Mirabai Starr – 2nd Interview

Summary: 

• Spiritual Journey: Mirabai Starr discusses her spiritual journey and her work translating sacred literature. 
• Teaching Career: She reflects on her 20-year career teaching Philosophy and World Religions at the University of New Mexico-Taos. 
• Inter-Spiritual Dialogue: Mirabai speaks about her international teachings on contemplative practice and inter-spiritual dialogue. 
• Bereavement Counseling: As a certified bereavement counselor, she explores the transformational power of loss. 
• Translations of Mystics: She has received acclaim for her translations of mystics like John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, and Julian of Norwich. 
• Authorship: Mirabai is an award-winning author with books such as “God of Love” and “Caravan of No Despair.” 
• Latest Work: Her latest book, “Wild Mercy,” focuses on the wisdom of women mystics. 
• Personal Life: She shares about her life in the mountains of northern New Mexico with her extended family. 

The interview provides a comprehensive look at Mirabai Starr’s contributions to spiritual literature and her insights into the transformative aspects of grief and loss. 

Full transcript: 

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done over 520 of them now and if this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, please go to batgap.com and look under the past interviews menu. This program is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers, so if you appreciate it and would like to contribute to its support, there is a PayPal button on every page of the website. My guest today is Mirabai Starr. I interviewed Mirabai five years ago in person, that time also at the Science and Non-Duality Conference, and that interview was very impromptu. We were eating dinner and she introduced herself and she said, “Mirabai Starr.” I said, “Mirabai Starr, I’ve heard so much about you. Let’s do an interview.” And so, we just kind of went to the room and did an interview, cold. And this one, I know Mirabai a lot better now and we’re going to cover completely different information than we did in the first one, although you might want to loop back and watch the first one also. That was more biographical, about the story of your life and all. One advantage of doing interviews at the SAND Conference is I get to do them in person, and one disadvantage is that there’s so many things to prepare for leading up to the conference that I don’t get to prepare for each interview as thoroughly as I usually do when I only do them once a week. So, unfortunately, I haven’t read Mirabai’s book in its entirety, but she’s such an accomplished interviewee that I trust she will guide us through this discussion and will cover all the points we want to cover. But firstly, let me read a bio of her. Mirabai writes creative nonfiction and contemporary translations of sacred literature. She taught philosophy and world religions at the University of New Mexico, Taos, for 20 years and now teaches and speaks internationally on contemplative practice and interspiritual dialogue. A certified bereavement counselor, Mirabai helps mourners harness the transformational power of loss. She has received critical acclaim for her revolutionary new translations of the mystics, John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, and Julian of Norwich. She’s the award-winning author of “God of Love: A Guide to the Heart of Judaism, Christianity and Islam”, “Caravan of No Despair: A Memory of Loss and Transformation”, and “Mother of God Similar to Fire”. That’s right, I didn’t italicize it all properly. A collaboration with iconographer William Hart McNichols. Her latest book, “Wild Mercy”, that I just held up, “Living the Fierce and Tender Wisdom of the Women Mystics”, was published in the spring of 2019. She lives with her extended family in the mountains of northern New Mexico, namely Taos. So welcome, Mirabai.

Mirabai: Thanks, Rick. It’s so good to be with you again.

Rick: Oh, it’s great. So, you’ve made a career out of kind of understanding the lives of mystics and translating their works and so on, and I heard you say in a talk yesterday that it was a little hard to, it was harder to do this book than you thought it was going to be, because the information in it about various women mystics had been kind of suppressed, presumably by the patriarchal society which has dominated Western culture for a couple thousand years and maybe Eastern culture as well. And so maybe that would be a good little trigger to get you started, you know, why it has been suppressed or concealed and, you know, how come, how women mystics have had a harder time of it than male mystics in terms of, you know, persecution and dismissal as being sort of insignificant perhaps, and things like that. And we’ll get, in the course of this discussion, we’ll get into how the tides are turning now and there’s a rebalancing taking place in the world.

Mirabai: Well, you just said so many rich things in that, in that, like, let’s see where to, which stream to draw from. So yes, I, when I first was asked to write this book by my publisher, Sounds True, I thought it would be fun, you know, looking for the teaching, the wisdom of the feminine across the spiritual traditions, not from any one particular tradition. And as you well know, and I don’t know if others who are watching know, that’s my thing, is drawing from the wellspring of multiple spiritual traditions. I’ve always felt at home among them.

Rick: Yeah, you know, I just want to interject that you gave a great talk at SAND two years ago called, or two or three years ago called, what was it, Bees in the Garden? And it was all about how bees, you know, go from flower to flower, extracting the nectar from many flowers, and like that, you know, we can extract the nectar from many different spiritual traditions without being dilettantes. You know, we can go deeply at the same time.

Mirabai: Exactly, and that, in fact, that whole messaging that many of us have received about that, somehow, yeah, that’s something to dig one hole, to just stay with one tradition to really get to the true transmission. I bought into that for a long time thinking that there was something wrong with me because I was temperamentally incapable of choosing one particular tradition. It almost felt like when I tried, I was betraying a covenant with my Beloved as I, you know, really feel the divine as beloved, and that I was somehow trapping my Beloved in a little box, and it just seemed wrong, and yet that’s what people were, people I respected deeply, were saying, like, it’s very nice that you’re attracted to all these different traditions, but eventually you’ll grow up spiritually. So, that was part of my rebellion, my subversive experience in the last, very recently. I mean, I started on the spiritual path when I was 14 years old. I’m 58, and it took me until my early 40s to finally claim my spiritual, my attraction to multiple spiritual traditions as not only not precluding depth, but being my deep path. But anyway, so…

Rick: Just to quickly comment on that, my attitude would be that if a person is inclined to focus exclusively on one thing, great. Yes, great. But if they’re not, great. You know, to each his own.

Mirabai: Exactly, Rick, thank you. Yeah, I think it’s a matter of spiritual temperament.

Rick: Mm-hmm.

Mirabai: And mine is polyamorous. So, looking for the teachings of feminine wisdom across the spiritual tradition seemed, like, just perfect for me, but I did discover, as you alluded to, that those teachings, those wisdom teachings of the feminine and by women had been buried, and that is not a coinky-dink. They were buried on purpose and by the patriarchal structures for whom they were very threatening. And I really got, Rick, that the world’s religions were not the spiritual impulse that gave rise to those religions, but the religious structures, the institutions, were built by and for men, largely.

Rick: Yeah, you know, another thought that comes up with that is that usually sort of administrative types end up taking over religions, and they are not the mystics who founded the religions. And administrative types are made, they get nervous around mystics, or you know, mystics sort of shake their world a bit.

Mirabai: Totally.

Rick: And so, you know, they have, I think there’s been a tendency in most religions to bury all the mystics, you know, if possible. And perhaps, you know, bury the women first and then bury the men as well.

Mirabai: That perfectly leads into what I was thinking as you were talking, what I was feeling, which is that mysticism in and of itself is feminine. So, when I speak about masculine and feminine, I’m not just talking about men and women, I’m speaking to the feminine in all of us, and I’m speaking from the feminine that transcends the bodies that we inhabit. So I’m speaking to that thirst for the feminine that I see so clearly rising more and more in women, in men, and in people of all genders and no gender identification. It’s still a longing for this feminine wisdom way, and the mystics reside in that feminine space. And what I mean by that is that the mystics are about paradox, and the law, for instance, the fundamental paradox to me in the mystical way is the paradox of the longing that is the portal to union. You know, when Rumi speaks about the cry of longing is the answering response of the Beloved. That’s the path of the mystics, is that it’s rooted in the heart’s yearning for union with the absolute, which is characterized as love. That’s the ground of all the mystics, I think, is love. And that love longing is the way to union with the Beloved. It’s not like preventing us from recognizing our essential unity with the Beloved. It opens the way.

