Saraswati Goddess:
 She is the Goddess who flows as language, insight, and sound. 
The Goddess of Flow:
As water the sustainer of life.  Water through rivers, taps, the water of the womb.  All life needs water all water needs to flow. The moon governs the tides of the oceans, the cycle of women. The flow  of music  from one note to another. creative movement, she is the creative inspiration, the inner impulse. 
At her subtlest Saraswati loves in that pulsing space at the root of sound, where silence gives birth to creative possibilities.
Everyday examples:

• Gospel of John “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with the creator, and the word was absolute”
• In yoga the word is “Om” flows on the breath of the divine and evolves into the 52 letters of the alphabet.
• Computer wizards of the internet are children of Saraswati

Birth Story of Saraswati:
In the beginning there was chaos.  Everything existed in a formless, fluid state.  "How do I bring order to this disorder?" wondered Brahma, the creator.  "With Knowledge", said Devi.
  
Dressed in white Devi emerged from Brahma's mouth riding a swan as the goddess Saraswati. "Knowledge helps man find possibilities where once he saw problems."  Said the goddess.  Under her tutelage Brahma acquired the ability to sense, think, comprehend and communicate.  He began looking upon chaos with eyes of wisdom and thus saw the beautiful potential that lay therein.

Brahma discovered the melody of mantras in the cacophony of chaos.  In his joy he named Saraswati, Vagdevi, goddess of speech and sound.The sound of mantras filled the universe with vital energy, or prana.  Things began to take shape and the cosmos acquired a structure: the sky dotted with stars rose to form the heavens; the sea sank into the abyss below, the earth stood in between.

Gods became lords of the celestial spheres; demons ruled the nether regions, humans walked on earth.  The sun rose and set, the moon waxed and waned, the tide flowed and ebbed.  Seasons changed, seeds germinated, plants bloomed and withered, animals migrated and reproduced as randomness gave way to the rhythm of life.

Brahma thus became the creator of the world with Saraswati as his wisdom.

When to invoke Saraswati:
She is the deity you invoke when you just need some help with communication. 
A Saraswati woman is unconventional not because they are trying to break the rules but because they don’t see the rules as being there in the first place. 
How to invoke Saraswati:
You can’t control her.  Anyone who sits in silence trying to shut off the mind will tell you that her creative flow is often endless...a tap that won’t shut off. 
You can only flow with her. Using a mantra or your own awareness as a boat you can steer along those channels that lead to expansion and joy rather than suffering and constriction
Too much communication there is overload, too little as we lack communication

Shadow Side:

• A blockage in Saraswati’s energy is felt when information you are trying to communicate is not being received or you are unable to understand information being delivered. 
• Words unconnected to meaning, not considering the weight of ones words

She has a deep veil of illusion.  

• Since our brains are wired to remember the negative much more easily than the positive the shadow side of Saraswati can program you for a life time as a skew of negative interpretations taking form as a lens in which you view yourself and others
• To fall into the shadow of Saraswati is to loose sight of the difference between truth and falsehood and be willing to use your gifts of speech for spinning tales that obscure truths for the sake of gain.

A balanced Saraswati:

• The ability to see through the chatter and cut to the chase.  Being a strong an clear communicator.  The ability to tap into your creative energy and give it room to flow and flourish.  
• see the connection between your moments of brilliance and Saraswati’s universal intelligence, you might feel more confident in your intuitions, and less egotistical about your intellectual gifts

Saraswati Shakti will give us the words to open hearts, loosen stuck energies, help us partner with the flow of reality, and show us pathways into the fertile depths of creative stillness. 
For details on how to invoke Saraswati's energy and to work with contemplations visit Sally Kempton's book "Awakening Shakti"

Sita Goddess:
Goddess of Devotion and Mystical Submission:
Sita exists only for love. She personifies loyalty.  She incarnates devotion.  She stands for the principle of loving submission-submission to the masculine, submission to the divine, submission to life itself. 


Story of Sita: 
Sits was born from the earth.  She was found as a baby in a furrow her body aglow by her father King Janaka.  King Janaka was a seeker of wisdom and by being his daughter she was bestowed with his qualities of devotion.  As she grew she became a beautiful young girl whose love would radiate from her and fill all those she encountered and was famous for her virtue. Many princes had asked for her hand in marriage but she turned them away.

Far away in the Kingdom lived the Rama.  Rama’s father was a righteous King loved by all and whose lessons on love and leadership were being bestowed on his son Rama to train him for the day he took over the Kindgom. By the time he meets Sita his training is so far along that he is beyond passion and attachment. Rama came to Sita and although he found her most beautiful and loving and kind his reasons for marriage were more to do with Dharma or duty rather than love.  The duty of Cosmic form of love(Rama) marries the embodied form of love (Sita). She on the other hand fell instantly in love with Rama and soon the two were married.

