Beloved: The Devotional Posture of Non-duality and Interspirituality

				Opening Minds, Opening Hearts Podcast Season 3 Episode 4 with Mirabai Starr
Episode Title - Beloved: The Devotional Posture of Non-duality and Interspirituality

Mark: Hello again, Colleen.
Colleen: Hello, Mark. It's good to be with you.
Mark: Here we are again for another episode.
Colleen: Yes. I know.
Mark: It's been a great season, so far. We're getting into it now.
Colleen: We are, and I'm really excited. I'll speak for myself, but I know I talked to you too, and I feel like, this is a practice in expanding consciousness, like actually giving ourselves the space and our listeners, hopefully, to experience other perspectives from other spiritual traditions.
And we've talked about a lot– Father Thomas certainly does. I'm still working my way through Reflections on the Unknowable and these later teachings that he left us. I would say they are like a transmission. I just read a section, set it down, everything isn't understood, but it's received and I trust that my heart is responding to it.
Mark: Yeah, and some of those works, you see this moving outward that Thomas is engaged in, probably always was, but it becomes clear in his later works, and that's what we're trying to engage here. I think the season is this interspiritual conversation and dialogue that he was certainly part of initiating.
Colleen: Yeah and I think he was always there. My sense is that he knew our journey and started us at the beginning and then shared with us in his later years what we were as a community ready to receive. But, he was there.
Mark: These terms that are coming up in some of our conversations too about non-duality and having this wide open understanding of The Divine, as this Ultimate Reality and I'm wrestling a little bit in my own mind. It's a long-time conversation in my head about my desire to know, as much as I possibly can, and then this other part about a deeper recognition and this invitation to unknowing or not having to know at all. So now I know for certain, I know absolutely that it's about unknowing.
Colleen: Yeah and the comfort with not knowing everything and being an eternal student of life and The Divine, and yeah, it's just such a more comforting place to be, the humility of not having all the answers.
Mark: Releases us to just be and we're going to be today in this conversation with a guest that I'm very excited–I know you are too–about having here today. So let me get to introducing Mirabai Starr, who's an award-winning author, internationally acclaimed speaker, and interspiritual teacher.
In 2020 she was honored on the Watkins list of the 100 most spiritually influential People living. Drawing from 20 years of teaching philosophy and world religions and a lifetime of practice, Mirabai shares her wisdom worldwide on contemplative living writing as a spiritual practice and the transformational power of grief and loss.
She has authored over a dozen books, including Wild Mercy, Caravan of No Despair, and renowned translations of sacred literature. She lives with her extended family in the mountains of Northern New Mexico. Her book has just been released. It's out in bookstores right now, Ordinary Mysticism: Your Life as Sacred Ground. We're delighted to welcome Mirabai Starr. Welcome, Mirabai.
Mirabai: Thanks, Mark. Thanks, Colleen.
Colleen: Welcome. Welcome. Mirabai, we're just so excited to have you. I just was at Lama Foundation for the first time in early June, and I was reminded there because I've read your story and knew, but didn't recall that you spent your childhood there. It was such an experience for me of really living interspirituality, just the whole ethos there, and spending time in the library there.
And that's where I wanted to start us in the conversation, just to learn more about your journey and where you came from, but in particular, in relation to the heart of our season for this podcast. Father Thomas spent years in interspiritual dialogue and with the retreats that he had, those who came together from different traditions, settled on a common language for God, for The Divine, and they used the term Ultimate Reality.
So we're starting off with all our guests exploring how they might describe Ultimate Reality or define that or, it may be better to say, what name do you give for this Ultimate Reality and how that name was formed for you by your childhood in your early spiritual journey.
Mirabai: Well, Father Thomas is the one who taught me the value of what my soul already knew, which is not knowing, unknowing. And so defining Ultimate Reality in any way feels difficult to me and also any effort I make to name it or define it puts it in a box, and therefore, it isn't what it is anymore. Although I have used his term Ultimate Reality in many of my books, because it really sings to me in some ways. But it's not as embodied as my current state of consciousness is craving.
