Shakti Spectrum
photography by Ganesha Isis, at Shakti Spectrum Play Temple, 2024
The Energy of Everything
शक्ति (śakti), from the Sanskrit root "shak" meaning "to be able" or "to have power," appears throughout Hindu and tantric traditions as the dynamic creative force that brings all existence into being. It's been translated and used in many different ways and interpretations - including power, energy, creative principle and many more.
Studying Shakti opens up towards an idea that’s simultaneously very simple and completely radical: the recognition that everything we experience - our thoughts, the air we breathe, a physical sensation, a sound, a smell, an emotion… is the same fundamental energy showing up in countless forms.
This isn't just poetic language. In classical tantra, shakti is the creative principle that manifests everything we encounter. Not just the "spiritual" things or the "beautiful" things, but everything. The argument you had yesterday, the pleasure you felt this morning, the tension in your shoulders - all shakti.
The Spectrum of Experience
This perspective, of “everything and anything is in some way the same” - challenges (and can potentially dissolve) our tendency to use categories that supprot us in navigating the human experience. No more good and bad, sacred and mundane, acceptable and unacceptable…
Shakti expresses in both matter and experience, dissolving the line between body & mind, thought and emotion, you, and me, the space between us and the greater whole.
There's nowhere to hide. Shakti also holds our resistance, our judgements, even our spiritual bypassing, our perceptions, our perceived limits and stated boundaries, our desires, our wishes, our grief and our wisdom.
The desire to fix something is made of shakti, as well as the thing we want to change, and the movement towards or away or through it.
All of it and all of us - belongs, simply because it exists.
photography by Ganesha Isis, at Shakti Spectrum Play Temple, 2025
Consciousness Witnessing Itself
If we can allow these ideas as (even if temporarily) truths - what may emerge here is an invitation to witness.
For those of us or those moments in us that narrate the human experinece as what we “do” - remembering the everythingness of shakti can be an invitation to witness. Nothing to do, no one to be - just experience what wants to be experinced through you, though this body, this mind, this heart - in this moment that is here and gone again.
What does shakti look like when it's expressing itself as attraction? As desire? As grief? As the light reflected from your window?
This isn't about becoming passive or losing our capacity for discernment. We can still have preferences, make choices about how we want to engage our energy. Yet we can do so from a place of recognition rather than rejection - seeing even our preferences themselves as expressions of shakti's endless creativity.
Beyond & Through the Personal
Shakti manifests as you - your body, inner world, thoughts, emotions, perspectives, desires, contractions, choices, escapes and dreams - and it also manifests as every other being. The love that makes your heart smile, that friend who confuses and challenges you, the person passing you by on their bike: all expressions of the same creative principle, all mysterious and magical and layered with experiences, thoughts and feeling that shape their choices, their desires, their heart smiles - all made of shakti.
Becoming aware of this does not make the outcomes of our interactions irrelevant. Shakti does not impose on us to welcome every behavior, bypass harm, or reframe hurt. It calls us to understand and honor - not ignore - our individual experiences as foundational context to navigating this paradoxical existence.
It does, however, shift where and how we can meet each other, blurring the lines of us being separate, isolated individuals and making space for a felt sense of shared becoming: ever shifting, co-emergent, held by the moment itself, and what we bring together to create it.
A Note on Translation and Interpretation
What we often meet about shakti in contemporary spiritual contexts has been filtered through colonial-era translations and Western interpretations that often imposes binary gender frameworks onto concepts that were originally much more fluid and expansive.
In classical tantra, shakti isn't "feminine energy" or "the goddess" in the way these terms are often used today. The creative principle lives beyond gender categories.
This distinction matters, and it does not intend to reduce, invalidate or take away from the meaning people have found in it through this common interpretation, but to clarify that exclusion or categorization of people and bodies was not embeded in these teachings by origin.
photography by Ganesha Isis, at Shakti Spectrum Play Temple, 2024
Shakti Spectrum at Conscious Play Temple
At Conscious Play Temple - we celebrate the spectrum of Shakti as the Archetype of Energy, which holds endless expression and may unfold in abundant range once invited, honoured, witnessed and celebrated.
For the Shakti Spectrum themed events, we highlight and invite the group to tenderly attune and practice both expression and witnessing - in themselves, in one another, and in the space as a whole. We invite moment to moment exploration of what’s already moving, what wants to move, and the endless possibilities in between.
