How to Embrace the Wisdom of the Women Mystics with Mirabai Starr

just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Mirabi Star, an award winning author of creative nonfiction and contemporary translations

of sacred literature. Mirabi taught philosophy and world religions at the University of New Mexico, Taos for twenty years and now teaches and speaks internationally on contemplative practice and interspiritual dialogue. Her latest book is Wild Mercy Living The Fierce and Tender Wisdom of the Women Mystics.

are always a battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other's a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the granddaughter stops and she thinks about it for a second. She looks up at her grandmother. She says, well, grandmother, which one wins? And the grandmother said, as the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

we buy into that courage. For instance, we often think of this sort of masculine warrior figure that's charging forth with the sword outstretched, and that's bravery and a feminine version of this wolf parable would be much more aligned, I think, with lifting up values of cooperation and mutual empowerment and creativity, and also even even values like kindness, like loving kindness and tenderness and mercy would be not always sweet and mild, but sometimes ferocious. As the sacred

feminine is. You know, she has those qualities of fierce truth telling that cuts through illusion and doesn't put up with injustice or with unkindness or with hypocrisy. So I guess what that parable does for me is it reminds me that my commitment to those values that I think of as feminine values of loving kindness and fierce truth telling do not necessarily always mean that I have to go along and make everyone feel okay about what's happening.

It sometimes requires feeding the good wolf, sometimes requires being fierce and protective and wild.

You've got a great line fairly early in the book, you said, I believe in the healing energy of the feminine as a fire that can melt the frozen heart of the world, the artistry that will mend the tattered web of interconnection.

We don't know exactly what happened, but somehow she ended up orphaned at a very young age, like twelve, just wandering the streets and begging, and became an easy target for slave what it would they be called eric traders, slave traders, and she was scooped up and snatched and brought to live in some kind of household, possibly even a brothel, we don't know for sure. And she worked hard and endured much abuse for several years, but had this deep senses I think many of us do when

we're young, of spiritual connectedness and yearning. And so she would work all day and then she would pray all night.

And one night the person, the man who owned her, heard some kind of sort of ethereal but also almost animal like sounds emanating from the courtyard, and he looked out his upper story window and down into the courtyard, and there he saw Rabbia in prayer, prostrate on the cobblestones of the courtyard, and there were flames leaping from the top of her head, and he listened to her cry out to Allah with all her heart and saw the fire increase in intensity with the power and passion

of her prayer. And he didn't know what to make of this, and he grappled all night with what he had seen. And in the morning he went to her and he said, Rabia, I realize that you are a great, powerful spiritual being, and so I would like to offer you two choices. You can either have your freedom and do whatever you need and want to do, or you can stay in our household and we will all take care of you, and you can have students and disciples come and will take care of them too, and this

will be this will be your house of worship. And she chose to go. And even though she was offered resources, she didn't go to a nice house in the city. She plunged into the desert and lived alone for many years in the desert. Said that she had a brick as her pillow, and she had one chipped vessel in which she received and carried and drank water, and then

the same vessel was used for food. And people would bring her these things and visit her in the desert, and everybody wanted to be her student, but she refused to accept students because she didn't want to buy into the power of being an important teacher. She just wanted a full bodied, direct and personal relationship with her divine beloved, who was not a romantic figure like God is for

other mystics that we could talk about. God was this kind of uncompromising beloved who demanded no less than everything of us. And so everyone who did come to learn from Rabbia was subjected to that same rigor of spiritual communion with reality, direct experience of reality. So Rabbia's my favorite fierce feminine mystic of the moment.

and so a lot of the spiritual belief systems that many of us have subscribed to over the last twenty or thirty years are not holding up. They're crumbling, Like so many structures are crumbling right now, and we can't just think our way into prosperity or just the power of positive thought is not enough to meet the power of this moment and what it requires of us that sort of manjuicery or Collie, what I'm interested in right

now is what seems to be required. And yet I also adore the women mystics who were much more rooted in poetry and peacefulness.

I'm aligned with it is non duality. So there's a very popular spiritual movement that I think drawn from an ancient Indian tradition of advita Vedanta Advitavedanta, the path of non duality, where the understanding is that we are already one with the One, there is no separation, and so yearning for union, which is at the heart of all bimistics, really is this burning yearning for union with the beloved

with God. As love is an illusion and so therefore devotional practices would also be in some sense delusional, or they would take us away from the truth of our not tuness, our non duality, our essential unity with reality, with divine reality. The problem that I find with that, to me, that's a very masculine paradigm that is kind of predicated on this understanding that duality is an illusion, and therefore our bodies and our sense of individuality is delusional.

