Excerpt

Why is Sita important in todays world? Sita is a religious symbol. Her lived life represents an archetype, a potentiality that exists in the psyche of every woman. An archetype that was created through the male narrative. In this twenty first century, we should, and must demolish those male narratives and create our own understanding of Sita, a woman who lived in a world ruled by men, and died a broken woman in a world ruled by men. Her lived life is nothing to aspire to. In fact, it represents a life that must be avoided at all cost.

The word religion stems from Latin roots re and ligare.  Re means again, and ligare means to bind, to bond, or to bridge. Religion, then, means to bind together again. When we restore the word religious  to its true meaning, it regains its healing power.  To heal, to bond, to join, to bridge, to put back together again – those are the sacred faculties of the psyche as well  (Robert Johnson, 1991). Our innate religiosity then, refers to our inner capacity to heal, to put ourselves back together again. It is a furiously potent power, a potentiality that lies within every individual, unleashing its curative powers whenever the psyche needs to heal.

An implication of this awareness is that humans do not have a choice between being spiritual or nonspiritual. We can either choose to consciously explore our spirituality, or be forced to divert our capacity for spirituality to our aspirations (perfectionism, addictions, materialism, greed, fame) that are equally frightfully potent and numinously powerful. These aspirations offer an alternate form of spirituality in that they too are seeking to heal, to bond, to join, to bridge, to put the soul together again, but they do it in a physically unhealthy way that may cause psychic and/or physical distress.  These aspirations may then be viewed as outcomes of a powerful process that was meant for inner healing, a process that now malfunctioned and goes awry because the natural ways of healing have been blocked.

And therefore, an understanding of Sita’s lived life can unchain us from the archetype, and allow us to live our ordinary, individuated lives, avoiding the fate that Sita was subjected to.

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