Rick: So when you say mysticism is feminine, is that because you associate such qualities as longing and love and so on with the feminine?

Mirabai: Not exclusively, but yes, in men too. Like John of the Cross, San Juan de la Cruz, who I’ve translated. As you know, “Dark Night of the Soul” was my first book. And it was a translation and commentary on that gorgeous text. John of the Cross was a feminine mystic in my mind. Rumi was a feminine mystic in my mind. John of the Cross didn’t write this text, “Dark Night of the Soul”, as originally as a guide for awakening, although it did end up becoming that. He wrote it as a love poem to God originally. It’s an eight stanza poem. And then the sisters, for whom he was confessor in this convent where he lived, begged him to explain this erotic, juicy, passionate love poem about the rendezvous, secret rendezvous of lover and beloved in the garden as a guide to the path of union with the one. And so, he did. He wrote this incredible, classic prose treatise on the Dark Night of the Soul, on navigating this very mature spiritual state of neti neti, of stripping, of becoming spiritually naked. Why? Not to flex our spiritual muscles like I can hang out in this emptiness, but rather so that we could have a naked encounter with the Beloved. It’s harder to make love when you got your clothes on. So, I speak of Santa Teresa de Avila, Saint Teresa of Avila, as the matron saint of this book. And, also, I would say the two primary guiding feminine beings, wisdom figures for “Wild Mercy” are Saint Teresa of Avila as a human being and the Shekhinah in Judaism as, I was going to say a disembodied feminine wisdom being, but she’s all about embodiment. But, the Shekhinah is the indwelling feminine face of the Absolute, of the Divine.

Rick: And who is this on the cover?

Mirabai: Who is that on the cover? So that is Lila Downs. And Lila Downs, some people say Lila Downs, is a contemporary singer-songwriter, protest singer from Mexico.

Rick: She’s the one who spoke at the San the other day. Yes? No, that was a different person. I’m sorry.

Mirabai: Oh, maybe Mona.

Rick: Mona.

Mirabai: Yeah, Mona Haydar. Yeah.

Rick: Well, that was a Native American girl.

Mirabai: Oh, right. So that was Lila June.

Rick: Okay, Lila.

Mirabai: These are all my girls.

Rick: Lila, Lila.

Mirabai: Lila, Lila, right. Yeah, totally. I bring, I collect young women leaders. I don’t mean to, but I just do. There are all these incredible young women who are rising. Their voices are rising. They have this deep wisdom and clarity and ferocity. And they’re all, many of them are finding their way into my sphere.

Rick: Yeah.

Mirabai: Meaning I have nothing, I don’t have a thing. I don’t have a wisdom school. I’m just nearby. I make tea and I listen to them speak about their road, the road that they’re traveling, which is often exceedingly challenging as young women, often women of color in this world.

Rick: I’ll be in touch with you about them. We’ll get some of them on back. Yeah.

Mirabai: Yeah, absolutely. They are coming in, Rick, with this fierce wisdom that is just blowing me away. So, I’m trying to give those prophets a drink of water is all I can say in there. And they’re finding their way to me and I try to hold them for a minute so that they can keep doing what they’re doing. So anyway, Lila Downs is the cover of “Wild Mercy”, is this beautiful kind of icon that was painted by this another young woman activist artist. Lila Downs, the singer-songwriter whose image this is, is an activist singer. And then the woman who painted it is an activist artist named Erin Currier. And Erin’s art is extraordinary. I just encourage everybody to look her up. Erin Currier. She’s also a rising star in the art world, but all of her art is about activists and mystics, which to her and to many women is the same thing.

Rick: Yeah, that’s a cool point in itself that we could get into because often they have been considered to be on other poles. But there’s a sort of a mystical activism or an active mysticism or something that’s coming to the fore these days.

Mirabai: And that’s my way. And I didn’t want to be. I did not want to be an activist. I just wanted to be a contemplative. I just wanted to be a meditator and someone who spoke with passion about the passion of the mystics, the poetry, the land of the heart. And I, like so many of us and so many who are probably watching, have felt the call resounding through every fiber of my being to step up. And so I teach a lot, guided by all these women mystics that I’ve come to love, about this blend of taking refuge and stepping up. Taking refuge in the depth and beauty, in the beauty of these great teachings and teachers and poetry, and then stepping up, taking refuge, stepping up. And in many ways to me that is the way of the feminine. It’s a way of holding and nurturing and then fierce prophetic rising. And all of the women in this book for me are models of that intertwining of the prophetic and the contemplative. So, Leila Downs is on the cover, Erin Currier is the artist. The book is filled with women like both of them who have throughout history and right now, because there are quite a few contemporary exemplars of the feminine way in this book, across the spiritual traditions who are embodying and modeling the essence of the feminine path of awakening and service. So, Saint Teresa of Avila. So, why do I call her my matron saint? She is one who came to me kind of of her, it almost feels like of her own volition. Like John of the Cross was my guy. I loved the teachings of the “Dark Night of the Soul”, the purity and nakedness of that of that classic wisdom teaching. But Teresa of Avila was John of the Cross’s teacher. She was his mentor. She was his his spiritual guide. And, because of his respect for her, I felt like I had to investigate her. And once I did, she became deeply dear to me. And that’s partly because, so I told you that “Dark Night of the Soul” was my first book. So I know you know this Rick, but maybe others don’t, that on the day that that book, my first of 15, came out, my daughter Jenny was killed in a car accident. In fact, tomorrow is the 18th anniversary of Jenny’s death. And the coinciding of this traumatic loss of my beloved child with the release into the world of these teachings on the transformational power of suffering has guided my way ever since. And it’s guided my way into the mystery. Not out of the mystery, but deep into the heart of what we don’t know. And I have found myself at home in not knowing in a way that that I used to write about and thought I knew. But I ended up knowing from from the depths of that fire, that stripped away everything that I thought before. All my belief structures crumbled in it with the death of my daughter. And into that space came a book contract to translate “The Interior Castle” by Saint Teresa of Avila. And so from 16th century Spanish to contemporary English. And so, Teresa accompanied me through that first year of mourning. And through that companionship, we have become so intimate that she is now with me all the time. To translate a masterwork of a mystic is to have living Darshan every day.

Rick: That’s a good point. I mean you really have to, to whatever extent you can, align yourself with their experience. You know, kind of experience what they were experiencing to whatever extent you can. Otherwise, you know, it’s you really can’t do justice to the translation. And that’s been an unfortunate fact about translations and commentaries and so on throughout the ages. And about the, I mean, you know, there’s that saying, “Knowledge crumbles on the hard rocks of ignorance” where, you know, some great teacher comes out with some deep experience which inspires him to come out and start teaching. And everybody listens from their level of consciousness and hears a completely different thing. And then, you know, he dies and then they pass it on and they die. And you know, it’s like the party game where you pass a message around the circle and by the time it gets back to you it’s something completely different.

Mirabai: And yet there’s also a living truth that is meant to be, it’s fluid and it’s meant to find the shape of the container that it flows into. And so, in many ways, I think that all of us who receive these great wisdom teachings across the spiritual traditions are meant to galvanize them in the crucible of our own hearts, to mix my alchemical metaphors, and see what shape they take in our lives. And that’s not to say that we’re supposed to blithely appropriate wisdom teachings that have their home in deep root traditions for our own purposes, like the whole prosperity thing, you know. But rather, you know, and the Buddha’s last words were, “Be lamps unto yourselves. Cultivate your own awakening with diligence,” or something like that. I’m a translator, I can translate that however I want. But that’s not an accident and that’s not an excuse to be sloppy about it. But with the rigor of contemplative practice and a continual coming back to the heart, I trust us to take these wisdom teachings and make them authentically ours. And I don’t mean that in an individualistic way. That’s one of the artifacts of the masculine paradigm to me, is this individualistic, my awakening, my liberation, my salvation, my redemption. But rather, find our awakening in the web of interbeing that supports us.

