The wounded warrior

This post is a tribute to Gianna Kali, the creator of Beyond Meds, a blog about withdrawal from medications, but not just a blog about withdrawal. Gianna has chosen to continue her healing journey without the tiring demands of daily blogging. Gianna Kali is her pseudonym. Perhaps she took inspiration from the Hindu goddess Kali, the dark goddess, whose name is associated with time and change.

Like most goddesses, Kali is controversial. Her goddess persona changes with the time. She has an original terrible side associated with death and destruction, but also a later repositioning as a warm and kind maternal Mother of the Universe. Like a mother, she is a protectress of last resort. Indian mythology is complex and has evolved over thousands of years. Since I am not an Indian scholar, I will leave interpretation to others, such as this writer:

Of all the forms of Devi, She is the most compassionate because She provides moksha or liberation to Her children. She is the counterpart of Shiva the destroyer. They are the destroyers of unreality. Of all the forms of Devi, She is the most compassionate because She provides moksha  person who is attached to his or her ego will not be receptive to Mother Kali and she will appear in a fearsome form. A mature soul who engages in spiritual practice to remove the illusion of the ego sees Mother Kali as very sweet, affectionate, and overflowing with incomprehensible love for Her children.

Gianna Kali is generous of spirit. She chronicles her healing journey to help others and she has helped neophyte bloggers like me spread our message through her blog. Spiritual to begin with, she eventually found herself on the painful path she was destined to take.

In the book, Goddess Shift: Women Leading for a Change, Dr. Susan Kolb writes about her own healing journey in terms of the mythology of the wounded warrior. In order to heal others, a person has to undergo a revolutionary healing journey of her own. This is a sacred journey, also documented as the path of the alchemist. The warrior emerges stronger, wiser, better able to carry on and an inspiration to others. Through ordeal, the warrior comes to know herself.

Thank you Gianna and all good wishes for your continuing recovery. We look forward to hearing from you when you are ready.

All a-twitter

I feel like I am back in junior high. Anything Gianna Kali posts, I want to copy. If she wore leopard skin jackets and smoked cigarettes from a cigarette holder, I’d want to copy that. By posting really interesting articles, her Beyond Meds blog gives me lots of fuel for my own daily post.

I have been meaning to write Gianna to ask her how Twitter works, because I know she Twitters a lot, and I am in the Twitter slow lane. I know she isn’t responding to e-mail so I am delighted to read her latest postings about Twitter to get a sense of what I am supposed to do. Now if she would only answer the question: How do I condense my blog link into the least amount of characters, and is it bad form to post my own blog link at all?