Ganesha is one of the most widely known and deeply loved Hindu deities. He sits at the threshold with a sweet smile on his face; welcoming, yet discerning, grounding and present, steady, and surprising. His role is to provide boundaries and remove obstacles. As an archetype he is known as Ganesha for new beginnings – the elephant headed loving character, invoked for starting something fresh with wisdom and depth. 

He is also known as Ganapati – lord of the Ganas; a Sanskrit word that refers to the wild, untamed, loud, and unconventional companions of his father, Śiva. He gathers those groups of rebellious characters, and the tumultuous energies inside of us. He doesn’t tame them, or puts them in their place. He brings together all of our parts, and creates proper boundaries around them, so they can have a place, a space, a vessel, and so we can be safe, grounded, and held. 

Ganapati is the invitation to work with the complexity of our being, with the view of nuances necessary for living in this layered, complex world. He offers deep engagement – a yoga of meaning making, and slow, intentional living. 

I am not a Hindu and not of Indian descent. I want to acknowledge that right here, in the beginning, and offer my gratitude and respect to the culture this character comes from. My practice with Ganapati is based on more than two decades of devoted study, relational learning, and is rooted in responsible, loving engagement with the intricate connections between where he comes from (India) and how he is relevant to a wider world. 

Ganapati for New Beginnings: Why He Matters Now

Ganesha’s spiritual meaning, in a sense, is the invitation to stand at the doorways of life; pause and contemplate, consider and breathe, receive where we are, discern and decide what comes with us and what stays behind.  

Life is full of uncertainties. We never truly know what is going to happen. And we live at a time of great upheaval. This is a scary historical moment. No archetype is going to give us solutions. Archetypes can’t solve our problems or give us answers. They’re here to help us process, think, feel, observe, understand, and interpet the world around us, the situations we’re facing, the experience we have, and who we are becoming. 

I’m writing this at the beginning of a new year. This is a moment of renewal, the start of a new cycle, a breath of fresh air, an opportunity to give ourselves the gift of saying goodbye to some old ways of being, and welcome new habits. But the teachings of new beginnings are not limited to this moment in our collective cycle.  

When we stand at a threshold – big or small – a new year, a new relationship, a new job, becoming a parent, losing a loved one, buying a house, going on a trip of a lifetime – we don’t know what the road ahead will bring. We don’t know what lessons will come our way. We don’t know what’s waiting for us, what parts of ourselves we’ll have to face, what dreams we’ll need to put aside, or who we will become. 

Ganapati is not here to secure our path. He’s here to open the door for our own wisdom, our own discernment, our own power. And he’s here to stand in the doorway and make us pause. The teachings of Ganesha are a slow river of earth and patience. 

Ganapati as a Mythic Companion in Yoga Philosophy

When people hear the word Yoga these days, they think of skinny white women in tightly fitting outfits, stretching long limbs somewhere tropical, with makeup perfectly intact. They don’t necessarily think about elephants.

Sometimes when I tell people that I teach yoga, they say things like; “Oh! That’s awesome! I do Pilates!” 

I try not to roll my eyes. I want to be respectful. 

I’m not a purist. I’m not here to tell anyone what yoga “truly” is. That’s not my job. It’s not anyone’s job. Yoga is an ancient technology, a philosophy, rooted in 4500 years of change. It has evolved through conversation, argument, and lineage after lineage claiming their interpretation is the truth. With a capital T. 

So in a way, yoga is whatever people say it is. 

Now, if depth is what you’re after, you might want to look for yoga outside the walls of IG or a hot LA yoga studio. 

Yoga as Philosophy and Practice in a Secular Mythic Context

Yoga in Sanskrit comes from the verb root Yuj, which means “to yoke.” In origin, yoga is about making connections – yoking oneself to something. And so here we are again; yoga is whatever people say it is – whatever connection they’re making. 

In one of his hands, Ganesha holds a noose. The noose is used for yoking. This is the tool with which we connect ourselves to meaning, to something that matters to us, to our own process, to yoga itself. We can interpret this tool in many other ways too. Like yoga, symbolism is a path of plurality. 

