u/PossiblyNotAHorse

I really like the Hare Krishna mantra for being a long, repeated list of nothing but names for Krishna, so I was wondering if there was an equivalent for Kālī?

I live near Jackson and I’ve wanted to try attending one of the Episcopal churches we have out here, but being from the south entering any religious environment is spooky when you’re queer. I was wondering if anyone here has been to the churches here and know whether or not they’re safe places?

I’m a Vijnani, and in Hinduism some people argue over the question of whether or not avatars (Rama, Krishna, Ramakrishna, etc etc) had past lives that built up to their avatar-hood or if the forms were created whole cloth by God. I study Sikhi on and off but I’ve never come across people talking about this, so I wanted to see if there was an answer in scripture.

I think we’ve all seen people debating what group in which splat has the most correct view of reality, but what group in WoD do you think is most off the ball?

A few years ago I (a primarily Shakta Hindu) joined this little online space of Buddhist practitioners who helped me sort some stuff out in my own spiritual life. I’m a Kālī devotee, but I had been interested in Buddhism for basically as long as I’d been interested in Hinduism and this little space was helping me learn more and get closer to the Buddhadharma. They encouraged me to attend a live-streamed empowerment held by the Vajrayana Foundation since they felt it would help me in my practice to have something formulated and strict, and told me the days I would need to attend in order to practice. I attended the empowerment on the days I was supposed to and after that took up the concise sadhana for a time and felt pretty good about what I was doing and the progress I felt I was making.

Eventually though this space started to feel less and less safe for myself as arguments broke out, egos ran high, and I started feeling like parts of my practice (namely my views on Kālī) were being belittled semi-often. I tried to practice on my own without being involved in that space but at the time they were the only community I had so I ended up going back and leaving a few times before ultimately giving up on it last year. The final straw was learning that there were parts of taking an empowerment that the community I was in had never told me, and in my ignorance I wasn’t aware to ask about. I was a baby Buddhist and was unknowingly learning and being encouraged to practice things far beyond what I felt I was capable of really understanding, so I left. Ever since then I’ve felt a kind of listlessness and dispassion in both my life and my practice that have been (for lack of a better term) soul-crushing. I feel torn between wanting to practice, feeling like I’m not ready for it, and even wondering if the empowerment I performed was even valid considering how little I understood at the time.

What I want to ask is if anybody has been in this position before, and have any advice or words of wisdom to share? I feel almost at the end of my rope because I keep running in circles in my own head and feeling like a failure, but being unsure of what to even do.