Your Life Is Holy Ground
UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: The following transcript may contain typographical errors or other mistakes due to inconsistencies in audio quality, background noise, or other factors. We cannot guarantee its precision or completeness. We encourage you to use this as a supplement to your own notes and recollection of the session.
Tami Simon: Hello friends. My name is Tami Simon and I’m the founder of Sounds True. And I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge. I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform. It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original premium transformational docuseries, community events, classes to start your day and relax in the evening, special weekly live shows including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an after-show community question-and-answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us, explore, come have fun with us and connect with others. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com.
I also want to take a moment and introduce you to the Sounds True Foundation, our nonprofit that creates equitable access to transformational tools and teachings. You can learn more at soundstruefoundation.org. And in advance, thank you for your support.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Mirabai Starr. Let me tell you a little bit about Mirabai. She’s an award-winning author and a critically acclaimed translator of the mystics, including translating works by St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila and Julian of Norwich, and more. Mirabai is a leading voice in the interspiritual movement using fresh, lyrical language to make timeless wisdom relevant and accessible. With Sounds True, Mirabai Starr is the author of the book Wild Mercy. It’s a beautiful book about living the fierce and tender wisdom of the women mystics. She’s also created an audio series with Sounds True called Taking Refuge in the Wild Heart. And she’s written a book about the tragic death of her 14-year-old daughter, Jenny. It’s a powerful memoir of loss and transformation and openhearted seeing called Caravan of No Despair. And we’re here talking about a new book by Mirabai Starr. It’s called Ordinary Mysticism: Your Life as Sacred Ground. Mirabai, welcome.
Mirabai Starr: Thank you, Tami. It’s so good to be with you. You that book Wild Mercy kind of by accident in a conversation in your office when we were talking about the primary qualities.
TS: That’s interesting. It reminds me of how much I like my own cooking sometimes because I was like, I love that title, but I feel that way sometimes after I make an omelet or something. I’m like, wow, that’s so good. But anyway, there you go. Mirabai here at the start, and this is something I don’t know about you, even though we’ve known each other for many years, how did you first start translating the works of great mystics? How did that begin for you?
MS: Well, I’ve always loved language. I always wish that the world would see me more as a writer than a spiritual teacher. Sometimes I feel like I’m in this beautiful, gilded cage where I get to share wisdom teachings from different traditions and I love that. I like, what does it say? Leading voice and inter spirituality or something that’s great. It’s fine women’s wisdom, but really I want to be seen as a writer, like a musician of words and artist of words. So when I was, I don’t know, I started writing when I was very young, but every time I would submit something in my young adulthood for publication, it wouldn’t quite fit in a nice tidy box and I was not getting published. And then I was teaching philosophy and World Religions at the University of New Mexico where I was a professor for many years and one of my colleagues said I was complaining about teaching dark night of the soul in my freshman humanities classes.
And I love this text by the 16th century mystic John of the Cross. And even though I’m not Christian, certainly not Catholic, it’s a text that has always resonated with me since I first encountered it when I was maybe 18 or 19, actually I think I was 20. That’s right. I was living in Spain studying Spanish literature, Spanish poetry, and that’s when I first encountered dark night of the soul. But my students were not sharing my passion for this beautiful text and this colleague of mine who was teaching creative writing said, look, why don’t you do it? There’s this trend right now. It’s when Coleman Barks had published his new translations of Rumi and Steven Mitchell and all of these other translators, mostly white men were bringing these mostly Eastern or Islamic texts to life again, but nobody was doing the Christian mystics and certainly not the Spanish mystics.
So my friend Sean said, why don’t you try it? It’ll combine your love of language. He knew how much I loved writing and the beauty of words with your fluency in Spanish, I’m fluent in Spanish with your passion for this particular teaching. He had just gotten an agent and for his own book, which happens to be gorgeous book called One Bird, One Stone about the American Zen movement. And he said, I’ll show my agent, see what he thinks. And I don’t know, it just all fell into place immediately. It was like, oh yes, this is missing out there. None of my Buddhist, Sufi, Jewish, Hindu-esque friends knew about the Spanish mystics. And it was time.
TS: Indeed your sacred destiny. In Ordinary Mysticism, you write about something that you call mystical transmission and how we can, if we’re open, receive a transmission when we’re reading a book. That was extraordinarily meaningful to me to read about you writing about mystical transmission. I was like, first of all, I think I’m receiving a quote mystical transmission from different sections of Ordinary Mysticism as I’m reading the book and you’re pointing different things out, falling into the experience and knowing it inside of myself. And I also thought about all of the spiritual books I’ve read since I was a teenager and how they have been my doorway into mystical states and I wonder if you can speak more about that and what it means to actually be open and receptive so we can receive these mystical transmissions when we’re reading spiritual books.
