Tami Simon: Welcome to Insights at the Edge, produced by Sounds True. My name’s Tami Simon. I’m the founder of Sounds True, and I’d love to take a moment to introduce you to the new Sounds True Foundation. The Sounds True Foundation is dedicated to creating a wiser and kinder world by making transformational education widely available. We want everyone to have access to transformational tools such as mindfulness, emotional awareness, and self-compassion—regardless of financial, social or physical challenges. The Sounds True Foundation is a non-profit dedicated to bringing the benefits of transformational education to communities in need; including at risk youth, prisoners, veterans, and those in developing countries.
To support the mission of the Sounds True Foundation, I’m thrilled to announce that we just opened registration for our first ever in-person fundraiser, the Sounds True Gathering. This inaugural event will take place at the end of September in 2019 at the 1440 Multiversity in the redwoods of California. This special three-day gathering is an opportunity to slow down, to connect with nature, and to connect with ourselves, to enjoy wisdom teachings, shared meals, and heart-opening music, and also have the chance to meet new friends from around the world.
This inaugural event will feature a lineup of premier Sounds True teachers and artists, including Jon Kabat-Zinn, Snatam Kaur, Ruth King, Kristin Neff, Mark Nepo, Zainab Salbi, Adyashanti, Seane Corn, and many more. And the best part is that 100% of the profits will go directly to support the important work of the Sounds True Foundation. This event will most likely sell out quickly. As a listener to Insights at the Edge, I wanted to make sure you heard about it first here. To learn more or reserve your spot, please visit SoundsTrueFoundation.org/event. Again, to learn more or reserve your spot at the Sounds True Gathering, please visit SoundsTrueFoundation.org/event.
You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today, my guest is Mirabai Starr. Mirabai taught philosophy and world religions at the University of New Mexico-Taos for 20 years and is a certified bereavement counselor, helping mourners harness the transformational power of loss. With Sounds True, Mirabai wrote a beautiful memoir about the loss of her own 14-year-old daughter called Caravan of No Despair. Mirabai has also received critical acclaim for her revolutionary new translations of the mystics John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, and Julian of Norwich. Her latest book is called Wild Mercy: Living the Fierce and Tender Wisdom of the Women Mystics.
Mirabai Starr, herself, is a contemporary mystic and writer. She throws her heart fully and with raw vulnerability and passion onto the page in service of helping, uplifting, comforting, bringing wild mercy to others. It’s my great joy to have this conversation with Mirabai Starr.
It’s my great joy and delight to be here with my friend, Mirabai Starr. Someone it’s a great honor to call a friend; and the author of this new book, Wild Mercy: Living the Fierce and Tender Wisdom of the Women Mystics, an absolutely gorgeous book. And Mirabai, thank you so much for pouring your heart and soul onto every page.
Mirabai Starr: Thank you, Tami. What choice do we have?
TS: Well, I think a lot of people approach a book wanting to pour their naked heart and soul into the page, but it doesn’t quite happen. Something gets in the way, which brings me to where I want to start our conversation. Let our listeners know a little bit about the antecedents or the rivulets, if you will, in your own being that led to the writing of Wild Mercy. What brought you to this book?
MS: Well, I feel like all my books have been an invitation. Somebody had an idea. You, in a couple of cases, and they plant that seed in my being and it either germinates, or it doesn’t. And so this one was planted by a number of spiritual communities: The Shift Network, Sounds True, and my own community of women saying basically, “OK, you’ve been writing about the mystics all these years. Why don’t you focus on the feminine? On the women mystics?” And I think for years, I avoided the kind of binary, dualistic approach to spirituality that was the masculine and the feminine. Or, the feminine over and against the predominant masculine paradigm in spirituality, because it just felt too dualistic to me. And I feel like ultimately, truth, reality, which to me, is love, is the boundless field of love, is not dualistic. The masculine and feminine dissolve those distinctions. Dissolve.
But, I began to realize that I have a voice, and it was important to use that voice for the common good. And that the feminine is rising everywhere, in all spheres: political, social, artistic; and that the spiritual community needs to be involved in that discourse. And that it’s an important dialogue to have, to emphasize the wisdom of the feminine, even if it seems ultimately dualistic, on a metaphysical level it’s really important here in this relative world in which we dwell to bring out these hidden teachings, to excavate the feminine wisdom jewels. For all kinds of reasons, it’s really vital to do it. And it, in fact, really requires excavation, because they are hidden in the patriarchal overlay. It’s not even an overlay at the heart of all the world’s spiritual traditions, it’s the way they were designed and built from the get go: by men, for men.
