Navaratri's True Meaning: Awakening Shakti Within Yourself

Thirty years ago, a woman raised in Hollywood arrived in India and asked for a spiritual name that matched the force she felt inside her. Her teachers offered her Shanti, which means peace. She refused. She wanted Shakti, which means power. In her Navaratri teaching, Sadhviji tells that story as a small confession, then uses it to open a larger argument: the nine nights of Navaratri are not a ritual for waking a sleeping Goddess, and the power and peace she was once offered as alternatives are both held inside the same Divine Mother. Sadhviji, a Vedic monk and Stanford-trained psychologist who has lived in the Himalayas for nearly three decades, walks through the three principal aspects the festival honors, Durga, Lakshmi and Saraswati, and treats each as a stage of inner work rather than a request for favors. This piece takes that teaching seriously on its own terms, explaining the ideas so that a reader who never watched the video can follow the logic from the first dark cocoon to the last line of the closing prayer.

Does the Goddess wake up during Navaratri at all?

The video opens with a premise most devotees have heard in some form: the sacred days of Navaratri are when the Mother Goddess awakens. Sadhviji reverses it at once. "The goddess has never been asleep, not even for a moment," she says (0:00, Navaratri teaching, 2026). "These nine days and nights is an opportunity for us to awaken."

That shift matters. If the Goddess is awake, the festival is a kind of summons, a request that she pay attention to us. If we are the ones who are asleep, the festival becomes a practice, a set of days in which we do the work of waking. Sadhviji frames the nights around the word itself. Navaratri literally means nine nights, and she asks why the count is nights rather than days. Her answer draws on images of darkness: "Think about a cocoon in which a caterpillar is turning into a butterfly. Think about a seed in which everything is getting readied to sprout. Think about a womb in which the baby is getting ready to be born" (2:02).

Each of those images is dark and each is a place where something essential is being formed, unseen. Her point is that the deepest change rarely happens under bright attention. It happens in the stretch when nothing visible is occurring. The nine nights are framed as that kind of dark interval, and the invitation is to let the Goddess work through it.

Why does the teaching refuse to choose between peace and power?

The story of her name is not decoration. Sadhviji describes asking for Shakti and being told that nobody is named Shakti, that she could be Shanti instead. "I don't want to be peace. I want to be power," she remembers saying (0:39). It took years, she says, for her to see the matter at a deeper level. "The goddess doesn't actually ask us to choose. She's both. The peace, the power, and everything else" (0:55).

She connects that realization to a devotional practice: the chant "Ya Devi Sarva Bhuteshu Shakti Rupena Samsthita," followed by the repeated bow, namastasye. The verse speaks of the Goddess abiding in all beings in the form of shakti. Sadhviji describes reciting it over and over, moving through "all of the different aspects of the mother goddess. Endless, infinite aspects of her" (1:34). For a listener, the practical instruction is to treat the chant as a survey rather than a single request. Each repetition turns attention to another face of the same presence, and the repetition itself trains the mind to hold more than one quality at once.

What does Durga clear out first?

Navaratri, in Sadhviji's sequence, moves in three movements. The first is Durga, and she is careful to say that the Goddess is not frightening. "Mah Durgika, sometimes people think is scary. But she isn't. She's the one who frees us of actually all of that that keeps us stuck" (4:20). The festival begins with her because of a household analogy. You do not invite a guest, even a prosperous one, into a dusty house. On Diwali, the festival dedicated to Mahalakshmi, people clean everything before she arrives. Durga does the same work inside the mind.

Sadhviji names the dust specifically. She lists "junk from our mind, the ignorance, the illusion, the egos, the attachment, the fear," and then asks listeners to examine their own inner corners during the first three days. Her questions are concrete. "What jealousy, what grudges, what attachments or expectations or illusions, what are you holding on to?" The practice is to notice what is "lurking maybe in a corner, maybe under my bed, maybe behind the couch," and then to let Durga free you of it, "the same way that she kills the demons."

A useful way to take this is as a three-day inventory rather than a mood. Pick one resentment, one expectation and one fear. Name each plainly. The teaching does not ask you to feel better about them first. It asks you to see them clearly so that the clearing can happen.

Is Lakshmi the goddess of money?

Here Sadhviji is most direct, and most in tension with how the festival is often marketed. "People make a big mistake. People think that Mahalakshmi is the goddess of money, right? That she's going to somehow increase, improve our bank balance. She's not an ATM machine. She's not a bank teller" (5:30). She points instead to the Bhagavad Gita, where Krishna lists the qualities of divine wealth. Those qualities, she says, "has nothing to do with the zeros on either side of a decimal point." They include "purity of heart, fearlessness, compassion, gentleness."