Rick: Yeah, and also what comes to mind as you’re speaking, maybe this is part of what you’re saying, was that it doesn’t really do us any good if this, that, or the other saint had such and such an experience three, four hundred years ago. We have to have it, or it has to be alive now for us to whatever extent it can be. You know, otherwise it’s just a story.

Mirabai: And yet the story, I agree. And yet the stories of these beings’ lives can be So.

Rick: They’re catalysts.

Mirabai: They can be catalysts. Like, there’s so many stories about Teresa. You want me to just tell one?

Rick: Yeah, everyone loves stories.

Mirabai: Okay, good. Let’s see, which of the many? The one that’s coming to my mind is what is often called her second conversion. Presumably as a Christian, she had already converted her heart to love of Christ. By the way, she was Jewish.

Rick: Originally, yeah.

Mirabai: Yeah, originally. She was the first generation converso family that was forced by the Spanish Inquisition to convert or be exiled or executed. And in fact, her grandfather nearly lost his life by secretly practicing Judaism in the home and being called out by a neighbor. But actually, it wasn’t even her grandfather. He was the one who was accused, but in Jewish homes, it’s the women who preside over religious practices. So, it was probably her grandmother lighting the candles of Shabbat. So anyway, Teresa’s so-called second conversion experience, which is what I’m feeling inclined to share right now, is so inspiring to me because she entered the convent at 18 only because she didn’t know what else to do with her life. Her mother had died in childbirth with her ninth child at the age of 33. And Teresa was 12. And so I think she must have looked at that life of wife and mother and decided that was not what she wanted. But she was very beautiful and very attractive to many people. People just were always falling in love with Teresa, her whole life actually. And she felt like that was going to imperil her mortal soul, you know, the fact that everyone was always falling in love with her. And that she was falling in love, I’m sure, back. Because it’s very hard to not respond, right? Nor should we not respond. But that’s another story. I wish I’d gotten to tell Teresa, “It’s okay, honey. You can let yourself be in love. But you’re not going to hell for being in love.” Anyway, she signed on to a convent and she was in the convent for 20 years before she had any sense of a spiritual, personal spiritual experience. She did, as a very young woman, have a lot of spiritual experiences, even as a child. But by the time she entered the convent, like, religion can just shut you down spiritually, right? And it did.

Rick: Yeah, ironically.

Mirabai: And so she, at the age of 39, she was at that point the abbess of this convent. And she was bustling through a hallway one day and saw a statue of Christ being scourged. Not growing up in Christianity, I don’t even know how to say that word, “scourged”.

Rick: Whipped.

Mirabai: Yeah, that’s better. At the pillar. So that was what the statue was. And he was looking up. And she looked down at him looking up, and all of a sudden, their eyes locked. You know, this statue that she was just going to pick up and go take to its proper spot. And in that moment of her gaze and his gaze meeting, her hard heart, as she says, melted and opened, and the floodgates opened. And the waters of passionate love and longing came flooding through. And she was down on the floor, fully prostrate, dandapranama, crying out to her Beloved, saying, “I had no idea that you loved me like this.” Because that’s what she saw in his eyes. She saw unconditional love and longing and pain and peace, all in the same gaze. And that unlocked her. And it was only after that that she, all her famous visions and voices and raptures and ecstasies, all the things she’s so well known for, came. So, around age 40, which seems to be a real, a very important turning point in the lives of many mystics. I mean, Francis of Assisi received the stigmata, I think, at 40. Hildegard of Bingen really had her awakening, the great medieval Rhineland visionary, at 40. So many, the prophet Muhammad, many people had profound awakening experiences right around the age of 40.

Rick: Interesting. Not all, but many.

Mirabai: No, no.

Rick: I mean, Christ died at 33, and so did Shankara.

Mirabai: Oh, really?

Rick: Around that age, 32, actually.

Mirabai: Shankara, really?

Rick: Yeah, he was commentating on the Upanishads at the age of 12 and stuff.

Mirabai: Yeah.

Rick: Anyway, yeah.

Mirabai: “That than which no greater can be conceived.” Shankara.

Rick: Just at breakfast, we happened to be talking about St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila levitating together.

Mirabai: Yeah.

Rick: That’s interesting. Why do you think that happened? Presumably, that actually did happen.

Mirabai: Right.

Rick: And there are stories from all over the world of it happening.

Mirabai: Yeah.

Rick: Why? How? What would the mechanics of that be?

Mirabai: Yeah, I think, well, so in the case of the stories of the two of them levitating, the one that we know of, is that they were awake all night talking in the convent kitchen by the fire. And the kind of talk that you do with your spiritual, deepest spiritual companions.

Rick: Yeah.

Mirabai: And in the morning, when one of the sisters came in to prepare tea for the morning, they were still there leaning toward each other, still deep in ecstatic conversation about God, and their chairs were five feet off the floor.

Rick: Wow.

Mirabai: This is part of Teresa’s canonization hearings that this was reported. And whether or not that physically happened, I feel that that story encapsulates the beauty of spiritual companionship, and the depth and power of the meeting of two souls. And I so deeply encourage people to cultivate the kind of friendships where you can have those head-to-head, heart-to-heart conversations around the fire that lift us both up. And to me, that story is the embodiment of the power of spiritual friendship to uplift us together.

Rick: That’s nice. That’s kind of what I try to do at BATGAP.

Mirabai: You do, Rick.

Rick: Yeah.

Mirabai: That’s totally what you do, and I’m feeling it right now.

Rick: Yeah.

Mirabai: I mean, in fact, a little while ago…

Rick: I think I started…you started to rise up.

Mirabai: Oh, exactly. Don’t worry. You know what Teresa used to say when she’d feel herself rise?

Rick: What?

Mirabai: She would tell the women around her to hold her down.

Rick: Yeah, because she didn’t want to show off.

Mirabai: Exactly.

Rick: Yeah.

Mirabai: Exactly. Sometimes she’d find herself up in the air, and then she would look around and say, “Put me down,” talking to God.

Rick: Right.

Mirabai: She had no problem talking back to God.

Rick: Yeah. We won’t get into it right now, because I don’t think either of us could really comment on it, but I’m very interested in the physics of that.

Mirabai: Yeah.

Rick: I mean, how that would actually work in terms of the laws of nature and gravity and all that stuff.

Mirabai: I think it probably didn’t.

Rick: I think it did.

Mirabai: Do you?

Rick: Yeah, I think there are so many stories from every culture of the world. I have a friend who wrote a book about them, and, you know, collecting dozens, hundreds maybe, of different stories from every culture.

Mirabai: Of defying the laws of physics.

Rick: Yeah, by levitating, specifically.

Mirabai: Oh, specifically.

Rick: Yeah. Saint Joseph of Cupertino was a very famous one also, but many others. And anyway, it’s a tangent, but it would be really…it says something about the fundamental nature of consciousness, that it’s not merely a product of the brain. That it must somehow be something fundamental to the Universe, and to even more fundamental than the various laws of nature that conduct various processes in the Universe, because it would have to be from there that you could affect an influence that could cause the body to levitate.

Mirabai: And yet I think what’s…I know this is a tangent, but just to go with it a little bit more, I think what’s even more interesting than defying the laws of physics…

Rick: Not defying. Airplanes don’t defy the laws of physics, although we once would have thought they did.