MS: Yeah, well, you’ll be happy to know Tami, I’ve gotten literally hundreds of letters from people who read Wild Mercy who have told me that they’re having this odd experience of feeling like they’re receiving a transmission when they’re reading. They’re not just reading it, something’s happening, what’s happening to Mirabai nearby, and I love that. So I guess I would encourage all of you who are listening right now to just take a moment to get quiet inside and think about one book that did that for you probably in your youth. I mean I might pick, and many of you might pick the same one, autobiography of Yogi Yoga, yoga Nunez coming of age story. What was it for you? Maybe it was a novel, maybe it was a collection of poetry or maybe it was the Bible, some book that knocked on the door of the heart and was in transformed into not just a collection of words, however beautiful and well designed on the page, but something happened that changed everything and that you refer to now years later.
It’s a point of reference. It’s a boulder in the stream that you can perch on that you remember what it felt like to take refuge in those words. So that’s what I’m talking about and that’s why I’m thrilled to hear you say, Tami, that you felt that points in this book, Ordinary Mysticism, that what I was talking about came alive for you and you were able to walk through. It’s like it’s a knocking on the door, the door opens and you walk through and it doesn’t have to be just sacred text solo. For many of us that was our first doorway in.
TS: I think of you, Mirabai, as a writer. And so you said that’s the way you want, I think of you as a writer. And so I’m curious as a writer, what is your internal process? I mean now you’ve turned yourself to communicating this mystical realization. We’re going to talk about what that is through the holy ground of your very own life. And I’m curious as a writer, what kind of state of being do you feel it helps you to be in so that you can be, now you’re on the transmitting side of putting these words out, not only receiving them historically from the great mystics and entering some state of receptivity, but what’s the receptivity of a writer?
MS: Yeah, well, true confessions, I’m working on something. I’m spending the winter in Mexico. My parents have a small house on a tropical laguna in the jungle in Yucatan, and my husband gang and I have been coming the last three winters to be with my mom since my stepfather died and she was alone and accompanying here to her home in the jungle and it’s a great place for writing. So I’m all about ritual. I love to create rituals and to invoke new experiences in a ritualistic way. So every morning when I’m home in Taos, I do yoga and meditation. When I’m here in the Yucatan, I still do yoga and meditation, but then I go out on the water in a kayak in the misty morning and in the quiet splashing of the oars in the water and the birds coming alive. And this sets me up for an encounter with the beloved, which is the way I see the muse, the beloved.
And then I go to my computer, I light a candle, I always light a candle. I started this ritual when I was translating the mystics and I felt like I was entering a temple and it was appropriate to light a candle in honor of them, but now I just light the candle and just ask for it to come. And as a writer, so quiet. So I guess I need quiet and I need nature and I need those two roots to hold me before I dare to open the page on the computer. And then I have to be willing to not know, not know what’s going to happen, not know if I’m going to be up to it, up to the task, if it’s going to be any good, if it’s going to be coherent, if I’m going to land that feeling of landing, whatever your art form is. So there has to be a willingness to not freak out if it doesn’t come pouring through in response to my beckoning. This muse is not always obedient, but I do find that when I sweep out the chamber, usually she come eventually and we work together. It feels very collaborative.
TS: Tell me more. You’re describing she comes the muse, the beloved. How do you understand that?
MS: Well, I understand it as an artifact of my sacred imagination. My friend and lifelong teacher, Ram Dass is famous for when people would cynically or at least skeptically challenge him about conversations he would have with his guru Neem Karoli Baba, who had been dead for years. What’s happening? You are having conversations with a dead guy in your mind? Yes. Does he talk back to you? Yes. Don’t you think that’s your imagination? Yes. Yes, Ram Dass said, and that just gave me such permission and God is a figment of my imagination. I don’t always use God language. I sometimes use God language. More and more I’ve switched to feminine pronouns because just to piss off the patriarchy and partly also because that’s what makes my heart sing, but I know that I am just building a set or I am putting clothes close, draping something over the absolute so that I can see something and relate to it.
But I don’t necessarily believe with rational mind that there is a muse who comes and talks to me when I’m writing or that there is a God in feminine form that is pulling the puppet strings of my life. Do I call on her when I don’t know what to do next, not just in writing, but in life if I have an intractable dilemma, a quandary, a problem, a heartbreak that I’m grappling with and I don’t know what to do, eventually it usually occurs to me, give it to her, hand it over to her, and it is, it’s she and I know that she will take it and transmute it and make sense of it and give it back to me.
TS: Mirabai, I’m digging in a bit here to this whole notion of mystical writing, because I think there’s a large portion I’ve come to know of people who listen to Insights at the Edge and who are part of the Sounds True community in a broad way who have some kind of, I’m going to keep going with this mystical language, mystical book inside of them about their own life and they’re not quite sure how to access it and bring it to the page with fidelity. And I know you’re teaching writing now and that you also made a personal journey to find your own relationship with this writing voice, first with the mystics, but then using the sacred ground of your life, Ordinary Mysticism, the sacred ground of your life to be the content of your writing. And I wonder what other tips you have because even this first one, you’ve given us the ritual of lighting a candle, but then not knowing what’s going to come out. I think that’s probably very helpful for people.