TS: [Yes.] OK. So this is an excavation process and one, really, you’ve been doing your entire adult life in your translation work and your study of the mystics. What are those jewels that need to be excavated for our time? Of course, that’s what Wild Mercy‘s all about, but when you think of what some of the key ones are that you want to highlight for our listeners?
MS: One is the inter-relationality of the feminine; the value of cooperation and relationship, but also just the core-level, cell-level, physical way that I think women and some men get that everything is interconnected. It’s not a philosophical treatise about dependent co-arising.
TS: Sure.
MS:It’s a felt experience of interbeing that I think women have in general, and is emphasized in the feminine wisdom teachings. That’s one. Another one is care for the earth. Not that men don’t also adore our mother, the earth, and want to tend her, but there is a way in which the feminine responds to the pain of the world that is spontaneous and generous and non-intellectual, and is really rooted in the body. And so these feminine wisdom teachings are very embodied. They’re incarnational.
TS: Yes. I thought one of the things you emphasized in Wild Mercy that I really appreciated was that our actual spiritual life is connected to the fate of the earth.
MS: That’s right.
TS: It’s not separate. So I wonder if you can talk some about that, because I think sometimes people think, “Well, whatever happens politically, whatever happens with climate change, that’s not really part of my spiritual agenda. My spiritual agenda is to align with the moment and be at peace, regardless of what’s happening.”
MS: Yes, there are a couple of responses to that. I mean, one is the way that we treat women in society and in societies and in culture and in cultures is directly related, I think, to the way we tend the planet. I don’t think there’s any accident that this masculine-driven model of spirituality and society and politics and all of that has left the earth in the dust and has done great damage. The male-driven model of doing things has been at great detriment not only to women, humans, but to the earth herself. There’s something about the fact that the feminine emphasizes relationship, that we have a real living relationship with the earth. It’s not just an idea about climate change based on science, although I think it’s important to track the science. But, that the feminine has a relationship with Earth as mother, as lover, as sister. I love how Saint Francis, who, to me, is a feminine mystic who lived in a male body, referred to the earth as our sister, Mother Earth. And combined two relational terms in the way he addressed the earth in his canticle to the creatures.
So when you have a loving relationship with the earth, there’s no way that you can violate her, because there’s an intimacy. There’s an intimacy. And I think that the feminine wisdom cultivates intimacy in all spheres, which actually leads me to, maybe, what I would say is the third kind of strong value of these wisdom teachings, that I’ve gleaned from all these different spiritual traditions, is inclusivity; how the feminine, how women, are kind of . . . I don’t want to keep saying naturally, because it sounds like it’s biological, and I’m speaking about something that is more integrated than that. Biology’s part of it. But that there is a way in which, when women come together, we include each other. I’m not saying all women are inclusive and cooperative and relational. Many women have divorced themselves from those kind of values.
And many men, including the men that we all know in love, are deeply relational. But there’s a way that the feminine is emphasizing now, inclusive leadership, horizontal leadership.
TS: [Yes.]
MS: So that I think that spiritually, the traditions that many of us were trained in, even when they have ordained women at the helm, are still patriarchal. They’re still hierarchical. So even if the woman is the roshi or the rabbi, she’s still the boss, standing there or sitting there and dispensing her goodies to the hungry people. There’s something that I really tapped into with this book that the more I said it, the more true it became, for me. That, this is the time for leadership to be truly a communal experience, that almost everyone I know carries this seed of wisdom, and all you have to do is water it with your loving attention, and it germinates and flowers.
And I’m seeing that in all the groups, and all the communities where I’m invited to speak or teach, is that, the minute I make it about all of us, this incredible flourishing of wisdom happens. To me, it’s deeply feminine. It’s very much about relationship and lovingkindness, and the ways that I see community developing before my eyes just by virtue of giving it the permission that everybody has something to bring to the table. And especially younger women, I’m noticing, are carrying this kind of wild wisdom. Like, “Where did you get it? You weren’t trained in the Zendo or the Yeshiva.”
TS:[Yes.]