Yoga can be about your life’s pace, about a sacred space, about a sacred pause, and also about a pose. It’s about your inner conversation, about life force and meditation, about intuition and self reflection. It’s about embodied experiences and our relationship with ourselves and with others. It’s a doorway into the soul. It’s the breath you need to slow down. Let it lead. Yoga is a practice because it’s something you show up to again and again. 

The practice of yoga doesn’t require belief. It’s an invitation, not an obligation. 

Yoga invites you to contemplate the meaning of life, and to make life meaningful. Traditions have argued over its meaning for thousands of years, cultivating a thick, elephant-like body of philosophical concepts through these argumentative conversations. The philosophies contained under the umbrella of Yoga are as diverse as the plants in the amazon forest. 

Like art, like mythology, like symbolism, yoga is evocative. It is experiential. And it is open to interpretation. Dogma shows up in almost every yoga tradition. And yet yoga keeps becoming. It cannot be pinned down. It keeps unfolding into more possibilities, more expressions, more stories. 

Yoga is also a storytelling tradition. It works on our unconscious. It takes us places inside ourselves and in the collective that we can only get to through dreams, through meditative states, through archetypal, mythic, and symbolic exploration. 

Read about why myth matters in this essay, to dive deeper into this topic. 

What does Ganesha have to do with yoga?

One of the key teachings of Ganesha, is that he’s distinctly himself. You cannot be mistaken; when you see an elephant headed deity, you have no doubt about who this is. His personality is very clearly his. His presence cannot be ignored. He’s the elephant in the room. There’s no one else like him.

And he’s fluent at being who he is. 

Graceful. Dexterous. Gentle giant. 

He invites you into your own particularity, and into the fluency of being who you are. 

Yoga is the practice of becoming more intimate with yourself, creating deeper connections with all the layers and levels of your being, cultivating fluidity in our movement between all the pieces of ourselves, and generating fluency in being who we are. 

Intimacy requires boundaries and receptivity. Bingo! That’s Ganesha! 

You hear this in yoga all the time; “Find your center!”

Yoga teaches you to find your core, to center yourself, to ground yourself in the middle of things. It takes you to the liminal, and offers you an anchor in the vastness. It teaches you to pause. To reflect. To turn your gaze inward.

Ganapati is an archetype of yoga in a very profound way. Presence. Power. Patience. Pause. 

He’s the space between your breaths. The discernment required for working on yourself. The inquiry at the threshold, on the mat, in meditation. 

Yoga is not just exercise. It’s a contemplative journey. A living, breathing, mythic inquiry. A somatic symbolic ritual of self discovery. And it’s also an opportunity to do the kind of inner work that turns us back to the world, and helps us make connections with that which surrounds us, that which we’re a part of. 

Ganapati’s Iconography as Inner Practice

A symbolic language speaks to the unconscious. It stirs the imagination. It sparks something within the collective and the personal psyche. Sybmols have layers of meaning. A diversity of interpretation woven through the ages. The magic is not in simplicity, but rather in complexity – Ganesha style.

When you know what a symbol stands for, looking at the image becomes a doorway. The iconography of a deity is a portal into the collective unconscious, into hidden chambers in our lives. It meets you where you are. It invites you to make connections. Looking at the image becomes a meditation. A Ritual. A therapy session. 

Ganapati symbolism is a vast body of soulful doorways; each with a path that winds and twists, like a trunk of an elephant, offering to lead us into deep conversations that can help us understand ourselves and the world in creative ways. 

The Twisted Trunk – Identity, Adaptation, and Wounded Beginnings

Ganesha’s trunk moves fluidly, like a serpent. It’s as if his mother, Śakti – the Great Goddess, the power of life, the embodiment of the universe, the energy that animates all of existence – takes the form of Kundalini on his face.

Kundalini is the serpent of awakening in the yoga tradition. Yogis say she sleeps at the base of the spine until awakened by sadhana (spiritual practice, or discipline). She travels up the central channel of energy (the Śusumna Nadi), piercing each of the Ćakras, and reuniting with her beloved, Śiva, at the crown. The serpent, in so many ancient traditions across the globe, has been the symbol of the goddess. (You might enjoy this Substack musing I wrote about serpents and goddesses). There’s a lot more to say about that. Kundalini deserves her own piece. We’ll wake her up another time.  