MS: Well, my first writing teacher was Natalie Goldberg, and in fact, I was 12 years old little hippie school in Taos. Natalie’s first job out of graduate school in English was teaching this little group of hippie kids in Taos, and she developed what is now called writing practice, what she now calls writing practice with us, these young kids. And so from an early age, I was given the teaching that all you have to do is let it come and it will come. So she’d give us topics, you might call them prompts, and she’d always have a list of prompts that she had put together for us. Sometimes with visuals, sometimes with something to eat, there was always some other sense involved with the prompt. And then she would just say, go, just write without stopping. Don’t think, don’t about it, don’t analyze it. It was like all the rules.
The rest of you probably were told to, I mean, she was breaking all the rules that the rest of us were, rest of you were indoctrinated with. I had an alternative education. Maybe some of you did too. And so I’ve always been the kind of writer that gives myself permission to go where my own wild mind leads me. So I do realize that that is an advantage, but this method nevertheless, is really reliable. So I keep a list of topics whether I’m working on a book or I have an idea for an essay or I just need to write through something that I’m working out in my everyday life. So I have a list on my phone of prompts and I just pull one out and I time myself and I go. And then usually if I’m working on a longer form, like a memoir, these prompts will all be memories, memories, scenes that I want to write about. I will see a thread begin to emerge, some kind of thread of light that illuminates the rest of it, and then I start to see how to weave it together. But the most important thing is to give myself permission first to just write whatever comes out. Now, the difference I would say between the way I do this and maybe the way Natalie does or Julia Cameron or some of the other teachers of writing is that I always have beauty as a beacon.
I am not that interested in people just throwing up on the page and then stepping over it and walking in away saying that felt good, got that out. It is like for me, language is art. It’s also sacred, it’s holy. And I approach it not with my analytical mind and my internal editor driving the chariot at all. In fact, my internal editor is not welcome on this ride, that critic, that sensor. But beauty, yes, because of my reverence for language. So that rides along with me and beckons and sparkles and helps me pick without thinking, without stopping and trying to pull the perfect word out of the air. That’s not what I’m talking about, but it helps me identify. It lights up the space, my commitment to beauty, whatever beauty and beauty is sometimes ugly, but that commitment to being available to the beautiful helps light up the space so I can find it on the fly.
TS: Now, we’ve used this word, I’ve used this word mystical several times now, and you mentioned nearby how you love words. I started by talking about mystical transmission and mystical seeing. And so how do you define it?
MS: In some ways, my definition is the classical scholarly definition, which is that a mystical experience is a direct experience of the sacred. It’s unmediated through prescribed prayers or ordained representatives, clergy people or belief systems. It’s an experience of the sacred that is direct and transformational, even if subtly. So a mystic then is someone who has a direct experience of the sacred or of the divine or of God, depending on your tradition and what language works for you. So what I am talking about here is not past life regression or sound healing or anything like that. Those are beautiful, wonderful things, but that’s not what I mean by mystical. I mean an experience of union. It’s a unitive experience with the loving truth of reality. I say loving because to me, ultimate reality, what you might call God or the divine or the sacred is characterized by love. And so it’s an direct experience of that vast loving reality.
TS: It’s interesting. As I was reflecting on reading Ordinary Mysticism, there were four gateways that I found that you return to again and again as gateways into the sacred. And what’s interesting is you’ve already touched on three of them, and then there’s a fourth we’ll go into, but awe, amazement and praise this beacon of beauty. That’s one our life as a place where there are these natural portals, if you will, to beauty, to awe, amazement and praise. And maybe you can say more about that before we move on.
MS: Well, I was speaking with my almost 90-year-old mother who’s more like 70 recently, and she read the book and she was thinking about, because she’s agnostic at most, she’s not a true believer in any religious ideology. And she said, I think what you’re talking about is when you have an encounter with something that is deeply moving and you don’t skip over it, you stay with it, you make yourself available for the fullness of that experience. So whether it’s watching an osprey land on the mangrove outside our window and look into your eyes, or if it’s about receiving a phone call that the lump in your friend’s breast is malignant. A whole range of moments can be these portals to deep presence. If we don’t run away, if we stay with it, and if we stay with it and cultivate a kind of curiosity and willingness to be transformed by the encounter, whatever it may be, willingness to be changed by it,
TS: You write about how awe actually takes us out of our default mode network, that there are research studies on this about how it’s a immediate shift out of our, I’m just going to think in a kind of trudge along kind of way into a different state. I thought that was really interesting that you were bringing in the neuroscience nearby, a little bit of neuroscience there.