Mirabai: Right.

Rick: But just utilizing the laws in different ways than is customarily.

Mirabai: Okay, then I’m going to think about that differently. Because what I was going to say that feels truly significant and not tangential to this conversation is that when we look at the stories of the lives of these mystics and other wisdom beings, because I also speak about goddesses in “Wild Mercy”, it does…the literal aspects of their stories are not, to me, the most significant part, but what they awaken in our hearts. Like that John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila spiritual conversation thing, or the fact that, like Tara in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, was born in the Legend of Tara from the tears of the Buddha who looked upon the suffering of the world and wept. And one of his tears became the White Tara, the Bodhisattva of boundless mercy and compassion. So, I don’t actually think of the Buddha as this celestial dude in some kind of heavenly geography.

Rick: Yeah.

Mirabai: Yeah. Crying, and his tear became a goddess, but rather when I hear that story, when I tell that story, I feel in my own being, in my own broken, open mother heart, the suffering of the whole world and how that is distilled down into an essence that becomes an offering of love and mercy in the world.

Rick: The feeling that that triggers in me is kind of an objection to the rather cold Neo-Advaita attitude sometimes, that the world is just an illusion and it doesn’t matter what happens to it, that kind of thing. And the real greats in the spiritual luminaries, in the spiritual firmament, have been very compassionate people with great hearts and great devotion.

Mirabai: Devotion, exactly.

Rick: And including all the ones that are often cited as exemplars of non-duality, you know, Papaji and Nisargadatta and Ramana and many others. They just had these tremendous hearts and that’s not always what came through in the books about them and stuff.

Mirabai: That’s right. That’s so true, Rick, and I really take that on in “Wild Mercy”, the neo-Advaita.

Rick: Maybe we should talk about it for a minute.

Mirabai: Yeah. So, I’d love to read a little something from “Wild Mercy” about non-duality from a feminine lens. “Ever since you first tasted the elixir of nobodiness, maybe in the midst of meditating or grieving, you’ve lost your hunger for somebody-ness. Mainstream culture conditioned you to construct a persona and defend it with all your might. The endless self-improvement project, fueled by self-loathing and foiled by the realities of the human condition, has only reinforced the illusion that you are separate from your source. But a combination of spiritual practice and tragic losses ended that game. You, for one, are relieved to surrender. Your surrender is invisible. You still go through the motions of promoting your work on social media. You make an effort to limit your carbs, practice yoga, pick out interesting things to wear. But that’s not because you actually identify as an individual being, detached from all other beings, or from the earth, or from the Holy One. You’ve come to understand that a functioning ego is a necessary vessel for an incarnate soul. You don’t regard your ego as a problem. You just don’t take it seriously, which used to piss your ego off, given its self-important nature. But she’s getting used to it. When you were young, you recognized ultimate reality as Beloved, and you developed a powerful crush. Over the decades, your roles reversed and reversed again. You were the seeker. You were the sought. Eventually, in moments of deep stillness or unbearable anguish, lover and beloved melded. Only love remained. This state of suchness looked like emptiness, but felt like plenitude. You came to understand that not only have you been connected to your Beloved all along, but that you are that which you had been seeking. You had expected God to be the prize you would collect after all the hard work of seeking God. It turns out that the object you thought of as you does not exist, which means the subject you called God is not real either. You would have anticipated such an insight to be devastating, but it isn’t. It’s amusing. Chuckling at the cosmic joke, you get on with business. There are temples to build, curricula to develop, sonatas to compose, startups to start up. You did not buy your equanimity cheaply. Frequent firestorms eradicated your opinion on the matter. Multiple meltdowns led you to a place where your only option was to melt. Who knew that dissolving would be so sweet?

Rick: Nice. Was that written about you? I mean, is that autobiographical sort of?

Mirabai: Yeah. I mean, each chapter begins with a kind of prose poem invocation to the topic of the chapter because the book is topical, so it’s cultivating a contemplative practice, a Sabbath, sexuality, creativity, parenting. It’s a whole gamut from the practical to the most ecstatic. And to me, that’s the way of the feminine is combining the grounded, earthy, getting shit done in the world with the heart that is available to the breaking in and the infusion of divine love at any and all times. Like, looking through the eyes of love and seeing love, cultivating that gaze. And also being able to, you know, get the kids to school and make a good meal and find time for sensuality and self-care and all of it at once. Service, service, service. So, this is the teachings of non-duality through a feminine lens. And when you spoke about the love and devotion of these beings, like Papaji, for instance, that people often forget, you know, that he was a Krishna bhakta, right? He was…

Rick: Yes. And I think that Ramana was a Kali bhakta, and I think also possibly Shankara was. They all had their Ishta Devatas.

Mirabai: Right. And that whatever the Ishta Devata is, she or he, that aspect of the one particularized in a deity that has a kind of characteristic, like the love of Krishna, the transformational fire of Shiva, whatever, the Kalima, those become the portals to the boundless undifferentiated suchness that isn’t just a big empty void, it’s love. And so, I’ve always felt that the way of the feminine mystic, and as I said in the beginning, I feel like all mystics are in a way residing in that feminine realm, is that love itself becomes the fire that melts the boundaries of the heart, and then we naturally lose our identification with a separate self and discover our essential birthright of unity with the one who is love. I guess that’s the difference, Rick, I feel like with Buddhism can be so cold. I have a Buddhist practice since I’m 15, I mean, there are so many things about Buddhism that work for me. Advaita Vedanta is the fact that we are that, that we yearn for. But the teachings have often been so masculinized, and the emphasis being on transcendence, perfection, purification, as if we were impure, imperfect, bound to this world of illusion as you said earlier. And so, when we reclaim these great wisdom teachings through a feminine lens, it includes embodiment, it includes the ego, it includes relationship with each other and with the earth itself in a way that I feel like the masculinized religious institutions have prevented. Somehow embodiment becomes a threat to those structures.

Rick: I gave my talk at SAND yesterday on the theme that knowledge or reality is different at different levels of consciousness, and a lot of talk about paradox and how paradoxically opposite things can both be true. And I think it pertains to what you’re just saying where on the one hand, you know, there is only one and it’s sort of a seamless whole, indivisible and so on and so forth. But Shankar said something along the lines of the intellect imagines duality for the sake of devotion.

Mirabai: Exactly, that’s what I’m saying. You said that?

Rick: Yeah.

Mirabai: Yay.

Rick: Yeah, he told me personally. No, he said that. And when I hear that, what I think is, you know, we have various faculties as human entities and one of those is the heart. And my understanding of spiritual development is it’s a full development or blossoming of all those faculties. And so somehow the heart has to have its due and has to be able to do what it does, which is experience love and devotion and so on. But love and devotion implies some sort of duality where there’s me loving this. And there’s been long debates in India between the, you know, the Hare Krishna types, the Krishna Bhaktis and the Vedanta types, you know.

Mirabai: I totally take that on in this book.

Rick: Yeah, the Krishna people rip apart the Mayavadis, so to speak, who are dismissing the world as Maya. But I think that it’s kind of like the old Certs commercial, you know, it’s two mints in one. There’s a, if you’re old enough to remember that.

Mirabai: That’s old.

Rick: Yeah, it goes back to the 50s. But in any case, these things are not conflicting and contradictory. They can be harmonized and reconciled within a larger perspective.

Mirabai: So, that is very much the theme of this book, exactly what you’re saying. Would you say the Shankara quote again?

Rick: “The intellect imagines duality for the sake of devotion.” Yeah, I heard that from Maharishi in 1970.

Mirabai: Oh really?