MS: And yet, they have this deep knowingness, and they’re keeping it quiet until enlightened, and then it just . . . It emerges, and it’s quite stunning. So I’m really trying to draw out younger women as spiritual leaders right now who are not waiting for permission. You know? They’re ready.
TS: It brings me to this question about the future of the patriarchal religious forms that we’re currently seeing crumble. We’re in this interesting transitional phase. And when I read a book like Wild Mercy and permission is given to the individual to find their way among all of these different spiritual texts; to find their way, having their spirituality express itself in their activism, in their families, in changing the diapers, in loving whomever they love. It’s beautiful. But what’s our future forms? How do you see that?
MS: That’s a wonderful question, and I think that the crumbling that you refer to is really real, and it’s really happening. So I see that the world’s institutionalized religious structures are dissolving and disintegrating before our eyes. And I think a lot of more . . . There’s a fundamentalist response to prop it up. And then it’s like propping up these carcasses. It’s kind of smelly and unattractive.
The people who are willing to show up for the death of these institutions are doing brave, courageous work, but it’s not difficult work. And if you tap into that deep wellspring of feminine wisdom, the women are the ones who’ve always been the midwives and the death doulas. We’re quite comfortable with the messy margins of things. We’re OK with ambiguity. We don’t need to have easy answers. In fact, we’re suspicious of them.
And so we’re present for these death throes that are happening in society, in religion, and we are breathing with those constrictions and openings that are happening around the death of these patriarchal structures, and the emerging of this new kind of wild, unpredictable, radically authentic . . . I don’t even want to call it a paradigm, but reality, that is emerging from the death of these old structures. It’s an exciting time if you’re not looking for black-and-white answers and fill-in-the-blanks with these beliefs.
TS: Yes. Something I want to talk about is this word, “wild.” And right in the introduction of the book, you talk about how different religious traditions will tell people, and I was certainly told this: “If you want to find water and go deep, don’t dig many holes; dig in one place.” I mean, I don’t know how many different male spiritual teachers told me that, and they wanted me to be part of their thing and dig deep.
And you know, I bought it, to be honest with you. I bought it hook, line, and sinker. I wanted reality so bad that I was willing to be like, “OK! I’m a little spiritual warrior. I’m part of the army. I’m part of our group’s army, and I’m digging my hole,” blah, blah, blah. But there was something about it that felt overly effortful, and also felt like I had blinders on to other possibilities, but I was so terrified of missing the depth. I mean, it was too terrified of that. And you’re basically saying that’s a bunch of S-H-I-T. It’s not true.
MS: Right. And yet I had to suffer to get to the point where I was able to look around and say, “Wait a minute.” This message that, if you find and dig for or gather, like a bee, the nectar from all of these different spiritual traditions, you’re being a spiritual dilettante.
And so for me to rebel against that message was scary and painful. And I felt exiled, as a result. I felt exiled from various spiritual communities that were giving me that message. Which was basically all of them, because they’re all patriarchal systems, even in their new forms, and even when women are in positions of leadership.
So when I finally kind of looked around and said, “Wait a minute, maybe that’s not true.” Maybe, because of who I am, and because of who each of us is, we actually have a faculty of discernment implanted in our being that will enable us to know what the life-giving truth is, and what the kind of divisive dualistic separating teachings are, and that we can, in fact, make honey from gathering the nectar from all of these different traditions. And that we can, in fact, have a deep and profound and transformational encounter within multiple sacred spaces. And from those encounters, those transformational encounters, find a way that is deep and profound and has social relevance, as well as a path to personal awakening and personal development.
That’s another thing about the feminine, the whole idea of individual awakening feels kind of irrelevant, because it’s truly about all of us. The Bodhisattva Vow of sticking around on this wheel of Samsara, of births and deaths and rebirths, until all beings are free. It’s just like, “Duh.” We totally . . . That’s, of course, the way it is. Individual liberation is a meaningless concept to the feminine, as are practices like purification and perfection. Those words, kind of, are very alien, I think, to the feminine experience, which is much more organic and sensual.
TS: But now, you, at some point, decided to trust your own powers of discernment. “I can discern. I can be a bee and I can pick the flowers. I don’t have to sign on with one patriarchal proposition.” I think a lot of people don’t have that level of confidence in their own discernment. What would you say to that person who’s like, “You know, I’m not sure. I’m a beginner. How do I know?”
