Visiting India as a spiritual teacher and paying homage to the mysteries through the frequency of Kali Ma, the Goddess of destruction, death, and creation, took us into the heart and energy of raw feminine power. It took me twenty years to face the vibration that India represents. Yet, I knew that one day, I would have to visit India.

India’s energy is organic, primal, and real. It forces you to examine every aspect of your humanness as a witness to heart-wrenching poverty, filth, and extraordinary beauty all at once. Don’t judge—all of life happens side-by-side in India.

We arrived in New Delhi on the full moon, a day when ten thousand marriages were celebrated in one day—this astrological cycle being the wedding season. New Delhi is a city known for its heart. Within this city’s heartbeat is a strange silence at its nucleus, an inner spiritual peace. A sacred city!

Deity worship in India is no pious affair. Temples throb with energy, and saffron-robed priests distribute vermillion dots on newly consecrated foreheads after rupee offerings are made for all of your earthly and spiritual wishes. Ma Kali revealed herself to us as we were guided to secluded altars of power, and were shown Her secret shrines from Delhi, Varanasi, Calcutta, and Tarapith, her most sacred home 300 kilometers from Calcutta.

Calcutta (Kolkata) has a fabulous heritage. There, we visited the largest flower market in the world, and found Mother Theresa’s Mothers House amid the poorest of the poor, where her nuns’ service demonstrates simple humility. Family contacts from Australia (Kali devotees) provided a private audience in some of Kali’s most inaccessible temples after ‘interviews’ by Kali priests, whose lineage of service to the Mother goes back generations. This was a three-day initiation into the mysteries and in surrendering to Ma Kali, and we found each other in the depths of Tarapith, Bengal.

My book, The Immortal Woman, was blessed in the shrine of the Hindu mystic, Sri Anandamaya Ma. One of her devotees, a high court lawyer, left his suit at the office and drummed for us, giving us access to meditate in her private bedroom and living room. This intimacy made the ashram stay a bliss-filled experience, whilst the temple nicknamed Baby Taj Mahal brought us back to nature. The temple of Goddess Lakshmi (the goddess of abundance) had us anchoring powerful vortexes of raw feminine power in this ornate, fascinating structure.

We were again instructed to anchor divine love in Agra’s Taj Mahal. This monument’s extraordinarily beauty, as dawn’s first rays illuminate the mountain of marble and semiprecious gems, is breath-taking. However, there is sadness because the Mogul’s love for Mumez, who died giving birth to the Mogul’s 14th child, was never expressed in the Taj Mahal. It is a monument of a husband’s ‘lost love’ and his indescribable grief.

A spiritual center of pilgrimage for deceased Hindus, Varanasi’s dawn rituals saw us witnessing sacred crematorium burnings at the Ghats. For a Hindu, being burned at the Sacred Ganges ensures no karmic rebirth. Life and death are one in this city of timelessness. Here, we were forced to surrender to time as we felt the pull of nothingness, and then were instantly invited by the father of the bride to a Bollywood-style Brahman wedding ceremony. At a personal level, India taught me to merge with elemental forces and bring them into my very essence whilst the feared gift of the Goddess Kali was simple to “live your life as there was only you in it.“