And the temptation there, I feel, is to then check out of the human condition. We're all just one. So, for instance, black lives matter, like why are these people so angry? You know about injustice? Don't they realize we're all one. People tell me all the time, because I emphasize, you know, kind of waking up from the coma of white privilege. Whenever I get a chance and people say to me, but we're all one. You know, I don't

see color. Color as just an illusion. Race isn't even real biologically yes, I know, biologically speaking, there is no such thing as race. And in the real world of human society, not only is there such a real thing, but people suffer terribly as a result of those false constructs. And it's the same with masculine feminine. Can't tell you how many guys, usually white dudes, say to me when I talk about wild mercy. There's always someone in an

audience who says, but God, Mirabi. They usually are man explaining me God is beyond gender. Maybe you don't know that, Mirabi, but actually God is beyond gender. And it's just the same. It's like I don't see color. All lives matter. It's the same bullshit. It's the same thing that opens us up to thereby treating other beings as if their pain is not real and doesn't matter, and not doing our

work of mending the broken world. You know, and Judaism, that beautiful term tikun olam in Hebrew to mend the world like that's what we were born for. Even my beloved teacher around us, who died almost a year ago now and whose death I'm still grieving, says, Yes, in the big cosmic picture, everything is perfect. All is one, Subek is what our guru Maharaji said, Sabeck. All is one.

And here in this fleeting human life where we are for just two seconds, for a very short time, there is and our curriculum rom that says is to alleviate it.

We can get lost, right, it's all one, It's all fine, no big deal, you know, out beyond right and wrong, you know, yeah, you know the roomy quote right, you know, so that breeds callousness if taken too far. And yet what I see in so many activists who I respect immeasurably is all that is seen is the problem, and it's seen so intensely, and it seems that the people that can have both. I look at people like Martin Luther King or A Gandhi or other people, those people

really seemed to live both those sides of it. They really seem to say, I do have a broader vision that the world is unified, and there's this deeper sense and I'm fiercely committed to the problems of the world, and I bring those two things together in some sort of blending that gives me the strength to do what I need to.

it together. So yeah, it's almost like I'm listening to you speak and I'm thinking that to be a nondualist and a fierce advocate for humanity and the earth at the same time. So it's not like the whole philosophy of nonduality is meaningless. It's actually hugely helpful when we're stepping up to mend the world to be resting in that oneness. But it needs to be I think a felt sense, like an experience of oneness, not an idea.

That's where I think it gets dangerous when we just buy into these concepts without experiencing them in our bones.

really need both. And then I was also thinking about also some of it comes down to, I think in classic Hindu texts, this idea of these different types of yoga, you know, raj yoga and Bakhti yoga and saying that, you know, for some people, just being able to appreciate the divine is this formless thing that works for some people and for some other people that doesn't work. We need to put it in the human form that can be loved. So I think some of it's maybe not

at least for me. Some of it's not getting too far over to one side or the other. The middle way, and then the other is sort of knowing tendencies what tends to be more effective for me.

kind of the biggest basket. You know that most people can relate to this heart centered desire for connection with God in a loving form or the supreme reality or whatever you might want to call it, and other people are more drawn like you said, like raja yoga, I call it the spiritual fireworks, you know, to altered states and resalted states of consciousness and so on, or even just thus and as to the physical postures, that's a

kind of temperament. Yogas are all paths to union. They're all yokes that connect us with the divine and work. And I love that about Hinduism, how generous it is that we're all different and it all counts, and all the other religions have their edisone for us, Hinduism is probably the most tolerant.

to certain phases of life, you know. I've just always thought that was really interesting because it sort of says like, well, you know, when you're in your thirties, as an example, taking care of your family and creating a living that's part of your spiritual life at that time, you know, and then as you get older, you have more time to devote to more of a spiritual life. And I think it frames it all under the context of its

all a way of being of service to God. But it doesn't make it sound like there's something wrong with being engaged in the world.

that before. So in that way did I learn? But if I if I interpret learning as going deeper into things, I would say it's been a very powerful program.

distinction is that important given our limited time. But there are people who move around through the different traditions a lot, and they take practices here and they take practices there, and oftentimes that's thought of as not being ideal, whether it's from a really extreme not ideal, like you're going to help well for that, or it's more of a

you need to go deeper in one area. The analogy that's often used is that going around and trying lots of different practices are traditions is like digging a lot of different wells and only getting ten feet deep in each of them. But you sort of took that analogy and spun it on its head. Tell me a little bit more about kind of how you took that analogy and your thoughts on all of this.