MS: You know, it’s interesting, because I don’t just trust my own faculty of discernment, I trust yours. I trust almost everyone’s. In other words, I believe in us, that we have that ability to discriminate. So if someone said to me, “Well, that’s fine for you. You had the courage, you had the background,” because I had exposure to multiple spiritual traditions, where I really did have a lot of experience with spiritual practice in multiple spaces. “But what about me, as I’m a beginner?” I would say, “I trust you to visit the sacred spaces of the other, and show up and allow yourself to participate and engage with the practices and the scriptures and the conversation in those spaces, and open yourself and allow it come in and see where it lands, and how it resonates, and how it doesn’t. And then, take that cup of water with you out into the world.”
TS: [Yes.] OK so we talked a little bit about this word, “wild,” in the title. And then the second part, “mercy.” I mean, it’s such a gorgeous word. So first of all, tell me what you mean by that word, and why you think it’s such an important gateway to appreciating this feeling quality of the wisdom of women mystics.
MS: You know, it’s interesting. I had a dude, a white man, kind of a well-known spiritual teacher say, “I don’t think you should call it Wild Mercy, Mirabai.” And it was because he felt like the term “mercy” was sappy, and that it had been-
TS: Well, glad you ignored him.
MS: -co-opted in some way, and it involved . . . Yes. It implied meekness. And I think that that’s how Mother Mary is being rescued and resuscitated, I feel, in the current inter-spiritual landscape, for the same reason: That the term “mercy” no longer means meek. It carries this powerful energy that’s different than compassion. A little bit different than compassion. Compassion, to me, carries a quality of equanimity, that the feminine not only doesn’t necessarily have, but isn’t particularly interested in cultivating equanimity.
The feminine is about the outpouring of the heart. And mercy, to me, carries that quality of aliveness. It’s compassion that has been lit on fire, and that melts. There’s also a melting quality to mercy. There’s a warmth. There’s a warmth in the word.
So I think that the wild and the merciful, the warmth and tenderness of mercy; of that feminine quality of out flowing of the heart partnered with the wildness of the feminine that is quite willing to not know what’s going on, or what’s going to happen next, but is showing up for it. It carries the quality of the whole book, for me. And if I hadn’t called it that from the beginning, I would have renamed it that at the end of writing it.
I actually had a different title at the beginning, which was “Indwelling.” And that’s one of the names for the Shekhinah, in the Jewish tradition, the indwelling feminine presence of the divine. But I think it was even you, maybe, who said that feels too quiet for what this is. And that was true.
TS: One of my favorite sentences . . . There’s so many great passages, I marked the whole book up. But one of my favorite sentences, “What breaks our heart is also what connects us.” And I know that a lot of things have happened in your life that have broken your heart, truly broken your heart. And I wanted to talk some about that, because to me, there’s a relationship—and I want to hear what you have to say about this—between knowing the depth of loss in our lives, and our capacity for mercy, our capacity to feel that kind of loving, alive connection with anyone in life who suffers.
And I thought, “Wow, part of why Mirabai could write this book, part of her own understanding of mercy is because of the loss she’s been through.” And anyway, what do you have to say about that, in terms of how that informed the level of heart you were able to bring to this?
MS: Well, that’s very insightful, and I think that anyone that I’m in dialog with who has experienced loss, and there are many, a lot of people in my world have experienced great transformational losses. I would say every single one of them has become a more open, boundless container of love and compassion. That it has broken them and broken them open. I’m not worried that people are going to calcify and constrict around their losses. Maybe for a time, but really 100% of the people that I encounter who have experienced loss have become more loving, more compassionate people. Eventually. And sometimes right away, and sometimes in moments. We open and close like an accordion, in the power, the bellows of loss.
So again, I believe in us. I believe in the capacity of the human heart to enlarge in the presence of unbearable experiences. And through that enlargement of the heart, activate in service in the world in a very spontaneous, organic, natural way. And I’m not saying it happens right away, or that it’s consistent. But in general, I find this greater capacity of the heart in people who have experienced great loss.
TS:[Yes.] And in terms of a model, in a more, I guess we could call it transcendent-oriented approach to the spiritual journey, if there’s a loss or something difficult happens, there can be this viewpoint of, “Let’s get up and above.”
MS:: Yes.