Rick: Some course, yeah. But, I mean, the implication is that devotion for even somebody like Shankara or Ramana or any of the others, no matter how non-dual they may have been, was important. And I think when we talk about devotion, we kind of associate, even though we’re referring to men here, we’re referring to what we would ordinarily call a feminine quality. I think you would.

Mirabai: I would.

Rick: And so, these guys wanted to incorporate that sweet feminine quality within their experience, needed to, I’d say, in the course of their development. Which is kind of what you were also saying in the beginning.

Mirabai: Well, I just want to reiterate that for me, devotion is the path to non-duality. The fire of love melts the heart and then we dissolve into that which we have longed for. It’s not like two different states.

Rick: Yeah, and I don’t want to keep talking about Maharishi so much, but in his cosmology, he actually talked about God-consciousness as preceding unity-consciousness, as almost a prerequisite to it. It was a sort of refinement of perception and the blossoming of the heart. When that has reached its fruition, then you may cross the threshold into full non-dual state.

Mirabai: Uh-oh.

Rick: What?

Mirabai: Okay.

Rick: Without abandoning the devotion, but…

Mirabai: Okay, good, and I agree. But I also think that’s a boy-shaped theology.

Rick: Probably so.

Mirabai: Because what I find is that often there are claims that somehow devotion is the precursor to non-dual consciousness, which implies that it’s a lesser level. And what I find is that, at least in my own experience, and in the experience of many of these women mystics that I write about, their unitive experiences began with an impulse of the heart, of love. They found themselves in these unitive states that were beyond all qualities, not even ecstatic, not even nothing sweet, use the word sweet, not even that.

Rick: Just sort of transcendent or absolute or unmanifest or something.

Mirabai: Right, undifferentiated. And then, when they returned, as we inevitably do because we’re still incarnate beings, to so-called ordinary consciousness, albeit transformed somewhat, because how could you have an experience of union and not be transformed by it? There is often an experience afterwards of both pain and bliss, you know, combined. Pain because we’re back, and it was…

Rick: Like coming back from a near-death experience or something.

Mirabai: Yeah, like we want to stay there. And bliss because we merged with the Beloved. And praise and gratitude for that. And that inspires… So, unitive experience inspires more devotion. So, it’s just an intertwining of yearning, union, longing, ecstasy, appreciation, all of it.

Rick: Yeah, I’ll give you another quote which is, “Contact with Brahman is infinite joy.” And if we’re lying in a bathtub, let’s say, really still, we don’t feel the warmth, but if we start sloshing around a little bit, then we start feeling this warmth. So, being able to sort of reside in Brahman or the Totality or the Absolute, and then engaging in life, in an embodied state and interacting and mingling, it stirs up, it’s that contact that kind of stirs it up and results in joy, which is really an underrated term because it’s much more than joy. It would be just waves, tidal waves of devotion. And another metaphor for you is that if a pond is, if it’s just a little pond, it can’t rise up in tidal waves. It’ll just stir up the mud or something. It can only do little ripples, but if the pond is, if it’s a deep ocean, like the Pacific or something, then huge waves can arise and the ocean has the capacity to rise up in those waves and enjoy them. So, your name is Mirabai, and there’s a very great saint named Mirabai whom you talk about in this book, who people might not be as aware of as they are of, you know, Saint Teresa or some of the others. Let’s hear a little bit about Mirabai. You were probably named after her, right?

Mirabai: I was. I was. So, Mirabai was also a 16th century woman mystic like Teresa of Avila. They were contemporaries, one in Spain and one in India, and I often think about the fact that they were both living at literally the same time.

Rick: Yeah. Cool.

Mirabai: Yeah.

Rick: I bet you they would love to have met.

Mirabai: I think so. I like to think that they’re having tea inside my heart right now.

Rick: Chai.

Mirabai: Yes, chai. So, Mirabai was, came from a wealthy, privileged family and was engaged at the age of zero, who knows, to be married to some dude.

Rick: Arranged.

Mirabai: Yeah. Arranged marriage. And so, but when she was five or six years old, the story is that she was with her mother on the balcony of their mansion, looking down at the street below where there was a wedding procession going by. And there were elephants and they were all ornately adorned and the bride and the groom were each on their elephant side by side and there was music and incense and flowers and it just was so beautiful. You know how India, everything’s a pageant.

Rick: Typical Indian wedding.

Mirabai: Yes. And she looked at the scene and said, “What’s going on?” And her mother said that these two people are to be married and they are going to love each other forever. And she said, “Will I ever get married?” And her mother said, “You’re already married to Lord Krishna.” And she took her inside to the family puja table, the altar to Krishna, the God of Love, and invited her to do a little puja, a little offering. And Mirabai asked if she could take the statue of Krishna that was on the altar with her. She could just carry him around. And her mother said “Yes”. And so, she carried him around and she continued throughout her childhood to always have Krishna with her under her pillow at night. And she forged this intimate love with the God of Love. And so, when it came time to be married at 16 to Prince Bhojraj, who was, I don’t know When, in his 40s, she said, “I’m already married.”

Rick: Yeah, Mom, you told me I was.

Mirabai: That’s right. But that did not go over well with her family. She was forced into marriage with this guy. And then she had to move into his household, which is the way in India. I think still in many places that the woman moves into the household of

Rick: Yeah, they just join these extended families and live together.

Mirabai: But she had to live with his family and they did not appreciate her refusal to carry out her wifely duties and to insist that she was married to Lord Krishna. And so, the legend is that they kept trying to, first they tried to convince her, to persuade her, then they tried to bully her, and finally they tried to kill her. And the legend is that they tried in three ways, they being probably her mother-in-law, but maybe her brother-in-law. There are conflicting stories about that, probably both. And the first one was that they delivered a cup of nectar, fruit nectar to her room.

Rick: That was poison.

Mirabai: But it was poison. And she drank it and it was the sweetest, most nourishing thing ever. Then they delivered flowers to her room. And the flowers had a cobra coiled in them. But the snake just became another flower. And then finally they put poison nails under her bed with a cover of rose petals to make it look like they

Rick: So she’d lie on the nails.

Mirabai: Yeah. And it was the most comfortable night’s sleep she had had. So, this is an example, Rick, of the stories that whether or not they happen doesn’t matter to them physically.

Rick: Yeah, they illustrate something.

Mirabai: And they awaken something in the heart. They illustrate something for the intellect, but more importantly, they awaken something in the heart, which is that love is greater than all hatred and violence. And so eventually, the prince went off to kill the moguls and was killed in battle. And so, Mirabai was supposed to commit sati, was supposed to

Rick: Jump into a fire.

Mirabai: Into the fire, yes, and commit suicide for her husband. And she refused. And so, she was banished, which was great.

Rick: It’s just what she wanted.

Mirabai: Just what she’d been trying to get to all along. And she spent the rest of her life, she was still quite a young woman at that point, the rest of her life barefoot, a single sari, a begging bull, and an ektar, or an ektara, which is It’s a single stringed instrument.

Rick: Oh, one of those things, yeah.