Back at home things were unravelling.Years ago one of Rama’s father’s wives had saved his life.  Indebted to his wife he granted her one unconditional boon. In Ramas absence she asked that her son be ruler for 15 years and that Rama be exiled to the forest.  Rama’s father had no choice but to grant this boon and send his son off to the forest.  The decision would later kill him from grief.  When Rama was told he had to leave he asked Sita to stay in the Kingdom but she refused saying “deprived on her consort a woman cannot live.”  

Sita and Rama were happy living in the forest until one day a demoness woman disguised as a maiden tried to temp Rama through seduction.  Rama looked at the woman and said “how can you ask me to be with you?  Can you not see that my wife Sita is right here and she is my love?”  The demoness undismayed takes her demon brother and disguises him as a golden deer.  Sita’s love for all creatures begs Rama to catch the deer so she could have him as a pet.  Rama chases after the deer and in his absence the deer transformes into the demon Ravana and steals Sita away to his island. Ravana was in love with Sita and thought that once she was with him she would give herself over to him.  Sita’s love was unwavering.  She was seduced, her life was threatened, Ravana tried to trick her by showing her the head of dead husband as an illusion.  She remained faithful.

Rama returned to his Kingdom took back his throne and sent his servant the monkey God Hanuman off to rescue his wife.  Finally Hanuman rescued Sita and returned her to her Kingdom.  Upon Sita’s return Rama refuses his wife.  He claims that she could not have lived with another man for so long and not been unfaithful. He claims he fought the demon Ravana for the honor of the family not to have his wife returned.  He makes what he declares a generous offer of protection “you may marry one of my brothers but I will not have you.”

Sita swears that she was taken against her will and that she remained faithful and to prove herself true she sets a ring of fire around the throne of Rama.  She prays to the God of fire Agni “Since my heart has always been true to Rama, give me your protection.”  With that she steps into the fire, it blazes up around her but not a hair on her head is singed.  The necklace of flowers she wears around her neck still has the dew of the water.  Upon seeing this Rama dissolves into remorse and begs Sita to forgive him and they come together in triumph.

It would seem as though the story ends here and all is happily ever after.  However the people of the kingdom begin to whisper.  They say she is dirty, that Ravana had his way with Sita and has poisoned the mind of her husband. Rama begins to falter.  He needs to save face. He decides to banish Sita even though he has just learned she is pregnant with his twins.

Off Sita goes back into the forest she raises her sons.  Years go by and one day Rama is hunting in the forest and he meets his two sons.  They have become strong archers and he is proud of his boys.  He finds Sita and agrees to take her back on one condition.  She must perform a second public ordeal declaring that she is the faithful and loving wife.  Sita seems to agree, she comes back to the palace and there standing in front of his throne Sita petitions her mother the earth.

“If I have always been pure and faithful to Rama in thought, word, and deed may the sweet earth receive me.” At her words a throne rises from the earth, Sita sits on the throne, which then sinks into the ground.  The Goddess returns to her origins.  Rama is said to mourn her forever.  He never remarries, he always keeps a golden figure of Sita by his side. 

When we hear the story of Sita it is hard not to feel the anger of the feminine collective towards the centuries of oppression by men. The story of Sita feels outdated.  We live in a culture of women who have fought so hard for the rights and freedoms of women that we have almost tipped the scales too far and adopted the energies of the yang. Yet she still exists in many cultures including our own. She is the generation of women who believed that by being good wives, good daughters, and good mothers they would be protected, that their connection to others defined them. Contemplating Sit’s story can bring up all the grief of the collective feminine and a deep rage at the masculine, with its rigid notions of honor and it’s assumptions that women are property. 

But to see Sita as either a victim or as the embodiment of wifely virtue is to miss who she is at her core.
Goddess of love:
Sita is the holding quality of love.  She is the essentially feminine power of unconditional  embrace, embodied in the energy that holds a child in the womb.  Sita is that quality in the feminine whose unconditional love draws out the innate goodness in someone who the patriarchal mind considers irredeemable.  Sita is that quality in the divine that can hold us in all our confusion and that has the power to transmute our darkness in it’s holding light.  She is the feminine in most need of protection because it is most open to violence and betrayal. 