MS: Yeah, I was fascinated when I found out that everybody was like me, that the way our brains are wired is that when we’re at rest, we’re not actively engaged in one pointed way with some task or just kind of in between things. Often our brains just go to bullshit chitchat inside and often of the nature of self-criticism and worry and anxiety and judgment, and that’s the default mode network. But when we have an experience of awe that shuts down and a whole other much vast consciousness opens up and we become very, very present.
TS: Is there anything that you consciously can do to shift to awe that you yourself do like, oh, here’s my go-to move to invoke awe.
MS: In many ways in this book, I’m deconstructing religion and religiosity and prescribed practices, and I don’t know the bossy patriarchal way of becoming enlightened ways, many ways, but I have a few favorites and one of them is contemplative practice silence sitting happens to be the one that has worked for the longest, most consistently and most reliably for me is sitting quietly the for 20 minutes in the morning. And what I find is that when I am true to that practice, it carries into the field of my life, the holy ground of my everyday world, so that there is more of an attunement to the presence of the awesome when it presents itself, which is many times a day. I’m not saying I go into mystical awe many times a day, several times a day, but more and more over the years because of this tuning of the instruments.
So it’s not about, I guess what I’m trying to say is not about my time on the cushion, it’s about how that builds my capacity for encountering awe inspiring moments. I mean, Abraham Joshua Heschel, one of my heroes, the great 20th century Jewish philosopher, peace activist mystic, said, to be mystical means to be amazed, to wake up every day in awe. And I think I aspire to it, and I think it happens. I mean, lots of really boring things happen too. I guess that’s one of the things, Tami, that I am really working with in this book is trying to help people see that it’s not only about those moments of awe, that to be a mystic can be really grungy and unsexy and very, very messy and unfinished and not exciting. But if our hearts are present, heart, mind, present to the possibility that the holy is going to is already dwelling inside of those ordinary quotidian, sometimes grim moments too, then they are transformed into an encounter, into a love encounter.
TS: Well, when you mentioned beauty as a beacon, when you’re writing, if beauty as a beacon, no matter what you’re experiencing with these things that you’re calling boring or bland or gritty or mundane, then that itself is the transformational view of what bringing that view of beauty. I mean, I think you’re communicating, I think you’re communicating that because it sounds to me you said this beacon of beauty in your writing even when things are ugly. So it was like, oh, okay,
MS: Yeah, it’s the same beacon. That’s brilliant, Tami. I love that.
TS: Okay, so as I said, reading Ordinary Mysticism, these different gateways, another had to do. And you mentioned that you love rituals, having shrines in your home and the power of invoking, and I wanted to hear more about that. I think sometimes people, especially who identify in this broadly defined category of spiritual but not religious are like, what am I invoking? What am I doing? I clearly need help. I need to ask for help. I’m setting up a shrine. To what to whom? How do you see that?
MS: Yeah, see, again, I have the benefit of a counter-cultural upbringing. So I was raised in adjacent to Lama Foundation where Ram Dass created Be Here Now with the lama residents. And so in the seventies, I lived in a communal situation in Taos where all kinds of spiritual paths and teachers and teachings came through, and I was exposed to many different sacred languages and deities and texts. So it’s easy for me to pick up a set of prayer beads, they’re right over there on the other side of my plant. And that morning find a mantra that resonates with the space I’m in or with something I’m working with and want to invoke for that day. So whether it’s O Shiva because I need to light some fires and blaze through some stuck place, or if it’s ture soha in the Tibetan tradition, invoking the diety of compassion, of mercy in feminine form, or simply shalom or Shanti or let there be peace.
Or if I want to use an English phrase and then I do that around the 108 prayer beads, or if I use a tasbih in the Sufi tradition, the 99 beads whoah whoah. And that roots me in this kind of invocational space where I feel like I’m praising, but I’m also showing up and calming down and rooting down. So what do you do if you either are rejecting the religion of your childhood, say you come from an evangelical Christian background, a lot of people drawn to my work who have that background and you are leaving it behind maybe in a cloud of dust, and yet there are things from the religion of your childhood that still are alive in you that still stir your heart, whether it’s Christmas or Easter or the Jesus prayer or well, we could come up with examples that for you as a former Christian, maybe recovering Catholic might be whatever it might be, still work.
So come back to them in your rituals, whether it’s in your contemplative practice or in lighting a candle and asking support for something you’re going through to not throw the baby out with the bath water. I guess I’m saying to use an old tired cliche, the baby of spirit, the beautiful baby with the bath, the dirty old bath water of organized religion. So I used to call people who are clergy, people who wear attire of their religion. You can look at them and you know what they represent. I used to call those people when they’re true, when they’re real, when they’re connected, the keepers of the jewels, and even though the rest of us are throwing it all out, we need these people to rescue and safeguard the treasures that lie at the heart, the mystical heart really of all the world’s great religions. But I’ve started calling them not keepers of the jewels but the seed keepers because I think that we need to propagate the very best of these seeds of wisdom, of loving kindness that we find at the heart of the world’s religion garden, and so the rest of us can eat from that harvest.