The trunk is in the middle of his face. It’s the midline; “Madhya” in Sanskrit. it’s not just Kundalini – it’s Susumna Nadi itself. It’s the space between things, the liminal, the threshold. Madhya, in yoga philosophy, is the doorway to the universe, to the vastness of the cosmos within us. The midline is also the center of identity. It’s the fluency of being oneself. The core of who you are. Notice that it isn’t still. The trunk of an elephant is alive, moving, twisting, and turning in serpentine motion, in waves, in fluidity. Our identity is fluid. It changes. It twists. It turns. It fluctuates. And yet it’s always there, at the center of who we are. 

Ganesha wears the power of the feminine on his face. He is his mother’s child. 

The head of the elephant, though, is given to him by his father. This is a core wound. You see, Ganesha is made by his mother. Fashioned from the dirt on her skin. And after making him, she asks him to stand at the threshold and guard the door. When his father comes home, they don’t recognize each other, because the son is not yet his father’s. This is when the story shifts into the painful, traumatic, not unfamiliar wounding of being unrecogniaed by our care givers, our community, or society. Each and every one of us has been through this at some point or another. And we go through it more than once in our lives. 

When Śiva comes home and finds a little boy standing at the doorway and not letting him in, he first finds it ammusing, but then rage takes over. This leads to a set of two severed heads. We can go more deeply, with greater detail into this story another time; there’s a lot to explore here. But in short, Śiva severs the little boy’s head, and then must find another head to restore life to this precious loved son of Śakti, because her grief threatens to destory the whole universe. 

I’m offering a series of Mythic Meditatiaon classes this month, focusing on Ganesha. This story will make its way into one of those classes, so if you’re into it and want to hear a fuller, more detailed version, you’re invited to subscribe to my mailing list, where I’ll share the details and zoom links. There’s a link to subscribe at the bottom of this page.

The head du jour is that of an elephant, and viola! We have a Ganapati! When Śiva breathes life into him, he crowns him as the lord of the Ganas. He initiates him into the family. As an apology for severing the boy’s head, and to make amends, he also presents Ganesha as the lord of new beginnings, and announces that from now on, before invoking any other deity, Ganapati comes first. 

Ganesha’s identity is recognizable because of his elephant’s head. He’s not the only deity in the Hindu tradition to have his identity woven into being by his wound. Because our wounds are not problems to fix. They are doorways through which we are born into who we are. This can be in the way of victimization, or in the way of empowerment. We don’t want our wounds to define us. But we must address them, create space for them, and integrate them. We can learn to turn toward the wounds that shape so much of who we are, as the serpentine power of the goddess, into the twisted trunk of Ganapati. 

The Broken Tusk – Self-Wounding and Writing Our Story

You gotta break yourself in order to make yourself.

Brokenness is not a popular lens to view ourselves or the world through. We strive for wholeness. We think we need to fix ourselves. The wellness industry is not the only industry making billions preying on people’s need to feel whole. 

Spirituality sells the promise of oneness; a “True” reality as a hidden gem of light and love. But reality bites. Life is complicated. Most people buy into ideas of oneness and wholeness because they’re comforting. This is why in most places, when you look for the meaning of Ganapati’s broken tusk, you find that it means oneness. Most teachings about Ganesha say that he breaks his own tusk to signify non-duality. 

But brokenness doesn’t have to be a problem. The universe broke from oneness into manyness in the moment of the big bang. And it’s still banging. A seed must break open in order to become a plant. An egg must be broken into in order for sperm to enter, and for a fetus to begin to grow. Another egg must break in order to become an omelette. Our hearts must break in order to be open. A mother’s uterine shrine gaps in order to birth her baby, and with giving birth, her identity fragments. Who she was bursts into flames, and a new, unrecognized bird rises from the ashes. 

Life requires shattering. 

In order to tell our story, in order to share who we are, in order to make art, in order to write our pathways of life in the stone of existence, we have to break. 

In some stories, Ganesha breaks his own tusk in order to write the Mahabaratha. Breaking his tusk is the only way he can tell a story as big as he is. In other stories, he gets angry at the moon, and doesn’t only break his own tusk, but hurls it at the moon, causing it to shatter into periods of shedding and times of swelling. We, along with the moon, along with the spinning of the planet, phase in and out of darkness, expand our light, and then release it into the night. 