Mirabai: So, it’s a gourd. So, it’s a very simplified kind of tambura. So, it’s a gourd with a single string, so you can drum and play that one note. And she wandered the streets of Northern India singing to her Beloved and uttering poetry very much like Rumi. It was spontaneous utterances of pure nectar poetry, and her followers would write them down. And she was also a singer, so she would sing her poems. And she became deeply beloved in India in her lifetime, and is still probably one of the most beloved women saints of India still, and her bhajans are still sung. And I, so do you want me to tell my personal story of how I was named? So, when I was 13, my first boyfriend died, Philip. He was killed in a gun accident. We lived in rural New Mexico, so guns, unfortunately, are quite common in that rural environment. And he was my first love, and my heart was absolutely shattered. I’d already lost my brother a few years before to cancer, my older brother, and now my first love, and I was in this very shattered state, obviously. And so, we were writing, so I went to this hippie alternative school in Taos that was run by Lama Foundation at that time, and Lama is the place where Ram Dass wrote “Be Here Now”. And Lama was a place where many spiritual teachers and teachings came through. And our drama teachers and music teachers were Neem Karoli Baba devotees, and they had just come back from India from being with Maharaj Ji who died shortly after that. And they brought back a comic book of the story of the life of Mirabai, and invited the children, we were older kids, we were all between, I would say, 11 and 15, to write a musical play based on this comic book. And I was cast as Mirabai, and Philip was cast as Krishna, and Philip died kind of halfway through, not that we hadn’t yet performed at rehearsals. And we choreographed the dances, we created the songs, although we used some classical Indian chants and bhajans as well. And so, somebody else filled in for Krishna, a girl actually. And by the time we performed the opening of this play, I was so stripped by grief and so broken open that when I went on stage, which was the Lama Dome, if anyone’s been to Lama Foundation, it’s this giant adobe and wood and glass structure where hundreds of thousands of hours of spiritual practice have happened over the last 50 years. And I entered into that dome dressed in this white wedding sari, and I didn’t think of myself as a singer, I did think of myself as a poet. I was a poet from the time I could write. But when I opened my mouth to sing these love songs to Krishna, this voice came through that had never been there before, and probably has never been there quite since. But with that voice came this sense of intimacy with who Mirabai is. I don’t want to say was, historically, but her deep devotion to love itself. And that longing, that love longing, that just changed everything for me and launched me on my spiritual path. And then later that summer, I was visiting Ram Dass in New York. I was kind of on my own, hooked up with different spiritual pilgrims, one particular family, which is a whole other story, because I ended up being abused by the father. But went to New York to be with Ram Dass, who was with Joya at the time, Majaya Sati Bhagavati, before he denounced her.

Rick: I don’t even know about all that.

Mirabai: Oh my goodness, quite a story. Egg on my beard from, what was that magazine? Anyway, and Ram Dass gave me the name, Mirabai.

Rick: Oh nice, okay.

Mirabai: Because it was obvious I had this kind of passionate, devotional, poetic nature.

Rick: Yeah. Do you have Anandamayi Ma in your book?

Mirabai: I do.

Rick: Let’s talk about her a little bit.

Mirabai: The bliss-drenched mother. She’s another wisdom being that’s been with me since my early teens, when I first saw her picture.

Rick: John, did you ever meet her? So, introduce yourself.

John Cowhig: My name is John Cowhig. And Mirabai, you mentioned Anandamayi Ma. The great Yogananda called her the bliss-permeated mother. And in 1970, I went to my teacher training course with Maharshi Mahesh Yogi in Rishikesh, and the ashram was not yet ready for the course. So, we were waiting around in Delhi for five or six days. And I was asked to go with a group to give her flowers on behalf of Maharshi, who was a great friend. She also knew Maharshi’s master, Gurudev. So, we went to the ashram, and it was such a striking contrast from the streets of Delhi, which let’s say they aren’t really orderly. And all of a sudden, we walked into this courtyard and into this facility, and it was just immaculately clean. It’s all beautifully shiny and flowers everywhere. And we went into a sort of an outdoor meeting area where Anandamayi Ma was speaking to a group of people. They were sitting on the ground, and she was talking. She speaks in Bengali because she’s from Benares. And so, I had a chance to go up and give her Maharshi’s greetings, and I had a garland. And so, I put the garland around her neck. And then she said something in Bengali, and then someone beside her said, “Please lower your head.” So, I lowered my head, and she took the garland off and put it around my neck. It was very sweet. And at that time, she was, I think, in her early 80s, but she was still just magnificent. Long, black hair and this ageless, beautiful face. And then she said something else, and somebody gave her three oranges, and then she put the three oranges in my hands. And so I went. And then after our teacher training course, which lasted three months, we went to see her at another one of her ashrams in Haridwar. And this time, I didn’t give her a flower or anything, but again, we got to listen to her. And it was certainly a fulfillment of a great wish, because for many years, many of us had just deeply admired, sort of mesmerized her beauty with something celestial. I even had once had a poster, with the posters in my room. So that’s my story of Anandamayi Ma.

Rick: Nice. Yeah, so now John tells us about his personal experience, but tell us a bit more about her. Fill out some details.

Mirabai: Can I read a little?

Rick: Sure.

Mirabai: So first I want to read a quote from Ram Dass about her, because he also was with her.

Rick: Yeah.

Mirabai: Ram Dass being my kind of lifelong spiritual uncle, I would call him.

Rick: Pretty much everyone knows who he is. He wrote “Be Here Now”. He used to be Richard Alpert. He was with Timothy Leary back in the old days. Their book was one of my original inspirations.

Mirabai: As it was for so many people. Oh, that book, yeah.

Rick: Yeah, it was a Tibetan book of the dead thing.

Mirabai: Oh, right. Okay. So, Ram Dass says about Anandamayi Ma. Well, now I know it’s Anandamayi Ma. As she played out the Lila of child, wife, and spiritual guide, she manifested from moment to moment the different aspects of the mother. The peaceful serenity of Uma, goddess of the dawn. The loving delights of Radha, Krishna’s playful consort. Kali’s protective fierceness. Sita’s dharmic perfection. And the mystical energy of Shakti, the manifest cosmos. So, I’m just going to read a little bit here. When I was 16, I was pretty sure I’d be enlightened by 19. And I was shocked when I still wasn’t a fully realized being by 22. Now in my mid-50s, I’m being called to teach the dharma, but I am nowhere near where I thought I would be. I still find myself getting caught by some of the booby traps my ego is so skillful at setting for me, such as feeling like I’m never enough and always too much. I am alternately impatient with other people’s neuroses and inclined to take things too personally. The separate self is a practical joke I keep falling for. The image I always held of the perfectly awakened woman was the 20th century Indian saint, Anandamayi Ma, this permeated mother, according to Yogananda, who had been roused from the dream of a separate self and left her ego behind. Ma was wild for God. She frequently fell into ecstatic raptures. And when she wasn’t in a trance, she was busy dispensing divine wisdom, meeting each pilgrim and devotee exactly where they were along the spectrum of awakening, directly apprehending their souls and coming up with the perfect solution to their specific spiritual conundrums. There’s nothing wrong and many things right about looking to certain great beings as exemplars of states of consciousness to which we aspire. The trouble lies in our preconceived notions of what it means to be awake. I will never be Anandamayi Ma. I live in a different time and belong to a different culture than the one that gave rise to that majestic being. But I, in my way, just as you, in your way, am already and always an embodiment of divine wisdom. No, I am not equating my neurotic little self with the divine mother incarnate. I am identifying here with my true self and it is your true self I am speaking to when I speak to you.

Rick: Nice. Yeah, this brings up an interesting point, which is that we should never belittle ourselves by comparing ourselves with somebody great like that and think that, “I’m just a chump. I’ll never amount to anything.” I mean, we’re all instruments of the divine and each sense organ of the infinite, as it were, has its function. You know, the nose isn’t going to be the ear, isn’t going to be the eye or whatever. And so, you know, we just live out our dharma as best we can, live out our particular function, that with which we’re gifted, and do that. And things go well.

Mirabai: Exactly. And so, the whole, as I said, self-improvement project foiled by the human condition is, I think, one of those masculine/feminine shifts that are happening that I hope will come into balance. So, I’m not anti-rigorous spiritual discipline, but if it’s used as a weapon to hurt ourselves, it’s counterproductive to awakening and to service in the world. If we are waiting to be some kind of perfected, cleansed beings that have no…

Rick: Foibles.