shallow wells. That that charge is not only not true, has been weaponized to harm people like me or people like many of you who are listening right now in this scampfire circle that were gathered around, who have an interspiritual temperament, that you are more like, I would almost say, naturally or innately suited to, like a bee, draw nectar from all the flowers of the human spirit, and that

it is almost a violence against your soul. To pick one tradition to the exclusion of any of the others almost feels like a violation of a covenant with God, like I'm going to exclude you, beloved from all these other places and only pay attention to you in this one. So that's how I feel, And I've heard beautiful analogies like interspirituality is more like cross training, where you're you know, you're using all the different parts of your body to

develop a robust life or what else. You're digging one well with many different tools that I love that one. Yeah, that's a good one. So all of that resonates much more with me. You know, from a very early age,

or young Team. I was exposed to many different spiritual traditions, particularly Hinduism, all the different schools of Buddhism from Zen to Tibetan to Vipassana, three different Sufi orders, Native American traditions from my home of Taos, New Mexico, where I still live, and Jewish mysticism, Christian mysticism, and they all felt equally true to me, and I still on a daily basis in my own practices engage many of them,

if not all of them, or certainly on a weekly basis. However, Eric, I am feeling right now that my lifelong interspiritual proclivities are rooted in white privilege, and that I have the luxury or the privilege of drawing from these different spiritual traditions that are rooted in other cultures, that come from other cultures without necessarily honoring the cultural home of each tradition. I think that I am but am I? So that's what I meant by this is a very living question

for me right now. It's very alive for me in light of kind of thank God, collective awakening around white privilege and unconscious white supremacy. Like Wow, I've been not only living an interspiritual life for decades, but teaching about it and telling people that this is your birthright to draw from all of these different spiritual traditions. And now I'm wondering, have I just in many ways been diminishing my own humanity by ignoring the I don't know the

sanctity of like, where does appreciation veer into appropriation? And I don't know if I'm doing that or not. And I don't know if I'm teaching that or not. But what I do know is I'm making the question public, and I'm doing that with you in this moment.

But again, everybody has to arrive on those things kind of on their own. This question for me has been alive over the last two years in a slightly different way because as a lifelong inner spiritual practitioner, just like as long as I can remember, I just it seemed completely self evident to me at eighteen, Like I think they're all talking about the same thing, and how would one of them be better than the other, Like the different traditions. Just that seems sort of self evident to

me at a very early age. So I've always sort of but the last two years, I've sort of honed in on zen and picked Zen, and listeners are like, all right, we've heard you say this one hundred times. But just because I felt like I'd sit down to meditate or I'd sit down to say, all right, I have time for spiritual practice, and I'd be like, I don't even know what I'm doing, not in like I don't know, I don't know how to do a whole lot of things, but I don't know what to do.

Which of them am I going to do? And is there any rhyme or reason in what I'm doing? And as somebody who can get very lost in intellect, I could find all my time trying to figure that question out instead of just practicing. So for me, it's been nice to sort of root myself somewhere for a while. But again, as we talked about that sort of moving

from one extreme to the other, finding in between. For me, that's just been a correction to a lifelong you know, And I don't think I'll ever not be inner spiritual in some sort of deep way, always interested reading, you know, but particularly with my job. Right every week I interview somebody different about something different. I was like, I need, at least in my own like this little bit of time I carve out for my spiritual practice.

So I do think even though a second ago, I was like, let's not talk too much about what inner spirituality is Let's have you do just a short reading on it, because I do think there are some nuances in there, and I do know that a lot of our listeners are very interested in this sort of thing.

way you rest in the intellectual purity of Buddhism. Contemplating the Daude Jing strengthens what the hopey elders have taught you, that the earth is alive, that she is your mother, that she is the love of your life. Institutionalized religious authorities discourage this kind of roaming. They will call you a lost soul. You lie down with the beloved in so many forms. The purests will call you a slut.

The more open minded may still accuse you of hoping to get to water by digging many shallow well as if you were a fool. You are no fool. You are in love, and you will use every available means to reach the living waters of love itself, which you can't help but notice bubbling up from the altar of every sacred space you have ever entered, including and maybe especially, the wild spaces of this earth. You embrace your beloved through your friendship with Jesus alone, or through Jesus plus Buddha.

You walk one path, or three or eleven different spiritual paths that all bring you home to the one love. Maybe you say no thank you to any kind of organized religion and instead cultivate a direct relationship with the beloved in the temple of your own heart. The singular true believers will advise you against all of this multiplicity, recommending that you pick a single tradition and go deep.