That was a pretty free-ranging response to your–
TS: That’s fine. I think it brings up for me a question that I’m sure you get asked a lot and I think is important to the Sounds True audience, which is when you take a little bit from here and a little bit from there and then a little mix in a little Taoist inner alchemy with some past life regression and put it all into your prayer beads, you can feel free and like you’re not imprisoned by a religious path that keeps you stuck in some narrow way. And you’ve also voiced here this not following the patriarchal, bossy paths that many of us were raised in, but I think it can also leave, and I found this a lot and I feel a certain responsibility for it. That Sounds True, actually can often leave people feeling confused. This contradicts that. And I don’t know how to put this all together and I don’t know if I’m progressing exactly because I’m mixing all these different things. So I wonder what your view is of that.
MS: I love that you are taking responsibility as a leader of a major interspiritual space, Tami, that’s so beautiful and moving to me, and I bow to that and as someone with a voice in the interspiritual movement, it’s important for me too, especially in light of the dangers of cultural appropriation and how so many of us who are white bodied people help ourselves to the spiritual treasures of so many other cultures without even thinking about it just because we feel entitled. So there’s that aspect. That’s not the one you were bringing up. You were bringing up the kind of confusing part. And also I think the danger of superficiality that can come with trying to find our way spiritually when we’re not rooted in a tradition. So all of that is real and necessary to keep in mind one of my teachers and friends, because all my teachers were my friends, was Thomas Keating, and Thomas really was a mentor to many of us who were doing this interspiritual work in the last 20 years or so.
He died about 10 years ago, but up until that point, and still maybe, and he said, you guys, this is great, but where’s the rigor? This is dangerous that you could just go for the easy answers and stay right on the surface. Where’s the discipline? Where’s the substance? And so that is a real danger in the interspiritual path, but also in the work that I’m speaking of, reclaiming your ordinary life as the domain of the sacred, the place where you encounter the divine so great. But then like you say, then how do I know I’m progressing? Well, partly the very notion of progress is an artifact of the patriarchy that we’re dismantling here and that I at least am trying to push up against that this idea of enlightenment as some kind of end goal is probably not only not helpful, but not possible, not true that, I mean so many people have said it, the journey itself is sacred, is holy is the thing.
It’s the thing. So it’s this combination, I guess is my response, Tami, of cultivating the discipline of contemplative practice and other practices and being open to not having our ideas and beliefs fed to us, but using critical thinking for one. That’s something that I think a lot of people on a spiritual path think of as a negative. I’m using my rational mind and I’m not supposed to stay in my heart and my body. Yes, stay in your body and come home to your heart again and again and again. And you have this faculty of common sense that is there for a reason and will guide you if you allow yourself to. Also, maybe it’s my Jewish heritage, even though I grew up in a non-religious household, but you too, Tami, have that heritage where we question everything including and sometimes especially our own presuppositions and beliefs. So being willing to, as Bernie Glassman said, unknowing wasn’t that the first pillar. Zen Peacemakers movement, being willing to not know is a huge boon on the path.
TS: Now let me, you mentioned cultural appropriation in relationship to interspirituality and you’re like, that wasn’t the question you asked Tami, and then you moved over it, but I need to know how you view that. It comes up a lot, and yet I think that when it comes to something like the human energy body and the discovery of this stretch releases, it’s in us, it’s innate in us. You can’t keep people from discovering the natural practices that free our soul. It’s just who we are. It’s in us. Who owns that? Right?
MS: So cultural is the key part of the cultural appropriation. Look at the cultures from which these practices and teachings and methods and texts arise. Okay, so here in front of me, she has a broken arm, but it’s okay. She has many arms so she could afford it. This is Saraswati. And Saraswati in India is one of the many forms of the goddess, and she is the goddess of creativity, music, language, writing, wisdom, knowledge. And so she’s playing an instrument and she has a book and many other activities, but she’s definitely the patron saint of writing. And so I have her next to me and I also have at home in Taos, a storyteller from the Dine Navajo tradition. It’s the grandmother with the little babies stuck all over her body because telling them stories. And so as a writer, I’m drawing on these cultural icons to guide me, to inspire me to be holders, vessels of the substance that I need to drink from in order to do what I’m doing.
