and across South Asia, as well as in Hindu communities around the world, culminating in Vijayadashami, the “tenth day of victory.” Scholars of the festival emphasize that there is no single universal way Navratri is practiced; its expression ranges from large public celebrations to intimate household worship.

One widely practiced tradition honors the Navadurga, nine forms of Goddess Durga across the nine nights: Shailaputri, Brahmacharini, Chandraghanta, Kushmanda, Skandamata, Katyayani, Kalaratri, Mahagauri, and Siddhidatri. Their sequence is often understood as a movement through different expressions of Shakti, the Divine Feminine, from grounding and discipline through courage, creation, motherhood, ferocity, purification, and spiritual fulfillment. Visit KaalPanchang to read more from a traditional perspective.

I am using those nine forms as lenses through which I can revisit what has unfolded since I first encountered Maa, the Divine Mother, in the form of Parvati.

The first of those forms is Shailaputri, the daughter of the mountain. It feels fitting to begin there, with grounding, beginnings, and the first invitation to step onto a path I did not yet understand.

Before the dream

By the middle of 2023, my body and my second marriage had both become places of instability.

In April, I experienced a transient ischemic attack at work and was taken to the hospital. What followed were months of medical investigation, appointments, medications, time away from work, and diagnoses that suddenly gave language to things my body had been carrying for some time.

For several months, I was on disability while I learned to better manage C-PTSD, fibromyalgia, Chiari malformation, and chronic migraines. By August, I returned to work full-time, although functioning normally and appearing to function normally were often two different things.

My marriage was unraveling alongside my health. The person I expected to help hold my life with me was struggling to meet me there, and I was frightened, exhausted, and increasingly aware of how fragile the physical and emotional ecosystem I was living within had become. 

But something shifted after my health collapsed. I do not want to turn that suffering retrospectively into tidy spiritual instruction. I don’t believe pain automatically becomes meaningful simply because we survive it. But I did begin asking a different question.

Not only: How do I get through this? But: What would it mean to actually live?

Sacred inquiry

The intensity with which I encountered that question created room for things I had previously kept outside the boundaries of what I was allowed to explore.

Someone suggested Reiki to me as a means to soothe my physical pain. Skeptical and curious, I tried it. Something about that experience opened a door for me. From there, I became more curious about things that had hovered beyond the realm of my Christian experience. I explored energy work, began meditation, studied crystals, consciousness, and spiritual traditions I had once viewed primarily through the categories Christianity had given me.

Some things resonated. Some did not. What mattered was that I was becoming willing to encounter an idea before deciding what I was supposed to believe about it. For perhaps the first time in my spiritual life, curiosity itself began to feel sacred. Inquiry became my theological lens.

And then, in October 2023, a woman came to the side of my bed and woke me.

The woman in red

She was dressed in red, something like a lehenga and choli, with gold jewelry and ornaments covering her body, clinking together in a melodic way when she moved. I remember thinking she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.

Her skin was the color of tea with heavy milk. She had large, dark almond eyes, a narrow nose, high rounded cheeks, and small, full lips. After gently shaking me awake, she told me to get out of bed and come sit with her. So I did.

We sat on the floor of my bedroom and talked through the night. I cannot remember what we talked about. That has always fascinated me, because I remember everything else so vividly.

Despite not remembering our topic of conversation, I remember very clearly how talking with her felt: somehow like talking to my closest friend, my sister, and my mother at the same time. There was familiarity without explanation. I felt completely at ease with her. She made me laugh, she reached into the most tender parts of my soul, and there was no judgement, criticism, or shame.

Eventually, the sun began to rise and she told me I should go back to bed. I climbed beneath the covers again, and she leaned over and kissed my forehead.

Then she said: “Come know me more.”

Having shared this closeness and deep conversation, I sheepishly asked: “I want to, but what is your name?”

She smiled sweetly and replied simply, “Parvati.”

I glanced at the journal beside my bed and sat back up to write the name down so it wouldn’t be lost to my dream world. I don’t remember her leaving, only waking up later and immediately reaching for the journal and my phone.