TS: But here, you’re describing something different, what gives birth to this wild mercy is actually going into our losses. And I guess what I’d like to understand is, what makes a loss a transformational loss?
MS: Yes. Yes, that’s a beautiful question. And I think that what you just said is the answer, that entering into the experience as fully as possible, even if it feels like it’s going to kill you, is the way that the loss becomes transformational. But we don’t do it in order to transform. Like, “OK, as long as my life just blew up, I’m going to be present. I’m going to grit my teeth and show up for this experience if it kills me.” It’s much more of the feminine way to approach loss, great loss, profound, shattering loss is yielding. Yielding to the contractions of childbirth, because where else can you go? The baby’s going to come. You know? So there’s nowhere to go but to open and yield to the experience. Just surrender to the experience.
Even protesting along the way, which of course, we’re going to do. I hate this, I don’t want to breathe through this experience, I don’t want to be present to this, but “Hineni.” The Hebrew word, here I am. It’s a prophetic stance. The prophet is always a reluctant prophet. A good prophet is. And so we show up with our Hineni for the experience of shattering loss, and then it becomes transformational. But it can’t be a transaction. It can’t be a deal we make with the gods. Like, “OK, I will be present to and enter into the heart of this experience, and then you make me transformed.”
TS: Yes.
MS: And you’re right, it’s not about transcendence. It’s about full presence. And you know, one of the things about grief and loss that I’ve found, and I think this is a truly feminine perspective, and it’s mine; is that when we experience a really profound, transformational loss, it’s not only about us. It doesn’t make us special. I lost a child. And there were moments, in the beginning, especially, where I felt like an alien creature. Nobody could understand me.
And then it was like, “Wait a minute, women have been losing children backwards in time and across the planet forever. So not only am I not special, but guess what? Those women, on a soul level, are my family. They’re my sisters, and we’re in this together, and they’re holding me now, as I navigate this mysterious, brutal landscape of loss.” So rather than rendering me some kind of rarefied, special creature because I lost a child, I actually took my place in the human family for the first time, in a way, when my daughter died. And it was the family of women, especially, that I felt were holding me, and that I’m holding, now. That’s my job going forward.
TS: OK. I want our listeners to get their ears on some of the actual writing in this beautiful book. And so we’re going to go directly to the beginning of a chapter called “Laying Down our Burden.” And I’ll let you introduce this, and then read it.
MS: So this is a chapter on cultivating a sabbath practice. And I am using the Jewish sabbath teaching of Shabbat, but it could be anything for anybody who is willing to take a chance with the practice of cultivating a sabbath.
Here. Come here. Take a moment to set aside that list you’ve been writing in fluorescent ink, the list that converts tasks into emergencies. Items like, “Feed the orchids,” becomes, “If I don’t accomplish this by 11:00 tomorrow morning, the rainforests are going to dry up, and it will be all my fault.” Or, “If I fail to renew my automobile insurance, I will probably crash my car and everyone will die.” Or, “This friend just had her breast biopsied, and that friend’s brother-in-law beat up her sister, and my aunt just lost her job with the symphony, and my nephew is contemplating divorce, and I must call them all, and listen to them for an hour each, and dispense redemptive advice.”
Gather your burdens in a basket in your heart. Set them at the feet of the Mother. Say, “Take this, Great Mama, because I cannot carry all this shit for another minute.” And then, crawl into her broad lap and nestle against her ample bosom, and take a nap. When you wake, the basket will still be there, but half its contents will be gone, and the other half will have resumed their ordinary shapes and sizes, no longer masquerading as catastrophic, epic, chronic, and toxic. The Mother will clear things out and tidy up. She will take your compulsions and transmute them, but only if you freely offer them to her.” So it’s like a sabbath is a revolutionary, subversive act in our culture, in our consumerist achievement-driven world.
TS: You know, at one point, you say in the book, “Go ahead, imagine god as the Mother.” We’ve spent all of these hundreds of years imagining god as a father, it hasn’t really worked for us. And I had the thought, “You know, I don’t really want to imagine god in any way, actually.” Me, personally, Tami. But yet, Mirabai suggested that it might be an interesting experiment to try.
MS: Right.
TS: Why do you find it an interesting experiment?