Mirabai: Yeah, and no neuroses and all of those things that come along with the human condition before we can step up and be of service, for instance, in this world, then we will never make use of ourselves to alleviate suffering. We come as we are, and the landscape of what we have is holy land. It’s holy ground. All of it.

Rick: Yeah. Besides which, if you get to know closely some of these great spiritual luminaries, famous people, you discover that they have their idiosyncrasies, and they have their human maybe shortcomings, if we want to look at it that way. They’re people. It’s good to be kind of realistic about things and realize that we’re okay as we are, even though there’s plenty of room for improvement. What was that saying? There was some great quote. I don’t know. It was something like, “You’re perfect just as you are, but then keep growing or keep improving,” or something like that.

Mirabai: Yeah, there are different variations on that one I’ve heard, too.

Rick: Yeah. One thing I want to get into is, you know, we often hear about the masculine domination of the world and how it’s resulted in environmental degradation and all kinds of other problems and how there seems to be a shift taking place to a, and the divine feminine is rising. And so, let’s get into the sort of social implications a little bit of that and what we really, what we mean by the masculine domination and what a more feminine-based world consciousness would look like.

Mirabai: So, one of the artifacts of the masculine paradigm that I think has done harm is its emphasis on transcendence and disembodiment. You know, we’ve talked about it earlier, that this world is Maya illusion in the Eastern, or the so-called Eastern traditions and non-Western traditions and in the Judeo-Christian traditions that somehow this world is a veil of tears and we aspire to enter some heavenly realm when we die, hopefully not too soon.

Rick: Get out of here as soon as possible, right?

Mirabai: Yes, because this is problematic, life in a body. So, with this emphasis on disembodiment and on leaving the pesky little physicality in the dust, it opens the way to exploitation of the earth herself. Because if the world is an illusion to be transcended, then, and the body is a problem to be solved or to be purified into oblivion, then that opens up the…

Rick: Well let me help you rephrase it. Not only if the world is an illusion, but if the world is just insentient stuff, rocks and oil and things that we can just exploit. If it’s devoid of any kind of innate divinity, then we can do what we want with it. It’s just dumb stuff.

Mirabai: That was so beautifully said, Rick. Thank you. That’s way better than I was able to say it. Exactly. And so, I think that the masculine spiritual model, or religious model, which is about disembodiment, has enabled us to exploit the earth herself. Whereas the feminine reclaiming of the body as holy and of the earth as a beloved relative to be cherished awakens all of us of all genders to protect this beloved, cherished, relative mother earth or sister earth, or as Francis of Assisi calls her, “our sister mother earth” with all our hearts. Or even seeing her as a lover. If the mother paradigm evokes problematic feelings, which it does for a lot of people, women and men, you know, how about lover? See, wherever you are on the gender spectrum, to feel this sense of deep love and attraction and fierce protectiveness for her, I think is what is going, and it’s rising everywhere, that love of the mother earth as a cherished relative is engaging all of us from a heart level. So that we’re not just engineering technical solutions to the problems of the climate catastrophe, but, actually, we’re coming from a place of personal, intimate, profound love and this sense of seven generations behind us of ancestors who had cultivated a direct relationship with the earth, and seven generations ahead of our great, great, great, great grandchildren who are going to be stewarding this earth that we are now cherishing and protecting.

Rick: Yeah, hopefully they will be. I mean, you know, there are kids in the climate marches, climate strikes with placards saying, you know, “You’ll die of old age, I’ll die of climate change.” And there’s a lot of people who think that there won’t be anybody around in a hundred years at the rate things are going. Some people definitely have that perspective.

Mirabai: And if we don’t survive as a human species, what I feel like we need, and I know a lot of my spiritual companions out there are echoing this, is midwives for the death. Yeah, for the chaos. The doula, yes, the doulas, the people can stay in their hearts and in their bodies and be present for what is to unfold, even if it results in the demise of the human species. Let’s do it with our hearts wide open and tending each other with loving care along the way, just as those of us who sit at the bedside of the dying do with our loved ones as they take their last breaths.

Rick: I’ve often heard you speak of the feminine as sort of wild and unpredictable and, you know, kind of stirring things up. And speaker after speaker at the SAND Conference, it was almost like a shared assumption that we’re really heading into some turbulent waters, that there’s going to be a lot of craziness and stuff. And I wonder if that is characteristic of the upwelling of the feminine in world consciousness.

Mirabai: That’s very insightful, Rick. I love that.

Rick: You keep complimenting me.

Mirabai: I love having a good interviewer.

Rick: It’ll go to my head.

Mirabai: It’s a beautiful thing. That is such an insight and I’m totally stealing it. I’m going to use it in the future. I think that’s right.

Rick: I copyrighted it.

Mirabai: Yeah.

Rick: Sorry.

Mirabai: I’ll give you credit.

Rick: Okay.

Mirabai: The feminine is very good at sharing the glory. So, I think that there is something true about that, that maybe that’s why there is this uprising of the feminine, because that is the power. That’s the superpower that is going to be needed to collectively navigate these turbulent times. And that the nature of the feminine is not only mercy and compassion and loving kindness, But, also, a kind of wildness. And here’s what I want to say about that. The feminine is at home in those spaces of wildness, in spaces of ambiguity, in liminal spaces.

Rick: What does liminal mean?

Mirabai: So, by liminal I mean the in-between threshold spaces where the old is clearly crumbling and dying and falling away.

Rick: Phase transition spaces.

Mirabai: Yes. Where the new is not yet fully formed. And that we, we meaning again, the feminine in all of us, have a capacity for holding paradox, mystery, darkness. You know, yesterday you kind of

Rick: Asked you a question.

Mirabai: Almost jokingly, yeah, that’s the word I’m looking for. Asked me a question. I felt like it was the dude playing devil’s advocate to the

Rick: It was a bit of a devil’s advocate. The question I asked her was, a talk she was giving, I said, well, you know, we often hear about the dark side of the masculine and how it’s raping the world and all this stuff. Is there a dark side to the feminine which would emerge if the feminine were to become as predominant as the masculine has been? Some guy actually came up to me afterwards and said there have been matriarchal societies in which, you know, male sacrifice was like part of the routine.

Mirabai: That’s dark. So, I had two answers to that. So, the first one is the answer I gave you at the time and the other one was one that bubbled up this morning. So, my first answer was that is such a guy question to ask. It felt dualistic. It felt like, so what about us? Or it’s like the whiteness question. Nevermind, I don’t want to go down that rabbit hole. I do, but we don’t have time. So, I felt like it was a non-question question. It was a question just to stir the pot.

Rick: It was sort of academic.

Mirabai: Or even academic, yeah.

Rick: Just curious.

Mirabai: But it’s also predicated on a certain kind of understanding of good and bad and, you know, so like, if you’re having a fight with your partner and they tell you that you’ve done something that’s bothered them and then they say, well, you’ve done this rather than holding space for them. In my sense is the masculine needs to hold space for the feminine right now. It needs he, whoever he is in all the forms, including inside ourselves as women, need to be quiet and allow the feminine voice to emerge and not only not worry about what it’s going to look like if the feminine dominates right now, but encourage the domination of the feminine because of thousands of years of patriarchy that have so skewed and screwed things up.

Rick: Well, I wasn’t worried about it and I do, I’m happy that the pendulum is swinging. I was just curious if, you know, in the traditional understandings there is something, a shadow side to the feminine as there is to the masculine.