In sleepy handwriting, the name was there, Parvati, and I typed it into my phone. The first sentence I read said, “Goddess Parvati is one of the principal Hindu deities, revered as the goddess of power, devotion, love, fertility, motherhood, and beauty.”

I have learned much more since then, including that my dream had taken place during Navratri, a festival dedicated to the Divine Maa. 

But that morning, I had none of that context. I only had the name in my journal, the memory of her presence, and a question I did not know how to answer.

What do you do with an experience you cannot explain?

I have loved India from a distance for most of my life.

One of my earliest memories of that fascination was holding a little ebony elephant my grandparents had brought home from a missionary trip there when I was four or five. Over the years there had been sarees and bangles, Indian friends, food, the brightly colored temples I encountered, and the sacred landscape and experience of Ganga Talao while living in Mauritius.

India was not unfamiliar to my imagination. Hinduism largely was.

I had certainly encountered fragments of it. But I had never meaningfully studied Hindu philosophy. I had no devotional relationship with Parvati. I did not know the stories associated with her well enough to construct what happened from some reservoir of conscious religious knowledge.

And I still do not know exactly what happened that night. There are several ways I could interpret it.

A neuroscientist might ask about dreaming, memory consolidation, prior exposure, stress, or the extraordinary associative work of the sleeping brain. A psychologist might be interested in what a maternal feminine figure represented to a woman experiencing illness, relational instability, and profound loneliness. A scholar of religion might situate the encounter among the countless dreams, visions, conversions, and numinous experiences human beings have reported across cultures and centuries. A Hindu devotee might understand it differently still, perhaps as a form of swapna darshana, a sacred or divine encounter experienced in a dream.

I am interested in all of those questions, and I am no longer convinced that I must choose among them before I am permitted to honor what happened. The most consequential question for me became something else:

What would I do with the experience?

Choosing the path

I searched for Parvati. Then I kept searching. I began reading about Sanatana Dharma. I learned about Shiva and Shakti. I encountered ideas about consciousness that felt simultaneously foreign and strangely recognizable. I started reading the Bhagavad Gita and excerpts of other Hindu sacred texts. I researched temple attendance and puja (worship). At first, much of this exploration remained private. I was learning, questioning, and following the invitation without yet knowing what it would mean to practice any of it in community.

And then, on January 1, 2024, another piece of the life I had thought I was building collapsed. I came home and discovered that my husband had packed his belongings and left, leaving only a note on the bed and a request to be left alone.

Our marriage ended shortly afterward. While it looked initially like another rupture, it also created an unexpected kind of space. For the first time, I was truly exploring my spiritual life. The divorce allowed me to do that without negotiating it against the expectations of the person I had married. There was complete freedom to follow the questions. So I did.

Showing up

That spring, following the questions began to require something more vulnerable than reading or watching YouTube videos alone. It required showing up. I timidly showed up to a temple hours away so if I embarrassed myself, I wouldn’t have to return to that exact one. Eventually, I showed up to my local temple and awkwardly participated. Importantly for me, I experienced puja not as an intellectual concept but as something embodied through sound, incense, mantra, flame, and community.

None of this happened in a straight line. There was curiosity and discomfort. Recognition and unfamiliarity. Devotion alongside the awareness that I had entered a religious tradition that did not originate in my culture, my family, or my childhood. My questions often went unanswered by other devotees whose own framework was simply “this is how it is done” rather than “this is why it is done.” I have felt my face flush with embarrassment during many celebrations at temple, while simultaneously feeling a deep sense of connection and groundedness during bhajans (devotional songs) and prayer.

There were questions about belonging that have never completely disappeared. Even now, three years later and a welcomed volunteer at the temple, I have crazy anxiety every time I show up. My heart races, and the vulnerability and fear of rejection are palpable for me.

I showed up anyway, because Maa invited me. I can’t know her more if I am unwilling to show up.