MS: Yes, that’s a really great question. And it kinda comes back to the first question when we opened, where you asked why the feminine, and I felt intuitively that that is a dualistic distinction that I wouldn’t normally make. I think that philosophically, I am much more of a Buddhist than a theist. Or a non-theist than a theist. We don’t even have to call it Buddhist; in the sense that my personal experience of connection to the sacred has usually rested in a non-dual space.
So it does take an effort, for me, to picture god as anything. As even god. I mean, I grew up where the G word was actually kind of a bad word. My parents were really anti-religion, so for me to even use god language kind of goes against my conditioning. But yes, I feel like by emphasizing the feminine now, in all spheres of human activity, maybe especially religion, because that’s my special sphere, is revolutionary, and is going to create a real and permeating paradigm shift, that I think is reflecting what’s naturally arising everywhere.
And so by overemphasizing, even if that’s what we’re doing, these feminine values of wildness and mercy, of compassion and connection to the earth, of relationship and horizontal leadership, that cannot help but heal and mend the torn fabric of the world. Tikkun olam, the teaching from Jewish mysticism. Tikkun olam, the healing of the world. That’s what all human beings are entrusted with, but I feel like the feminine has a special task of mending this torn fabric, now, with the very qualities of the feminine that have been buried and covered over by the patriarchy.
TS: Yes, and as much as . . . Whenever I hear people say, “Of course god’s not some man in the sky with a beard,” I’ve never heard anybody say, “Of course god’s not a big-breasted black woman coming in on a cloud.” I’ve never heard anybody say that. I’d kind of like to hear that, even if I wouldn’t believe either, I’d still sort of like to hear that. So that’s where I got to in your imaginings of god in a female form.
OK. One of the things you said that I thought was really important is that you wanted to clarify that devotion is not an immature inclination. Because I think also, in the kind of more militaristic spiritual traditions in which I was brought up and trained, at times, devotion was seen kind of like for sissies, or something, in a way. Kind of like, “You don’t need that. You just need to practice. We’re rational adults, that we’re talking about what’s going on in your mind, you can study the neuroscience of mindfulness. You don’t need to prostrate yourself facedown, and you don’t need to make offerings. This is all superstitious mumbo jumbo.” But in Wild Mercy, you really reclaim the power of devotion. So tell me why that’s so important to you.
MS: I’m so glad you used the word reclaim, because as you were speaking, that’s what was rising in my mind: To reclaim devotion, reclaim passion, reclaim the landscape of the heart. That’s the feminine landscape, is the landscape of the heart. And I, too, was trained in these sort of vertical traditions, where we still our minds and purify our senses, and become one-pointed with this kind of rigidity called rigor or discipline that leaves the body behind. And that our feminine bodies, which are all of us. I mean, I almost feel like the body, by definition, all of our bodies are feminine. They’re incarnational. They’re connected to the earth. And that if we don’t respond to the impulses of the heart, which resides in this body, then we’re going to be cutting ourselves off from an entire range of spiritual experience.
And so devotion, for me, is the impulse of the heart that cries out to the beloved who we may not believe with, in our rational minds. We may call that magical thinking, to envision Krishna or Quan Yin as some kind of entity that becomes the object of our heart’s impulse to love; but just as a placeholder, even, for that very real, very holy part of ourselves that calls out for love, then allows us to dissolve into those non-dual spaces, I have found.
What I mean is, I am devoted to Neem Karoli Baba, the great 20th century saint that Ram Dass wrote about in Be Here Now and all his other books. Maharaj-ji’s been my guru since I was 14 years old. I can’t help it. Philosophically, it doesn’t matter what I think. I have this devotional relationship with him. When I experience Maharaj-ji, there’s something in my heart that melts. It’s like he’s a warmth. He’s a fire. He’s a flame. And when I come into proximity, my heart softens and the boundaries dissolve. And that enables me to enter into this non-dual state that other people cultivate through much more cool practices that aren’t necessarily heart-centered. They’re more about mindfulness.
When I chant (I also love sacred music in all languages; in Hebrew and Arabic, especially in Sanskrit, especially Kirtan) my heart softens and opens and yields, and there’s a devotional quality that’s quite ecstatic. It also has an element of pain; the pain of longing. But ultimately, what happens when I allow myself to just fully enter into that devotional space is that I almost always taste those non-dual states of undifferentiated awareness that are very empty. Empty in the very, most delicious sense of that word. I like how Roshi Joan Halifax translates Sunyata, the Buddhist term emptiness, which is the true quality of all that is, not as emptiness, but as boundlessness.