As if your polyamorous spiritual proclivities render you a diletante, they will mistakenly judge your way as superficial and undisciplined, rather than as the mind blowingly, heart openingly soul transfiguringly rigorous spiritual practice that it is you don't care that much what they think. Anyway, you are not about to miss any opportunity to encounter your beloved and bow down and rise up and take refuge.

and it isn't because meditation isn't right for them. In my free guide the top five reasons you can't seem to stick with a meditation practice and how to build one that lasts, I teach you why it can be a struggle to build a meditation practice that lasts, and the small fixes that can have a big impact when it comes to getting you where you want to be with meditating regularly. Go to oneufeed dot net and sign

up for this free guide right on our homepage. I would be curious how do you determine And this again might be more of an intellectual concept, but what practices make up your spiritual practice. How do you know if you are on the right path at any given moment, and just how you navigated that challenge over time, because it's the challenge is if you go to a particular path, they tell.

world's religions. I mean, if I think about it, all of those spiritual traditions that I was so gleefully engaging over all those years were mostly mass skill in paradigms. The texts were written by men for men. Even the activists that you just mentioned, Martin Luther, King and Gandhi, and the people we go to as the kind of prototypes of whatever spiritual or even political ideals we may hold are almost always men, and so it takes great effort to find not only women, but the face of

the Goddess, the feminine face. So, for instance, my morning practice for many years has been I do a couple of different things. One is I do a kind of breathing visualization chakra meditation that it's kind of like house cleaning every morning, you know, just just clearing out to

those energy centers in my body. Ramdas taught me this practice when I was I don't know, fifteen maybe, and he said, at the time, there're seven chakras, right, it's better to start with the heart chakra, which is the fourth, and go up, you know, to the throat, third eye, crown of the head, and don't mess with the lower chakras, the solar plexi, the second chakra, which is the seed of sexuality, the first chakra, which is the most basic primal chakra, like, those will just get in trouble, so

stick with the upper ones. And so I have reclaimed the lower chakras in my morning meditation. Same thing with Chappa. I use prayer beads, either Sufi or Islamic Tasbi with ninety nine beads for the ninety nine beautiful names of Allah of God, or I use one hundred and eight prayer beads in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions. So it's an introspiritual practice of mine, depending on how I'm feeling that day. But now for my mantra, I pick a

feminine mantra. I invoke a feminine energy, whether it's om Tare toutare toure Soha in the Tibetan tradition of invoking Tara the Bodhisatva of compassion or Sita or Radha in the Hindu tradition, or Sofia in the Christian tradition. And

I intensely focus my spiritual practices around the feminine. The last thing I'll say, so, I have a morning meditation and I root it in what I've always known, but I bathe it in the fragrance of the feminine, and it infuses me for the rest of the day in such a way that I can show up for the challenges of this world. Without getting to thrown. My contemplative practice is my root. The other practice is Shabbat. So every Friday night I light the Sabbath candles in the

Jewish tradition, which is my ancestral tradition. So it feels homey and cozy to me. I light the candles for invoking the Sabbath, which carries over until sunset on Saturday. But it's infused with the feminine because the Shahina, which is what you're calling on when you light the candles and welcome the Sabbath, is feminine. She's the indwelling, feminine

presence of the divine. And so I sit with the Sharhina, the feminine imminence of the majestic, transcendent Holy One comes into my body and into my family, and into my community and into my relationship with the earth for that twenty four hour period in a very tangible way. So I've reclaimed the feminine in my ancestral tradition. And so these are the few practices that are really integrated. Is a meditation practice and the observing of Shabbat, the keeping the Sabbath holy.

like each week. I need to talk with my partner and get her on board, make sure that we're both kind of aligned in it. But yours was sort of felt like another law gone, that fire that's building.

I do son salutation. So yeah, if it's embodied, it's breath, it's and it's stillness, it's all of the things I love, and I have a pooja table and altar that has all my friends, all the saints and masters, and statues and pictures of the beings that have inspired me for so long.

And so I did try for a while to disconnect from my creativity, but it was absolutely impossible. You know, I grew up in an artistic family and an artistic agnostic family. They didn't subscribe to any particular religious ideology, and in fact, we're very suspicious of religion. But creativity was sacred and is in my family. So I really have never been able to tease those strands apart. But what I guess I'm really coming to in my life is that there is a wildness to the creative act.

Whether we're making visual art or writing, or music or dance or any of the artistic expressions, there is a way that we have to surrender to the process and let it take over us. That feels sacred to me. That's holly surrender. That's allowing ourselves to become a conduit for the sacred in our lives and making making ourselves available to the Holy One to use us as she will. And so any chance to be able to do that for me is a cause for celebration and praise.

suddenly gave me like a trumpet. I don't think that I could just let it come through me, because all my attention would be like, what do I do? I don't even know what to do with this thing. Yeah, but with guitar there's a certain amount of work that I do that then enables me to sort of, when I'm lucky, take my hands off the wheel and see what happens.