Holding India

Since then, Sanatana Dharma has moved from something I was studying into something I was practicing. It entered my home in the form of my own mandir (home shrine). It entered my mornings through devotional offerings and chalisas (devotional hymns) before work. It entered my meditation, my understanding of consciousness, my relationship with God, my travels, my academic questions, and eventually my understanding of my own life.

In 2025, I traveled to India for the first time. I stood barefoot on cool marble during monsoon season and placed marigolds and rose petals at the feet of Maa Durga, watching the priest wrap red and yellow yarn around my wrist. I stepped into Gangaji, letting the cold water soothe me in the humid June weather. I climbed through clouds toward Surkanda Devi alongside people participating in traditions far older than anything I could claim as my own. I shared chai and homemade breakfast with a local shopkeeper as we spent hours talking about art and culture and the differences between Western and Eastern life.

What I felt there was difficult to describe without sounding dramatic, but the closest comparison I have is birth. There was joy, relief, tenderness, and grief all at once. I had loved India from a distance for most of my life, and suddenly I was inside the sounds, smells, colors, rain, temples, mountains, animals, music, and movement I had imagined for years. I wept from the strange familiarity of it. It felt, briefly, like holding something I had prayed for. And leaving carried its own grief. I had held India in my arms, and then I had to let it go.

Again and again, I found myself encountering a strange combination of familiarity and humility. Something could feel profoundly like home while simultaneously reminding me that I was a guest. The Gita’s distinction between love and attachment became more meaningful to me there. I wanted to love what I had encountered without needing to possess it, claim it, or make it mine.

I think learning how to hold both has become part of the path itself.

Beginning with Shailaputri

The first form of Durga honored during Navratri is Shailaputri, “daughter of the mountain,” a form of Parvati as the daughter of Himavan, the Himalayas.

I did not know any of that when this story began. I knew only that I had written the name Parvati in the journal beside my bed and that the woman who gave it to me had asked me to come know her more. If Shailaputri offers a lens for this first reflection, perhaps it is simply because she stands at the beginning, and beginnings often make more sense in retrospect than they do while we are living them.

Three years later, there are still things about that night I cannot explain. I do not know where dreaming ended and something else began. I do not know why the name of a Goddess I barely knew appeared within an experience that felt more intimate than many waking conversations I have had.

What I do know is that I kept following the questions that came from what happened. I read. I questioned. I looked for context. I eventually found enough courage to move beyond private curiosity and begin showing up in places where I could practice what I was learning. What happened that night did not resolve anything for me. It opened something.

That distinction matters because I am still interested in what psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, consciousness research, and religious scholarship might help me understand about experiences like mine. I do not experience those questions as a threat to the sacredness of what happened. If anything, they have made me more interested in it.

So this is where I begin. Not by trying to prove what happened that night, but by returning to the words that followed me out of it: Come know me more. Three years later, I am still doing exactly that.

Shailaputri: Cultural and Devotional Context

Shailaputri is the first of the nine forms of Goddess Durga traditionally honored during Navratri. Her name comes from shaila, mountain, and putri, daughter, identifying her as the “daughter of the mountain.” She is associated with Parvati as the daughter of Himavan, the personification of the Himalayas.

Shailaputri is commonly depicted riding the bull Nandi and carrying a trident and lotus. Her imagery connects her both with Shiva and with the grounded beginning of the Navadurga sequence. Devotional interpretations frequently associate her with steadiness, strength, rootedness, and the beginning of spiritual movement.

As with many Hindu traditions, the meanings, rituals, and representations surrounding the Navadurga are not completely uniform. Practices vary across regions, communities, texts, and lineages. Throughout this series, I am approaching each form with respect for that diversity rather than presenting one interpretation as the entirety of Hindu tradition.

Further reading 

Explore Shailaputri at KaalPanchang, the iconography guide explicitly bases its descriptions on traditional dhyāna verses and summarizes the mounts, arms, weapons, and gestures of the nine forms.

For readers interested in a scholarly treatment of the Navratri festival itself, Nine Nights of the Goddess: The Navarātri Festival in South Asia examines the diversity of Navratri traditions across regions, histories, and communities. Read about Nine Nights of the Goddess on JSTOR.