And so in some ways, I'm going back to my youthful ways of relating to the Great Mystery as Beloved. In the Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions, often God, who is it is accepted to be utterly unknowable, is also Beloved, is also Intimate, is also Friend and Companion. That's often where I spontaneously go when I reach out for the connection with The Divine Presence – Beloved.
Mark: I like that. Doesn't make this, whatever we want to call it or try to call it Ultimate Reality or Beloved. That's more personal, which is nice because you can have it get to be so big that it's a sort of nebulous, for me, anyway, it's hard to connect then, to something that's just general.
Mirabai: An abstract, yes.
Mark: An abstract, Yeah.
Mirabai: And it doesn't reflect my belief system necessarily, to say that. In other words, I don't conceive of God as a person that I hang out with. I do sometimes in my imagination because it's helpful . Beloved doesn't reflect some existential idea I have about a guy named God, but it is a pathway to the Presence. Presence with a capital ‘P’.
Colleen: And that's something we're curious about too, because we're in our interspiritual explorations. There is this dynamic between the personal and the impersonal. And I'm not ashamed to say I don't know too much about the impersonal, although even Father Thomas is writing about this impersonal God, this impersonal reality. Could you enlighten us a bit more about your understanding of the personal and then the impersonal and how this expresses itself in other traditions?
Mirabai: Full disclosure, I grew up without any religious education at all, except insofar as my parents actively rejected organized religion. They weren't atheists, probably you could categorize them as agnostics, but even that isn't really right. That's too neutral. They had a deep connection to spirit, but they had a deeper suspicion of organized, institutionalized religion and the harm that religious institutions have caused in the world throughout history and right now.
That suspicion of religiosity is baked into me, and it's made it difficult, and yet irresistible for me to sign on to any of the religious institutions. Although I have this innate response to all of them, a response of the heart. So, I have been on an interspiritual path ever since I was a young teenager.
But, what I would say just to sum up my response to your question about personal versus impersonal God, is that, through years of silent meditation practice, contemplative prayer, Centering Prayer, I have come to rest in a non-dual space in relation to The Sacred, to The Divine. Where it cannot be confined by any personal ideas or characterizing.
And, I am Mirabai. So Mirabai in the 16th century Indian history was a Bhakti poet, a devotional poet in India. She sang and danced and wrote poetry for God in the form of Krishna, the God of love. And that is very alive for me. My devotional heart lives, coexists comfortably in the same space as my non-dual inclination.
So the personal God and the impersonal God are not mutually exclusive for me nor were they for Thomas, I'm sure, or for probably most of you. They happily co-mingle, in my heart and my consciousness. And in fact, David Frenette, who's one of the teachers of this tradition, was one of the first people who helped me realize that my inclination in both directions, devotional and non-dual, that they both were so alive for me was not a problem to be solved. That of course there was this kind of mutuality between my non-dual mystical inclinations to rest in the absolute and this fire of desire for union, a union of love with God as Beloved.
Colleen: What may be challenging for those of us who are accustomed to this personal God or God figure at all is this idea of devotion and prayer as relationship. So I'm curious, even from your childhood experience, it's likely you carried and held this sense of devotion. Was there an object of your devotion? Did that evolve over time? Or is this an objectless devotion? How do you express that or would you describe that?
Mirabai: Because my childhood was so non-religious, in fact, anti-religion, I think that my sense of God was a secret. It was like this hidden passion that grew in my heart. And how did I conceive of that God? Sometimes as goddess. Sometimes God, for me, had a feminine face which was nurturing, yes. Merciful and compassionate for sure. But also wild and almost dangerous. If you go through this gate, you will never be able to go back. I didn't know what the gate was, and I didn't know what was dangerous about it, but there was somehow inherent, again, for me there, it's holding these dualities or holding these paradoxes. There was a sense of safety and nurturing, in my secret relationship, my rendezvous, as John of the Cross called it, with the Beloved. And then there was also this sense of wildness and fire and a breaking open.