What I try to do is, to me, cultural appropriation means that you, you’re just helping yourself to these treasures and then using them for your own aggrandizement or get rich quick scheme. It’s about using them for your benefit only and not honoring the cultures from which they arise. So I have a friend who teaches a yin yoga class once a month on the full moon. It might be the New Moon, and she receives money for it. People make a donation. It’s an online thing. It’s beautiful life-giving session for people and she takes a percentage of the income to give back to what she calls Mother India because that’s the culture where this yin yoga practice came from. And that’s a beautiful way to not superficially avoid cultural appropriation, but to just recognize that these things come from somewhere. And if you weren’t born into a culture that those practices or methods or beliefs or texts or whatever were part of, then that’s fine. You’re right, Tami, I agree with you a million percent our longing for this wisdom, these transformational encounters and practices belongs to us. It’s universal and we just need to be conscious and caring and reverent and honoring.
TS: There’s a lot I want to talk to you about Mirabai, so I’m going to keep us moving here to a different gateway that you write about beautifully in Ordinary Mysticism. And in some ways it’s the part of your writing that I think has the greatest emotional impact on me. This is in the feeling section of Ordinary Mysticism where you write about grief and how it is a gateway to sacred experience. And I want to read just one paragraph and then I’m going to ask you to actually read a section from the book. You write, grief unravels and rethreads us that doesn’t make our heart breaks good news, but the way of the mystic invites you to slow down and allow for the possibility that from the depths of a pain greater than you can bear, a greater love than what you could have dreamed of is calling your name very beautiful.
MS: I love having you read it to me, to us. I love hearing it.
TS: A greater love than you could have dreamed of is calling your name. And then the section I would love for you to read if you would. It’s on page 183.
MS: I’d love to. Loss and longing. Once we’ve exhausted ourselves in the fruitless effort to keep grief at bay, we collapse into the arms of the darkness and let it have its way with us. We have nothing left to lose. We yield to reality. Taking a long sober look at what is and conceding what isn’t. We have lost what we’ve lost and there’s no going back to the way things were before. The great shattering. There is nowhere to turn except toward the unknown. We begin to befriend the mystery, the whiff of this liminal space, this threshold zone, this ambiguous state of being is subtly intoxicating, even if it is pervaded by sadness, tinged with rage, laced with fear. It carries something that reminds our souls of their separation from their divine source, and it sparks within us a desire to return as we allow that ember to intensify, it catches flame and we find ourselves filled with an ineffable yearning missing.
A loved one who has died or a partner who has left begins to resemble longing for the divine. Even if we do not subscribe to a belief system that postulates the existence of a personified being called God, there is no denying the connection between loss and longing between grief and sacred desire. We may no longer know what we even want, but we begin wanting it with every fiber of our broken open heart. This is what it is to walk as a mystic in this world. It’s about continuously tuning the instrument of your soul so that it can pick up divine impulses and transmit them. It’s about keeping your heart open in hell. As my friend Stephen Levine used to say, it’s about allowing our sorrow to ruin the walls that separate us from the rest of creation. We climb over the rubble and step into the landscape of belonging.
TS: You write, Mirabai, about letting the darkness have its way with us. Tell me about that, letting the darkness have its way.
MS: Yeah, I come back to the feminine. It’s like the darkness has a bad rap, but the darkness of the womb or the darkness of the dark mother in some of the traditions of India or mother earth and the darkness beneath what we can see beneath the ground, Valarie Kaur, the great contemporary Sikh activist, is the one who postulates. That question of so many people are quoting, especially right now is maybe this isn’t the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb, that we’re in a transitional space that is going to break back into new life and new growth. But when I speak about embracing the darkness or letting the darkness have its way with us, I am also speaking from experience. And the experience is one of fighting the darkness because I was taught growing up in the world that I’ve talked about in this conversation, there was a lot of emphasis on the light going to the light, ascending enlightenment, waking up luminosity and a rejection of darkness.
But when I have been brought to my knees by life circumstances and simply didn’t have the energy to rise up out of the pit of darkness that circumstances had thrown me into, I began to explore what it was to just be in that darkness. And I realized that what I was doing was letting myself down into the arms of darkness, and it became a mothering darkness that held me. The black Madonna has become a beautiful cherished image for me. Another one that I’m careful about cultural appropriation. I’m not black but allowing her to hold me. So the experience I’m referring to, of course, is the one you mentioned at the beginning of the conversation that is the death of my daughter. Jenny was car accident. No, no warning. And so I was plunged into a ravaging darkness. But when I realized there was nowhere to turn, everywhere I looked for acres inside of myself, it was just dark. I let myself down and let it do whatever it needed to do with me. There was nothing left to lose. And that changed everything. That became a mystical experience, which doesn’t make it pretty, it wasn’t, but it became an encounter of love.
TS: Tell me about that part, and I’m especially thinking of the person who’s listening, who’s in a type of darkness who’s not seeing or sensing the quote sacred part or the mystical part. It’s just dark.