Everyday Examples:

• Mother Mary stands for the loving, suffering feminine in Christian culture
• Reverend Dale Lang father of Jason Lang who was killed in the Taber school shooting had such a strong Sita energy for his faith, his God, his religion that he not only forgave the shooter but went on and strengthened his faith.
• Mother earth that despite her suffering from polluted river, raping of the soil, clear cutting forests, she continues to feed us, nourish us, and sustain us.

When to invoke Sita:
Sita is that energy that we invoke when we ourselves or someone we know requires that unconditional love.  We all want to fall in love with someone who loves us unconditionally.  This is why if we have a good relationship with out mother it lasts forever.  She is the one person in the whole world who will always see our side, she will always listen and love us no matter what the circumstances.  Yet to turn this around how challenging is it for us to love our spouses/partners/friends in much the same manner.  We place conditions and expectations on people so that they measure up to our worthiness of love.

Balanced Sita:

• Sita’s love is shown it it’s sheer beauty of love’s enduring sweetness.  Sita’s endurance is passive, but it is never weak.  Her passiveness is never passive aggressive.  There is no doubt that Sita’s archetype stands for the oppression of women, powerlessness of people in every culture.  But if you cut to the eternal core of who Sita is, you’ll find that she can show you what is means to offer yourself entirely to love-even when love seems to have deserted you.
• Readily recognize aspects of Sita in a moment when you feel impelled to sacrifice your own self-interests for others, or when you feel unheard or unseen by a lover or a boss

For contemplations and meditations on the Goddess Sita visit Sally Kempton's book "Awakening Shakti".

The dynamic aspect of the divine
 Vishnu is responsible for playing out the divine plan.  Calling on Vishnu is calling for balance, responsibility and manifesting vision into action.  Balance of the world always includes this struggle between the light and the dark whether it is inside us or in the world.  

Love is Krishna’s vision:
In the celestial world the Gods and Goddesses can see that playing out on earth the evil or dark forces are beginning to take over and ruin the world.  They decide to intervene by sending Krishna an avatar of Vishnu down to earth to right the wrongs. 
 The Story of Krishna:
There is a Demon King (Kumsha) has been told that one of his sisters sons will rise up and kill him.  He insists that all his sisters sons be killed when born.  9 sons are killed. When another sister is pregnant and about to give birth the Goddess Maya (Goddess of illusion) comes into his sisters womb and when she gives birth the Goddess Maya comes out first.  The guards kill the Maya Goddess and she rises up laughing at the guards and in this moment of distraction Krishna is born and spirited away to the land of farms. 

In his childhood and youth Krishna embodies the playful beauty of the divine as love.  Not because it is his duty or his necessity but because this is who he is. The simple sport of love. It is Completely unmotivated love to the divine.  

The demon King finds out the town that he is in and sends demons to get rid of him.  The first is a demoness disguised as a beautiful woman who comes to his home as a nurse maid.  She picks him up and offers her breast to suckle which is filled with poison. Krishna suckles and as he feeds she is looking into his eyes.  This demoness becomes so transformed by Krishna that her poison dissolves and in it’s place he begins to suck the life force from in her.  She dies in a beautiful state of ecstasy, filled with divine love.   

His uncle keeps sending assassins.  Krishna destroys all of them.  There are no wars, no blood, no weapons of any kind.  They each die in bliss.  No warrior at all. 

Loving is the highest form of practice. The more you love him the more you are freed from convention or normality.   Everyone in the town that Krishna grows up in is in love with him.  It is said that when Krishna wanders down to the banks of the river to play his flute the conventional norms are replaced by love.  Women who are married drop their domestic duties and run to the banks to dance to his flute. maidens are in love with him.   Wise men forget their wisdom, laws of the world are overturned, rules have no place. 

He says anyone who thinks they are embodying love I am going to show them that I can intoxicate him so completely that they will realize that they are just a drop of love and I am the whole ocean. 

The essential nature of the divine is BLISS.  
Spirituality doesn’t emphasize this enough.  We focus on awareness but Bliss is not trusted.  Bliss is the essence. When you experience bliss and love in its pure form with other people or spontaneous in the heart then you are experiencing the divine.

BLISS IS GOD.  GOD IS BLISS. BLISS IS LOVE  In other words divine love is eternal and endless.

The dynamic divine masc. as a lover, absolutely present and in the world for the sense of play is not how we think of the masculine. He draws us away from our fears, work, stress and into the pure sweetness of his presence.

Symbols:
The demons here represent the forms of the negative ego qualities. Krishna demonstrates that if you turn any emotion towards him the Divine will dissolve the negative qualities. In the path of Bahkti (devotional love a form of yogic practice) whatever emotion you direct to God will be transformed to love. Krishna is totally outside of the rules.  he is post conventional.