Mirabai: Right, okay, so then here’s the other answer that percolated, bubbled up in my heart and consciousness this morning, which is what’s the dark side of the feminine? The feminine is all about darkness. She’s all about, it’s the dark mother. It’s all about mystery and creative chaos. And so that’s my answer. That’s the dark side of the feminine is all of it. We abide in the dark and in Taoism, Yin is the dark. And that’s the creative ground from which all life emerges and it can’t all be tidy and pretty and sweet. And I have found that in myself because I was a sort of tidy, sweet girl until I was And my daughter died and then I wasn’t tidy and sweet and girlish anymore. You know, then I came, I dropped into my fierce feminine, into that wild space of mystery.

Rick: Do you advocate any kind of practices or anything that you’ve gleaned from your study of all the female mystics that others, even hearing this interview, could actually get into?

Mirabai: Yeah, at the end of every chapter I have a practice that I offer to people. But one of my primary spiritual practices has been writing. So, writing a prompt at the top of either the page or the computer screen and then setting a timer for 10 minutes, say, and allowing whatever arises to arise in response to that prompt with one maybe structural gesture to myself, which is stay grounded in the body, avoid abstraction, and keep it sensory and sensual and physical and memory and story. And so, I wrote a memoir called “Caravan of No Despair”, about the death of my daughter. Also, about growing up in the counterculture of the 70s and meeting all these spiritual teachers as a teenager, and then how translating the Christian mystics saved my life during this time of mourning. But it’s not all sad. In fact, a lot of it is funny and warm and human.

Rick: Thank you.

Mirabai: And thank you. But the way that I wrote the entire memoir was with this writing practice of giving myself prompts and timed writing and allowing whatever emerged to emerge. Of course, then I crafted it and shaped it and distilled and distilled and distilled to its essence. I didn’t leave it like this big journal writing rush, but that’s how it began with giving myself permission for the Shakti, the primordial feminine energy of life to come coursing through me and step out of the way and see what she had to say. So, writing for me is a spiritual practice, and I received the transmission of that practice from Natalie Goldberg, who was my actual English teacher at the Hippie Free School in Taos when I was 12. And Pema Chodron was our social studies teacher.

Rick: Oh, cool.

Mirabai: And Ram Dass and Hari Dass Baba and Taos Pueblo elders all came through our school.

Rick: Wow, wish I’d gone to that school. I might not have dropped out.

Mirabai: Well, and it’s why I’m so at home in all of these spiritual traditions.

Rick: Yeah.

Mirabai: Because that’s how I was raised.

Rick: Yeah.

Mirabai: I’m not a renegade from, you know, the American Baptist Church or something. I grew up in this inter-spiritual church in a way, although it had no walls.

Rick: The world is getting more and more that way. I don’t know if, it might take a long time before our school system is that way, but you know, with the internet and everything, there’s just such a mishmash these days of things you can get exposed to. And it’s hard to keep people in boxes anymore.

Mirabai: And that kind of multiple spiritual belonging does not preclude actual transformational depth of encounter with the jewels of all of these wisdom traditions.

Rick: Yeah. One way I like to think of it is, you know, the metaphor of digging one deep well rather than ten shallow wells. Well how about using ten tools to dig one deep well?

Mirabai: I like that.

Rick: Lots of tools, yeah. Sometimes you need a pickaxe, sometimes a shovel, sometimes a jackhammer.

Mirabai: And you know what else?

Rick: What?

Mirabai: You can’t all one dude do all that. We need a community to get that well dug.

Rick: Yeah. One thing that was an interesting observation last night at the concluding session of the Science and Non-Duality Conference, which I’ve been to for ten years in a row now, was that Zaya, one of the main organizers, said that, you know, quite some years back it was just 90 percent white dudes on stage giving talks. And that now it was this tremendous mixture of quite a wide age spectrum, color spectrum, gender spectrum, just this very – and there was also kind of a – I mean the original title, Science and Non-Duality, that sounds kind of dry. And there was a very sort of heavy Advaita or Neo-Advaita presence in the beginning. And now there’s just tremendous heart and social activism, and still Advaita in there, but just much more of a full-bodied, multi-frequency scene.

Mirabai: Yes, and embodied.

Rick: Yeah.

Mirabai: And therefore, feminine and rooted.

Rick: Yeah. I’m not saying that just to refer to the Science and Non-Duality Conference, but that as a representative of the broader spiritual culture.

Mirabai: Yes, exactly. It’s a beautiful microcosm of what’s happening.

Rick: Yeah, yeah. So yes, let’s make some concluding remarks. Do you do any living female saints in here, or just all the past ones?

Mirabai: I don’t call them saints.

Rick: Or whatever. Mystics.

Mirabai: Okay, mystics, great. I definitely interview and have conversations with a lot of living teachers. And in each case, what I asked them for was a vulnerable story so that we could show people that the path of awakening and service in this world is not about some idealized notion of perfection from that old patriarchal model, but rather to be a full, complete human human is intimately entwined with this path of awakening and being of service to others. So I, for instance, Gangaji I speak to, and she tells about having her first period, you know, and then menopause. Like those are really intimate, vulnerable things to talk about. And then all the spaces in between where sexuality was entwined with awakening. So, you know, they don’t get asked questions like that very often, and they were happy to talk about it. Tsultrim Allione, Lama Tsultrim, spoke about grieving her husband who died very suddenly in his 50s when they were in the middle of their life together. And what that path of grief was like and how, as it was for me with my daughter, ultimately became a way of disarming the heart so that we could be available to the suffering of the world in a way that we never had been before. So those are the kinds of stories that I talk about. Miranda McPherson who had experienced this kind of awakening in Ramana’s cave where it was like she really got that there is no self, returned to her devotional heart very spontaneously while running in the woods in the midst of her life falling apart. And then reclaimed that embodied devotion, once again, that had fallen away into this non-dual nothingness that she went through in her original awakening. And it was returning to her body that completed that circuit in a way. So, those are the kinds of stories I tell. They’re vulnerable, they’re grounded, they’re real. Teresa of Avila said, “God lives among the pots and pans.” And these are the stories that I was looking for in these living women that I was able to speak with.

Rick: That’s great.

Mirabai: Some of whom are not famous or known.

Rick: Right. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, God lives not only among the pots and pans but in everything. You know, we were talking earlier about sort of treating the world as a thing, as a rock. And I can remember 50, 55 years ago, sometimes looking at the world and just seeing it as being so drab and dead and kind of depressing and lifeless.

Mirabai: An existential crisis?

Rick: Yeah, perhaps so. But now it’s like everything is alive and the Divine is in everything. And it’s subtle for me, but you realize that it’s there in every little fabric of the couch cushion and bit of the paper and everything else. The Divine is humming away and all that. And so, we’re just like fish swimming in this ocean of Divinity. And that brings with it a softness that I think would be characterized as feminine.

Mirabai: And a kind of childlike wonderment. And awe.

Rick: Good. Well, that’s a good note to end on. So, thanks, Mirabai.

Mirabai: Thank you, Rick.

Rick: Glad we got to do this.

Mirabai: What a joy.

Rick: Yeah, really great. Thank you, those who have been listening or watching.

Mirabai: Yes, thank you. And we’ll see you for the next one, whatever it will be. I have no idea at this point at what order we’re going to release these videos, but glad you could join us and hope to meet you in person one day. One of the cool things about the SAND conference is that every few minutes, someone would come up to me and say, “Oh, I just wanted to meet you in person. I’ve been watching you for years. You’re always in my living room or in my kitchen or whatever.” And it was really wonderful seeing flesh and blood faces and people that I could hug.

Mirabai: That’s so great.

Rick: Yeah, so great. Thanks. See you next time. Thank you. Bye.