And so the devotional practices bring me to those non-dual states. And those non-dual states conversely, there’s a reciprocity, when I return to kind of individuated consciousnesses from those fleeting moments of resting in the suchness. I have this urge to praise. Praise what? Praise who? I don’t know, but it’s coming. It bubbles up from my heart and from my body. I experienced this terrifying sweetness of being nobody for a minute. Thank you.
TS: Now, it’s interesting that you brought up this deep pain or ache of longing, because that was also one of the sections of Wild Mercy that I really appreciated. At one point, someone asked me, “Do you have longing?” And I was like, “Yes, I have all kinds of longing,” but I also felt like I’d given the person the wrong answer, or something, like I failed my spirituality exam because I said I had longing. And yet, in Wild Mercy, you make owning our longing part of the landscape of the heart, part of our spiritual path.
MS: And in fact, the portal. Longing is a portal.
TS: You offer this great . . . At the end of each chapter, you offer these deepening exercises, which I really liked. And at the end of one of the chapters, you write, “What do you want from the holy one? Write a letter to your beloved stating your demands, stating your longings.” That, I thought, was a great exercise. I was like, “I’ve got …” It also, I think, doesn’t fit with people’s conventional view of what a spiritual path should be like, that I’m writing to the holy one what my demands are. What? My demands don’t count. Do they?
MS: Right.
TS: So tell me about that exercise.
MS: Well, two things right away come to mind. One is, you’re right. We’re not supposed to want stuff. Desire is the problem. I mean, the Buddhist teachings have been interpreted, anyway, to mean that we are ultimately to become desireless. Well, a more sophisticated version of that teaching is to just become aware of our desires. But in either case, there is this kind of cool detachment that is expected of us in most spiritual traditions, in which we understand that it’s OK to have desires, but it’s going to cause trouble, and ultimately you’ll be a lot happier if you can detach from your desires.
I’m advocating that we actually connect with our desires on all levels, and I don’t really make a distinction so much between physical and spiritual at all in this book. And that as we stand up for ourselves in the presence of the holy and say, “This is what I want.” I mean, Teresa of Avila, who I have had the great good fortune of translating, the great 16th century Spanish nun, renegade nun, was famous for shaking her fist at god and saying, “What a minute, dude. This is not OK with me.” Or, “Why do you become present with me, enter me, inflame my heart, hold me close, and then leave me. This is not OK.”
And she had no trouble speaking her mind to the holy one. In all the great scriptures, from the Song of Songs in the Torah, in the Hebrew scriptures, to the Gita Govinda of Hinduism. I could go on. Layla and Majnun in the Sufi literature . . . are often based on lover and beloved coming together, having this ecstatic union, and then separating. And it’s usually him that leaves her behind, and her crying out with love longing, and then the cry becomes the impetus for reunification.
And what is that union? It’s the reunion. The reunification of the masculine and feminine in all of us, I believe. That that love longing that our hearts cry out with is a longing for the balancing of the masculine and feminine, the godhead reforming and restoring wholeness. And our beings become our microcosm for that restoring of balance of masculine and feminine in the whole world.
TS: [Yes.] Now, I can imagine that some listeners might’ve been surprised when you said Neem Karoli Baba, this Indian male figure, has been a guru, a teacher for you, living in your heart, and then here you are, writing about the women mystics. But at the very beginning of the book, there’s this great section where you invite men into the dialogue, and you invite them into the book. And I’m wondering if you can read that for us.
MS: Sure. “You don’t have to be female yourself to walk through these gates. Men are welcome here. You just don’t get to boss us around or grab our breasts or solve our problems. You may sample our cooking and wash it down with our champagne. You may ask us to dance, and you may not pout if we decline. You may study our texts, ponder our most provocative questions. You may fall in our laps and weep if you feel the urge. We will soothe you, as we always have. And then, we will send you back to the city with your pockets full of seeds to plant in the middle of it all.
The secret is out. The celebration is overflowing its banks. The joy is becoming too great to contain. The pain has grown too urgent to ignore. The earth is cracking open, and the women are rising from our hiding places and spilling onto the streets, lifting the suffering into our arms, demanding justice from the tyrants, pushing on the patriarchy and activating a paradigm shift such as the world has never seen.”