The central idea is that abundance is a relationship to sufficiency. Sadhviji describes a person who is constantly desiring "more money, more, more, more," and says that in Hindi the mind simply wants more and more. In her account, that restlessness is poverty, whatever the bank balance: "Doesn't matter how big our house is or how many cars we have. If we're living in a sense of lack, we're poor. And if we're living in a sense of abundance, fullness, enoughness, that's prosperity."

She backs the claim with observation from decades in Los Angeles, then Rishikesh. "I have seen so many who are fabulously wealthy, but miserable. An inner feeling of emptiness. And I have seen the opposite. I've seen so many who don't have much at all. But whose hearts are filled with wanting to share and give and serve. That is wealth" (7:24). Gratitude, in this reading, is the mark of Lakshmi's presence. A person who feels that their cup runneth over is not waiting for the next purchase to be satisfied.

How is Saraswati's wisdom different from school knowledge?

The third movement brings Saraswati, and Sadhviji is quick to rule out a common misunderstanding. "She's not the goddess of knowledge. It's not like, 'Oh, I've got an algebra test tomorrow. Let me pray to Maha Saraswati. And even though I didn't study, she's going to come in and give me an A.' It's not how it works" (8:13). She distinguishes ordinary knowledge, or vidya, from para vidya, the higher knowledge. Ordinary vidya asks whether you know how to do things, whether you studied, whether you went to school. Para vidya asks different questions: "Do you know who you are? Do you know why you're here? Do you know your Dharma?"

The practice she recommends is meditation on core teachings of nondual Vedanta, which she lists as So Hum, Aham Brahmasmi, Tat Twam Asi and Ayam Atma Brahma. Each in its own phrasing reminds the practitioner, in her words, "I am divine. I am one with the divine. This is Maha Saraswati in our lives" (9:03). She ties the teaching to her own lineage, which she describes as the Saraswati lineage. Her name, Sadhvi Bhagawati Saraswati, belongs to it, and so do the names of her teacher, Param Pujya Swamiji Swami Chidanand Saraswati, and his guru, Swami Dharmanand Saraswati. Wisdom, in this framing, is transmitted through a line of people who have held the same question for generations.

What is the tilak on the forehead meant to see?

Sadhviji then turns to the mark on the forehead. The tilak, she says, sits "right at that energy center, the Ajna Chakra, which is the energy center of the power of discrimination, truth from falsehood" (10:10). Her image is physical. The two eyes perceive form, shape, color, size and movement, the things that tell you whether someone is tall or short, dark or light, handsome or not. "This eye sees content, essence. This eye tells us divine" (10:50).

That is why the greeting namaste, "I bow to the divine within you," is paired with the forehead mark. The practice is not to deny the surface of the world but to train a second kind of seeing that looks past it. Sadhviji asks listeners to pray for that sight, "to really be able to see her in ourselves and in all," because, in her words, the Goddess says, "I am in all. There is nothing I am not" (11:18).

What does it mean to see the Goddess in everything?

The closing movement widens the lens. Sadhviji says her own name, Bhagavati, means the Mother Goddess, "that embodiment of the shakti, the shanti and all of it." It is not, she insists, only a name for her. "It's the truth for all of you. All of us are that embodiment of the mother goddess" (11:41). The nine nights, in other words, are not a visit to a distant divinity. They are a training in noticing what is already present.

She gives examples that move from temple to ordinary life: the image of the Devi in a shrine, the women and girls in one's family, the trees, grass, water, mountains, leaves and earth. "It's all the mother goddess that sacred creation," she says, and the instruction that follows is to honor it, celebrate it and bow to it. The video ends where the teaching began, with the verse and the peace invocation, Om Shanti, repeated three times. The reader who began with Shakti and was offered Shanti now hears the two presented as one.

Where to go from here

The most useful next step is to take the three-day structure literally. Spend the first days of Navaratri with Durga's question: what is hiding in the corners of your mind, heart and psyche? Name one grudge, one expectation and one fear. Spend the middle days with Lakshmi's question: where in your life is the mind saying "more," and what would it mean to feel that you already have enough? Spend the last days with Saraswati's question: who are you, and why are you here? Sadhviji's own words are worth returning to, and the full video is available on her channel. She also points listeners to a free spiritual toolkit, Unshakeable: How to Stay Centered Even Through This, which is offered at sadhviji.org/unshakeable/. Read it as a companion to the nine nights, not a replacement for the inner work they ask for.

Finally, try the chant. Say the Ya Devi verse slowly, and pause after each name of the Goddess's presence. The point, as the teaching shows, is not to ask the Divine Mother to awaken. It is to notice that she has never been asleep, and to ask whether you have.