Even at a young age this feeling that having a spiritual life was not a matter of obeying rules and taking on somebody else's idea of reality, but it was a full-bodied surrender to something that would maybe annihilate me.
Colleen: It’s a sense of intimacy and danger and all of the adventure that is expressed in your work and it makes sense too, and the feminine as well. So how are you exploring this now in the context of your book and this relationship to this secret, somewhat dangerous intimacy within the context of mysticism.
Mirabai: The new book is called Ordinary Mysticism: Your Life as Sacred Ground. And the way I'm relating to this now is - this is what happens to me as a writer, and I think that writers will totally get this. When you start publishing, you share what's on your mind and heart at the time and it doesn't always stay. In fact, it rarely stays in one place. Because if we're on the path we are continuing to evolve and unfold, and our thoughts and opinions and beliefs change as we change. I'm 63 now.
And what's happening is that I am noticing almost like an allergic reaction to certain kinds of religious concepts and language. The sacred scriptures from all the world's religions that my studio where I'm sitting right now, is surrounded by bookshelves with all of the sacred texts, of all the traditions that I have loved so much, especially poetry. And I'm starting to pick them up and open them and go, nah. You need something more grounded, more embodied, more edgy, more messy.
And so Ordinary Mysticism, the new book, reflects this space I'm in where I am challenging some of the beautiful beliefs and practices that I have been engaged with all of these years and saying, if they don't actually affirm the beauty and transformational power in washing dishes and fighting with your boyfriend and schlepping your kids to school and dealing with a scary diagnosis, then I'm not interested anymore. I want to affirm. I want the holiness of the everyday. I want to be able to gaze through the lens of love and see the world as not an obstacle to my spiritual life, but as a portal to a greater spiritual awakening. Just to end that.
My response to that question, let's define mysticism for a moment. Just let's redefine it. I'm sure we all walk around with our definitions. But what I know it isn't is balancing your aura and having past life memories and, those kinds of ideas of mysticism have nothing to do with what I'm talking about, or probably what you are talking about. We're talking about a direct experience of The Divine, of The Sacred. Unmediated through any particular channels clergy people, teachers, books, belief systems, even practices and prayers. It's an experience of intimacy with The Sacred that is, direct and naked, really naked. And so, in that sense, I feel like everyone is a mystic, like it's our birthright. It's what we're here for is to have a direct experience of love. Let's call it love for a minute, Ultimate Reality.
And so that's why I think we all qualify and why there are many experiences in our lives, maybe even every day that could be, by this definition called mystical experiences, where we for a moment forget that we're separate. Where we have often fleeting and they are often fleeting, experiences of our interconnectedness with all that is, and that ‘all that is-ness’ feels like love.
Mark: Yeah, it sounds like you're saying, that's always there. It's immediately available to us, right? If we enter into our lives with that kind of awareness.
Mirabai: Yes, and that intention and attention.
Mark: Thomas Keating talked a lot about the human condition as it sounds like some of what you're saying in the sense that it's about engaging all of that, not fleeing from that and running to a temple or an ashram or a church or something, that it's out there. When they got together for the Snowmass Dialogues, they had these points of agreement and one of them was - “As long as the human condition is experienced as separate from Ultimate Reality, then it's subject to ignorance and illusion, weakness, and suffering.”
Which, sounds a lot like they were leaning on the four noble truths there, out of Buddhism. This idea of suffering, where it comes from, that we don't quite get that; it's two separate worlds. And so, they're suggesting, and that sounds like what you're saying too, that we've got to connect, we've got to be engaged because separation brings suffering. But I wanted to ask you about your work Mirabai that you've done for so long and beautifully around grief and loss, of separation also that happens when we lose someone.