TS: Thank you, Mirabai. There is so much in this book, Wild Mercy, that we could talk about. There’s no way we can get to it, but I want to end similarly to how we began, talking about what is happening in our time. In a sense, the Me Too movement has its work that it’s doing in the culture. We’re seeing women rising to positions of leadership, running for office at an unprecedented rate.
And here, Mirabai, with Wild Mercy, you’re addressing what’s happening in our spiritual landscape, in our viewpoint, in our maps, our very maps of what the spiritual journey is. And I’d love to hear, as we end, what you think is happening right now in terms of our earth and what it’s crying for, through you and a book like this.
MS: There’s something prophetic about living in these times, I feel. And when I say that, I mean there’s a call to step up in service of our fellow human beings and other creatures, and the earth herself, and anyone listening is going to be hearing the call. However, the ordinary maps for traversing the landscape are not laying onto the current reality very well. And so there’s this way in which the feminine wisdom teachings from the past and the present are subversively suggesting radically new ways to show up with our yes during these times where everything’s kind of on fire. And the only way that we can meaningfully address the conflagration is together.
And the teachings of the women have always been singing that song, that we cannot, should not, must not even attempt to be lone saviors in this crazy reality in which we have found ourselves. That it is only by looking around and paying attention, and listening to each other and holding each other, and pulling each other in and lifting each other up, that we can possibly hope to mend that torn fabric.
So it’s . . . And the wisdom of the feminine lays hidden in all kinds of places and spaces. So we have to really be paying attention to find it. That’s why I want to call out the younger women and the transgendered people, and people who fall all over the spectrum of the feminine experience, and yet are drawing on these deep values of heart, of relationship, of feeling, of tending, of nurturance, of wild, radical, fierce truth telling that’s also required of us right now. Is a kind of ferocity that has not always been associated with the feminine.
TS: Well, I thank you for following your yes and writing this book, and because you brought up connection, let’s end with you reading this final piece that opens the chapter on connecting and community.
MS: You feel special. Sometimes this feels like a curse, like no one will understand you. Ever. Like you will always be an alien walking among regular humans, pretending to blend in. You have learned to live with this gulf, but what you really crave is community. You long to belong to the human family, to Mother Earth. Participating in the human condition can be bewildering. It is just not always cozy and easy. Rather, it’s humbling at best, downright humiliating when it’s not flowing. It can seem so much simpler to ride solo, slaying your own dragons and singing the ballads you wrote about yourself.
Collaboration can be tedious, and the prevailing masculine value system may have conditioned you to feel like you’re giving away your power when you share it with others. So what? Give it away. The time of the singular sage bestowing his unique wisdom is over. That was a method devised by the men in charge who sought to regulate wisdom. They taught us to suffer alone in the desert for 40 years, collecting our insights in a secret box labeled “esoteric knowledge.” Then, we were supposed to dispense those insights stingily to those who proved themselves worthy by also suffering along for the requisite 40 years in the desert.
It turns out that this world is filled with special beings, grappling our way through the anxiety of solitary conundrums and tasting the occasional reprieve of connection. When you realize this, your body lets out its breath and relaxes. The curse lifts. You come in from the cold. You hold out your cup, and some other special being fills it with sweet, milky tea, spiced with fragrant herbs. You drink.
Our way, the way of the feminine, is to find out what everyone is good at and praise them for it, and get them to teach it to one another. Maybe you know something about the hidden meanings of the Hebrew letters, or how to build a sustainable home from recycled tires and rammed soil, or loving kindness meditation. You, the one who knows the Islamic call to prayer, climb this minaret and call us all to prayer. You, the one who knows how to sit quietly at the bedside of the dying, show us the way to bear witness. You, the one who knows how to get us to wake up to the shadow of privilege, please wake us the fuck up. It will be chaotic, all this community building, but your cooperation will save the world. Besides, it will be fun.
TS: All right! Mirabai Starr, the author of the new book, Wild Mercy: Living the Fierce and Tender Wisdom of the Women Mystics. With Sounds True, Mirabai has also written the book Caravan of No Despair: A Memoir of Loss and Transformation.
Thank you, Mirabai, for saying yes to what was called forth from you and writing this book, and being part, everyone listening here with Mirabai and me, all of us, being part of a community together, connected. Thank you so much.
MS: Thank you, Tami.
TS: Thank you. SoundsTrue.com, waking up the world.