MS: Yeah. So John of the Cross, who we talked about in the beginning, that my first book was a translation of Dark Night of the Soul by John of the Cross. And when John talks about darkness, the darkness of the soul, he’s talking about an incredibly sacred experience When we’re stripped of all of our sensory attachments to spiritual feelings, those kind of spiritual bliss moments that so many of us get fed, he talks about that being like a sweets that we eat along the way and in a dark night of the soul, they’re taken away and we have a direct experience. We’re stripped naked and all of our concepts of God, of the divine, of spiritual life, of prayer, all of that is also stripped and taken away. When we’re naked, when we become spiritually naked, we’re able to have this direct experience, a mystical experience.
But John says that one of the paradoxical hallmarks of a dark night of the soul experience, which is the ultimate mystical experience in many ways, is that we can’t know we’re having it while we’re having it. We just think it sucks. It’s just terrible. Someone I love has died or left me, or I’ve just received a terrible diagnosis, or there are so many forms of loss or the suffering of the world is bringing me to my knees. I don’t see anything. I don’t see any light here. It’s not a matter of saying, oh, good, God’s got me. I’m in her hands, and all will be well and all will be well, and every kind of thing shall be well. As Julian of Norwich said, it’s more about, okay, whatever. Who is it? Anne Lama or somebody? So it’s one of her mantras is whatever, it’s kind of whatever. It’s like I am here. I am plunged into this unbearable anguish. When Jenny died, I kind of jokingly, dark humor developed a new mantra. It’s just unbearable anguish. And so with our spiritual sense of humor tucked into our back pocket, we just sit in the dark and say, okay, this is where I am. I surrender. It’s about surrender, not because you’re so spiritually advanced and evolved that you have cultivated a stance of surrender. No, it’s because you’re all used up none of your tricks for getting into the light work
TS: And describing this journey. And here you’re talking about the descent part. For some people there’s a sense of then a rebirth that comes new life, a regeneration, greater love, but it doesn’t always happen all the time.
MS: Yeah.
TS: What do you think allows it to happen? Like, oh, greater love came through greater openness. I came out of it new and with a sense of greater feeling for other people that could happen. What enables that to happen?
MS: We cannot engineer it. This I know. I mean, we can’t make it happen. It’s a collaborative experience. I believe with the divine, we can surrender and also we can give up and also show up at the same time. They’re not mutually exclusive and we can’t rush it and we can’t spiritually bypass the messy parts and we can’t hoist ourselves up by our spiritual bootstraps. We can’t climb what John of the cross calls the ladder of love up and out of here. We have to do what Theresa Avila advocates and go in just move inward, step over the slimy serpents that will try to throw us off our path and just go into the darkness, enter without any hope for the outcome. And I will say that 99% of the people that I work with around grief and loss do come out of the chrysalis where the caterpillar completely and utterly dissolves and they emerge with wings, but it’s not some idealized version of transformation. It’s subtle, it’s awkward, and there are cycles we cycle back through again and again to these times of darkness. I’m sorry, but we do not as terrible maybe, but we get to taste the I do not know again and again.
TS: So these two actions, this surrendering, letting go, being in it and then unquote showing up, what do you mean by showing up? What does that mean? What does that look like?
MS: I know that there are people here who require pharmaceutical substances to survive. And so please understand when I say this that I’m not talking about you, but for instance, when Jenny died, one of her friend’s father is a psychiatrist, and the first thing he did when people were coming over to the house bringing casseroles was he brought drugs. And he said, here me by take this, it’ll make you feel better. And I knew enough to say no thank you. I couldn’t bear to be in my body and mind. I was so shattered, but I didn’t want to check out of it either. I felt like to make the choice to be present was in some ways an act of devotion to my daughter. I’m not going to go anywhere, honey. I’m going to stay right here. So Jenny was the holding place for maybe God in that moment. I’m not going anywhere, God, I’m going to, this is what I’m being given this darkness. I’m going to be present and try to be curious and compassionate for myself as I do so. I’m not going to turn away. That’s what I’m talking about. I’m not going to numb out. I’m not going to bypass by telling myself some kind of religious story about it. I’m going to actually be in it out of love, not out of proving anything,
TS: Out of love for life, love for yourself,
MS: All of the above, for life, for yourself, for the divine. If it’s an experience of grief because of someone’s death, for your love of them as an offering to them. I write about this in the book that you spoke about, that you published Caravan of No Despair. I write about it in detail, this kind of choice to show up and surrender at the same time. And I use John of the Cross as kind of the guiding light of the book. Dark Night of the Soul is my guiding light.
TS: There’s one more aspect of Ordinary Mysticism that I want to talk to you about Mirabai, and you briefly touch on it in the book, but I want to hear more, which is ordinary mystics as agents of change, as revolutionary vehicles for change in the world. And you write about how Teresa of Avila risked everything to reform the Carmelite order and how John of the Cross was persecuted for supporting his mentor, Theresa of Avila. And it seems to me, if there’s ever a time for our ordinary mysticism to express itself in our revolutionary energy and standing up against injustices of all kind, this time is now this time that we’re in. So I wonder how you see that as part of Ordinary Mysticism?
