There are moments in a life when you stop asking "how do I succeed?" and begin asking "who is carrying me through all of this?" When I started asking that question honestly, I met Her. Not in a temple, not in a textbook — but in the simple recognition that everything alive in me, around me, and through me was the same primordial energy. Shakti. And the form She took for me was Tara — the cosmic mother, the star that guides the soul across the dark ocean.
In the Tantric tradition, Devi Tara is the second of the Dasha Mahavidyas — the Ten Great Wisdom Goddesses who together represent the full spectrum of Shakti, the divine feminine energy. Her name comes from the Sanskrit root "tṝ" meaning "to cross over". She is the goddess who carries you across the ocean of samsara — across grief, across confusion, across every dark night where your own strength fails.
Tara is often called Neel Saraswati — the blue Saraswati — because she also embodies wisdom and speech. She is the mother of the word, the mother of knowing, and the mother who appears precisely when there are no more words left.
Her most sacred seat in India is Tarapith in Birbhum district of West Bengal — one of the great Shakti Peethas, where the famous saint Bamakhepa realised Her presence. Sage Vasishtha is said to have travelled to Mahachina (the lands beyond the Himalayas) to learn Her worship from the Buddha himself — one of the rare bridges between Hindu and Buddhist Tantra, where she also appears as the compassionate Bodhisattva Tara.
To understand Tara, you have to understand Shakti.
In Tantric philosophy, the universe is not a static creation made by a distant maker. The universe is a continuous arising — energy in motion. Consciousness (Shiva) is the silent witness, but the entire movement — the birth of galaxies, the growth of a leaf, the rise of a thought, the building of a company, the falling of an empire — is Shakti.
Shakti is not "feminine" in the social sense. She is feminine in the cosmic sense — the womb from which everything emerges and to which everything returns. Every act of creation, every business built, every child born, every word spoken — is Her movement.
When you say "I built this company", the Tantric would smile and say, "You witnessed Her build it through you."
This is not poetry. This is a real shift in perception. And when it happens, the ego becomes lighter. The successes become a gift. The failures become teachers. And the woman beside you — the mother who raised you, the wife who walks with you, the daughter who looks up at you — you start seeing her differently. She is not just a person. She is a doorway.
Among the ten Mahavidyas, each goddess represents one face of Shakti. Kali is the fierce destroyer of ego. Bhuvaneshwari is the cosmos itself. Bagalamukhi stops the enemy. Chinnamasta is radical self-sacrifice.
But Tara is the one who guides you across.
She is the mother who comes when you are drowning. The hand in the dark. The voice that says "come, this way", when every other voice has fallen silent. She holds a pair of scissors — to cut the bonds. She holds a lotus — for the soul that has not yet bloomed. She stands on a corpse — the dead ego — because real spiritual journey begins only when the false self has fallen away.
In a life full of building and losing, climbing and falling, gaining and grieving — Tara is the steady star that does not move when the boat is being tossed by every wave.
You do not have to go to Tarapith to meet Tara. (Though if you ever can, you should.) She comes to wherever you can sit still long enough to feel Her.
She comes:
Modern life is built on doing. Tantra invites us to remember that beneath all our doing is a deeper being-done-through. We are not separate engineers of our destiny — we are participants in Her dance.
We live in a moment that is dangerously imbalanced. The masculine principle — doing, achieving, conquering, scaling — has been celebrated to the point that the feminine principle — receiving, holding, nurturing, sensing, intuiting — has been forgotten. Even in spiritual circles, the feminine is often relegated to "soft" qualities, while the "real" work is the masculine struggle.
Tantra rejects this. Tantra teaches that the feminine is not soft — she is the source. She is the energy without which the masculine principle is dead silence. Shiva without Shakti, the tradition says, is shava — a corpse.
Recognising Devi Tara in our lives is recognising that:
If you feel drawn to Devi Tara, you do not need to know everything. You only need to begin with reverence.
Try this, for one week:
Do this for seven days and notice what shifts. You will not become a saint. But you may find that something heavy you have been carrying alone — you are no longer carrying alone.
Tara means star. In a world that asks us to be our own light, the Tantric tradition reminds us — there is already a Star. She has been guiding us all along. We just forgot to look up.
Whatever you build in this lifetime, whatever you lose, whatever rises and falls — remember that the energy doing all of this is Her. The same primordial Shakti that spun the galaxies is spinning your breath right now. The same cosmic mother who held the universe in Her womb is holding you, in this moment, exactly as you are.
Jai Maa Tara.
This piece is written with reverence by a businessman who has spent most of his life building, losing, and rebuilding — and who, somewhere along the way, started looking up at the stars. If you have your own experience of the Divine Feminine, I would love to hear it. Drop a comment below or write to me.