The meaning is diverse. It’s not one possibility, but many. This breaking invites an array of interpertations rather than one fixed way of thinking about it. 

Breaking ourselves open, poking holes in our world views, shedding skins of identity, shattering beliefs, disintegrating pieces that no longer hold, and letting walls that block a wider view collapse – is how we become more of who we are, more of who we can be. This is a key to our creativity. Without cracking open, we cannot tell our story, paint the picture, compose the music, carve our path. Without chopping, tearing, and cracking, we cannot make a meal.

Beyond the Broken Tusk: Ganesha’s Many Symbols and Voices 

Part of growing, is learning how to speak to ourselves in many different voices. Ganapati offers this array through breaking. We need a wide variety of ways to think about things. We need self reflection. That’s not always going to be easy. 

We need a tough love voice – the kind that might hurt a little sometimes, the kind that breaks our tusk. And some of us need healing in the furctures we have within ourselves, tha’s for sure. But abandoning the clouds of remorse and regrets is not necessarily a healthy choice, as they are necessariy for the rains that flood the rivers and the fields of tenderness and understanding between us and others.

We need a loving, mothering, nurturing voice. We need a kind grandpa in our pocket. We need the voices of different trees and insects and landscapes. We need rough and roaring lions, howling werewolves, and wild, wandering tribes in the pantheon of voices within our inner lives. 

We need the axe in Ganesha’s hand for cutting off certain behavioral patterns that don’t serve anyone, or unhealthy relationships, harmful practices, or dangerous tendencies. 

We need to be playful at times, soft and stern and sophisticated, and we need the sweetness, the gentleness, the soft spoken words of consolation, offered by the sweets Ganesha holds in his hand for us. 

In our breaking, fragments of self fly all over the place. Some parts, particularly the ones we have a hard time with, scatter and disappear from view. But sometimes they run the show from their hidden places. This is why Ganapati has a noose – to gather parts that want to disconnect, to integrate the pieces that in fragmentation become alienated. 

This is why he has a big belly – not just because he eats lots of sweets, but because he holds our multiplicity, our expansive sense of self, our orchestra of instruments and voices. His big belly holds the parts we’re proud of, the pieces of shame, the beauty, the beasts, the celebrations, and the pain. This is our wholeness. In breaking we don’t become less whole, we become more of who we are. 

This is what those big, elephant ears are for; deep listening to the sonic constellation of our many parts, and the many pieces, voices, stories, and expressions this world has to offer – a diversity, a complexity, a multitude. 

Each of these symbols can be explored in much greater depth. And there are many more. I promise to address them in future essays, to unfold them, to breathe life into them, and give them more room to express their medicine. 

Working With Ganapati as a Living Practice

Who are you becoming at the threshold of your next phase? What parts of you need to lead you into your new cycle? You can use the archetypal presence, the teachings, the symbols, and the mythic gravitas of Ganesha for new beginnings – anytime you start something new.

Ganapati is a layered and loving archetype to cultivate and contemplate, a rich companion for the space between compost and renewal. He’s not something to believe in, he’s a relationship to develop. Not something to rely on, but an energetic tool kit to forge in the fire of our core, the fire of a door we’re ready to open and walk through. 

If his mythic magic tags at your heart, and you wish to go deeper into a space where mythology and meditation meet, where arhctypes become practice, and stories become sadhana, I invite you to join me for my live Mythic Meditation class. 

This month, we’ll be focusing on Ganapati as a guide for beginnings – the beginning of this new year and beyond. If your heart needs his sweet, inclusive, non-dogmatic energy, you are welcome to join. Subscribe to my mailing list via the form below, where I’ll share the zoom links and other details for this class. 

For more mythic magic and archetypal alchemy, subscribe to my Substack, where I share the medicine of Muse every Monday. 

If you wanna meet me on the mat for yoga practices steeped in philosophy and mythology. Subscribe to my YouTube.

Thank you so much for reading! And if you liked what you read, share it with a friend. 

Much love,

Hagar