MS: That’s a very long, complex conversation. To distill it, the best I can in this moment, if the path of the mystic is a path of love, and that is what I believe it is, a path of radical love, then it requires radical loving. And by radical, I mean brave and fierce. I’m not speaking about a fluffy feel good love that if it starts to be uncomfortable, we turn away. I’m talking about the fire of love. If a mystical experience is an experience of union, a unitive experience with God, with the cosmos, with all other beings, with all beings, then there is only one of us. And we must act on behalf of the whole. The idea of a private self-improvement project called enlightenment is completely and utterly divorced from what I’m speaking of when I speak about the mystical path. Beloved community is the middle and most important chapter of the book about how, and Wild Mercy too, the book that we did together, Tami, is all rooted in community that the time of the loan seeker or profit is over and that we act behalf of the whole and do whatever we can, whatever is ours to do.
And we can’t always know what is ours to do, but that’s the invitation, is to tune our instrument, to be able to pick up what is our form of what Andrew Harvey calls sacred activism right now, and how do we do it out of love and not out of othering and judging and making people bad and wrong, but listening, cultivating humility.
TS: The final thing that I’d like to talk about, Mirabai, is a section where you write about Bodhi Zafa in disguise, and you tell the story of the woman who does your nails. And I loved this story because it made me become aware of the different people I interact with and how I don’t know who they are, the different people I interact with at the dry cleaners or the pharmacy and people regularly and weekly. And I thought, Bodhi Zafa is in disguise. I have to keep this story tucked in my heart. So let’s end on this note and tell us about Michelle.
MS: So I love having my nails done. I don’t have them now because I’m in the jungle, but I often do, and I always have. So I go to my local nail salon in Taos, and Michelle is this beautiful young Vietnamese woman, and for quite a while, I would say at least a year we didn’t speak because she’s very kind of taciturn. She doesn’t really interact much, she doesn’t make eye contact. But we started working out together at the gym. We go to weightlifting classes together. And so little by little I started engaging her. She would give me very short responses about her children or whatever. And then one day she just very casually mentioned that time that she lived in the refugee camp in Hong Kong. And so I asked a question as subtly as I could, not someone who you could tell was going to disclose much.
And she said something about escaping her village, no shoes on her feet freezing, getting on the boat and heading from Vietnam to Hong Kong. And then I would say it took about a year from that point to really get the full story of what she had been through. And what she had been through was incredibly harrowing as many Vietnamese people have experienced with taking those boats to safety. And then the refugee camps were harrowing, horrific places as refugee camps often are violent and dangerous and not enough food and unsafe. And then coming to America and starting a business and raising her children. And then one day she said something about Hanh. She’d been robbed, she’d been robbed, and they found the guy, and he was an unhoused man living in a parking lot behind the Albertson’s grocery store. And he took some cash. And when the police asked her about pressing charges, she refused.
And they said, why? And she said, he obviously needed it much more than we did. This is someone who had less than nothing in her early teens, but now she had a successful nail salon. And I said, Michelle, because she said many things like that along the way, and I noticed her compassion at heart. How did you get this away? And she said, Thich Nhat Hanh. I was like, Thich Nhat Hanh. Well, he’s Vietnamese Buddhist teacher, so I guess he must be part of her culture. And she said, no, I listened to him on YouTube, watch YouTube videos, and I like what he has to say. I just love that. I just love that. And she doesn’t look like what you might call a Bodhisattva, whatever our ideals are of people who have dedicated their lives to being of service till all sentient beings are awakened. But she is.
TS: What I love about the story is this notion of seeing the people in our lives through the eyes of love and how she, Michelle saw people through the eyes of love, even the person who stole from her.
MS: I love that too. And I really aspire to that.
TS: Mirabai Starr, author of the book Ordinary Mysticism: Your Life as Sacred Ground and a book, Wild Mercy: Living the Fierce and Tender Wisdom of the Women Mystics, and Caravan of No Despair and more. Mirabai, thank you so much. It’s always great to be with you. I haven’t seen you in a few years, and so this is a kind of homecoming for you and I, as well, to be together.
MS: Definitely. Thank you, Tami. I love being with you. And thank you all for listening.
TS: Go be ordinary mystics, friends. Go do it. See you with the eyes of love. Thanks everyone. And if you’d like to watch Insights at the Edge on video and participate in the after-show Q&A session with our guests, come join us on Sounds True One, a new membership community featuring award-winning original shows, live classes, community learning, guided meditations and more with the leading wisdom teachers of our time. Use promo code PODCAST to get your first month free. You can learn more at join.soundtrue.com. Sounds True: waking up the world.