FEATURED TEACHER: MONICA SHUM

Yoga and Invoking the Divinity 

Being brought up in a Catholic family, I never thought that I would be so interested and intrigued by the Hindu Gods and Goddesses.  Before embarking on my yoga journey, I have always remembered seeing blue color Hindu Goddesses with snakes, knives, and scary animals in portraits.  Not only they were scary, they also didn’t communicate the image of what Goddesses should be (I was used to seeing Greek Goddesses)! After learning about the Gods and Goddesses through my teacher training, I was fascinated by the stories and also feeling how each Goddesses play such an important role in various aspects and time of my life.  From feeling scared and intimidated, I am feeling these emotional connections and greatly inspired by these Goddesses.

The Divine Feminine is symbolized by the Goddesses.  She is the feminine incarnation of divinity. The Divine Feminine is scared, and we are scared because we embody her.  She is the Great Mystery.  She is the sun, the moon, the earth, the stars, the sky.  She is interconnected through all that exists.  She is the atoms and molecules that make up the matter of our world.  She is the energy and the light flowing through every dimension.  She is everything.  

Our bodies are our temples. Our physical bodies, our feelings, our thoughts, and our energy are temples as well. If you are a woman, that means that it’s a goddess temple.  You hold the power of the Divine Feminine in your form.  Even if you were born male, you can still hold the power of goddess within you.  We all hold the vibration of the Divine Masculine and the Divine Feminine within us.  

When I look back now, throughout my life, I had different period of times that I resonated and connected with different Goddesses.  When I was in my early stage of my career, I had so much Durga in me that I felt like the whole world was under my feet, and everything was positive and motivating.  When I felt madly in love, Sita overtook me entirely.  I never knew I could be such a devotional lover.  At the time when I was moving smoothly upwards with my career, I sure had the blessings from Lakshmi.  

Throughout my yoga journey especially after becoming a full time teacher, learning to access and invoking the Goddesses within us became extremely fascinating.  Since I moved to New York, the biggest challenge that I had to confront was being alone, particularly when we were hit by the pandemic.  Being new to the city with no friends and families, I was learning to build a new life from scratch.  I have always been a very independent person, but the pandemic challenged me in a whole new level.  I was very fortunate to have my yoga practice, a great community, and wonderful fellow teachers and practitioners at Sonic Yoga to guide me.  Then I met Saraswati!  She is such an inspiration to me.  I felt so aligned to her energy, and I needed her so much to build my inner strength.  Saraswati inspired me to dive deeper into my knowledge of yoga and to gain more wisdom through yoga philosophy.  With new knowledge and an expansion of perspective of life, I feel more independent than ever.  I came to understand that I don’t need anything from the outside world to be content.  Of course feeling connected with people is still one of the most important things in my life, but I have overcome this ultimate challenge that was truly fearful.  Even now that we are back to normal, my journey with Saraswati continues through calling upon her with my creative sequencing in teaching a class.  She became the most important Goddess in my life!