Touched by Divine Mother
By Anastra Madden
I discovered Ananda at the start of COVID in March of 2020. With great enthusiasm, I dove into Paramhansa Yogananda and Swami Kriyananda’s exquisite teachings on Self-and-God Realization. I learned that when Paramhansa Yogananda came to America in 1920 and began teaching, he also introduced a concept that was quite new to most Americans: love of God as Divine Mother. Upon reading this beautiful reframing one hundred years later, my heart, mind, and soul spontaneously rejoiced.
Later, I realized the depth of Yogananda’s precious words to Divine Mother from Whispers from Eternity when he wrote, “I loved many things only to find that my true craving was for Thee alone.”
Gradually, connecting with Divine Mother became a “divining rod” for intuition, for living guidance, and for deeper attunement to God and Guru. Above all, there was profound gratitude to Her for all of life’s events that brought me to Ananda, and for how She continues to keep me aligned with the Path.
As a beautiful force prompting outward expression, gratitude carries a dynamic, intuitive energy that is both deep and expansive. The felt sense of Divine Mother gratitude runs deep, filling the pores of one’s heart and mind. Incrementally and systemically, one is transformed from the inside out. It’s the only way I can explain the physical response I experienced to events that happened on May 6 of this year.
On that day, Divine Mother manifested a prayer request that my heart and mind had spoken two weeks earlier! For some time, I carried a feeling that my inner life was leveling off, as if the spiritual ethos was losing vibrancy and draining energy. My practical side made a reverent request to Divine Mother: “… would you please shake me up a little…” Well, She did not disappoint.
That morning, I went to the community storage unit for a garden tool. Unthinkingly, I grabbed the long end of a hedge trimmer forgetting the battery was still in. In just a few seconds, my left hand was shredded leaving me in awe at the amount of blood that poured out. I left the storage closet and went looking for help. Response from gurubais was immediate. Care and kindness was quick and overwhelming ~ wrapping my hand with a couple of towels, calling for an ambulance, and while waiting, hearing multiple Aums directed toward my hand. Surprisingly, and possibly due to the shock of it all, there was discomfort but no pain. That came later.
I looked down at my wrapped hand, replayed the event of what just happened, and just as clearly I realized that this was not happening to “me”. Within this unusual experience of detached awareness, there was a subtle and distinct pressure on the upper half of my back. The intuition flowed through me that right from the onset, Divine Mother was fully present. In essence, She “had my back”. Simultaneously, an emotional element in the chest area slowly began to unravel. It was a ripple of surrender, of letting go that meandered upward within my core. There was no fear, no anxiety, just a profound innate knowing in Divine Mother’s protective shroud. Everything was as it should be.
Over the following weeks, a warm relationship developed with the medical and physical therapy teams at UC Davis Trauma Center where skill is matched with compassion. The first two fingers experienced severed arteries, nerves, and tendons. I was told that recovery would be lengthy and therapeutically arduous, but my consciousness was focused on Divine Mother’s grace that I still had a complete hand!
In Master’s words from God as Divine Mother:
“I’ve seen again and again that when things in life happen that seem to be the worst possible things, if you can say, “This is coming from You, Mother, and I accept it,” then suddenly it all becomes just the right thing—the only possible thing.”
Surgery was complicated but ultimately successful on May 11. Nerve grafts were used from a donor (cadaver) involving extensive microsurgical repair on the middle finger. To stabilize the fractured bones in the index finger, a pin was inserted which will be removed in 6 weeks. Superficial wounds were cared for, excised as needed, and stitched with blue thread.
Several days later while sitting in meditation, fledgling nerves began to wake up with sudden pain waves of intensity and sharpness. It took me by surprise. A thought dropped into my mind, “Thank you, Divine Mother!” The sensation of pain continued, yet, the perception of it immediately made an about-face trajectory from self-involvement to self-offering—from feeling victimized to feeling strangely liberated from a sliver of ego identification. Ahh, purification at its best!
Our Beloved Guru taught that pain and suffering are very different from one another. Pain, he explained, is a natural physical or emotional reaction to a stimulus. Pain is temporary and serves a purpose: to alert us, to prompt healing, or to help us adapt. Suffering, on the other hand, is an egoic reaction and resistance we give to pain through identification with the body or mind. We feel victimized. It’s as if something or someone were doing personal harm to us or to who we think we are. Yogananda reminds us that, “the body may hurt, the mind may ache, but the awareness that witnesses all of this remains whole and unchanged.”
There is grace when an event suddenly disrupts and upturns one’s life. The grace deepens when that same event drops one into an unfamiliar realm of accepted surrender to what is… and the choice is made to lean into it. When Divine Mother is centered in the middle of the event, grace is truly immeasurable.
Paramhansa Yogananda offers another way of looking at karmic events in one’s life, spiritually threaded with exquisite filaments of Divine Mother’s love:
“Sometimes, when the Mother is going to caress you, a shadow is caused by Her hand before it touches you. So when trouble comes, don’t think that She is punishing you; Her hand overshadowing you holds some blessing as it reaches out to bring you nearer to Her.“
In divine joy,
Anastra