You've talked about your own deep personal loss of your daughter, Jenny, sudden as well. In fact, you said, “my spiritual life began the day my daughter died.” So can you say more about that engagement and a kind of loss and grief and the suffering around that and how that leads to not necessarily separation but to connection or to a deeper spiritual life?
Mirabai: Yeah, thanks Mark for asking. It's one of those paradoxes, and of course the mystical life is characterized by paradox, and what I have discovered and what many people who I sit with report is that at the same time that we are shattered, stripped of breath, there is an opening to a sacred space that happens when we experience a profound loss or when we return to our hearts and allow ourselves to feel the pain of grief.
That there is a fragrance in a way of The Sacred that emanates from the embers of that fire of sorrow, of loss, of anguish even. That if we allow ourselves to be with it and not run away from it and not even spiritually bypass. And what I mean by that, of course, is that wonderful term of spiritual bypassing when you use spiritual beliefs and even spiritual practices to actually get away from the experience rather than be present with it. It's insidious. It's subtle, it's tricky, but it really works. I can think of a half a dozen spiritual tricks I could use right now to not feel my feelings and to transcend, and that's in fact what many of the religions teach us to do; transcend this world.
But when we are experiencing sorrow - and it doesn't just have to be the death of a loved one, there are so many ways that we experience profound grief, end of a relationship, especially when it wasn't our idea. A serious diagnosis or injury that takes away a certain kind of freedom that we may have enjoyed in our lives. The loss of community which often goes with the loss of a job or the loss of a relationship. An estrangement from our children, or our parents, or our siblings, or dear friends. So many places that cause that kind of deep grief, right?
But when we don't turn away from it. When we don't try to over spiritualize it. But we gently, tenderly, with great compassion for ourselves, breathe into it. Show up for it. There is a spaciousness that opens around the pain of the experience that includes more than the pain. There is something that arises in the awareness of separation that feels like connection.
So my daughter Jenny was 14 when she died in a car accident, completely unexpected. Nothing I could do to prepare for it. And so it just plunged me into that fire of grief and separation. And somehow there was some wisdom in me.
I had just finished translating John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul, by the way, when Jenny died. In fact, I had spent a day with Father Thomas in Snowmass. I drove from my home in Taos, New Mexico to Snowmass to spend an hour with him, because he told me that's all he could give me, and then he spent all day with me. It was so generous. And he gave me the complete transmission of his understanding of his really, arguably favorite text ever, Dark Night of the Soul by John of the Cross, or at least one of his top five, let's say.
His complete understanding of that text as I was writing my introduction, which I did after I finished writing the translation. That book came out a few months later, a year later, I don't remember the timeline exactly. And the day that the book came out is the day that Jenny was killed.
And there was something in me, and I think it's because of John of the Cross, and I think it's because of Thomas Keating, that gave me just enough of a little bell that rang in my heart to say don't turn away, Mirabai. Do not walk away from this experience. If you stay present right now, as an act of devotion of love for your child, that's the best thing to do. I mean you can't do anything. I knew I couldn't do anything. There was nothing that could be done. I couldn't meditate. I couldn't do contemplative prayer, Centering Prayer, mantra, nothing. All my practices were useless in that moment. But there was this invitation that had opened in my heart to stay with it for the sake of my child, for the love of her. That, here's what really was happening. I knew from John of the Cross, and from Thomas Keating, and from my own experience, that I didn't know what was going on, or what had happened, or what to do next. I knew nothing. That was not a problem to be solved. It was a reality to be with. And so that's what I did. I can't say it came from the books or words, but they didn't hurt.
Mark: Yeah, I'm glad to hear you say that, the practices just weren't doing it for you during that time. I had a very similar or not similar but, my own experience of a loss. My wife, after a long illness with cancer, almost nine years, seven and a half of those terminal. But when she passed I would go to sit and I couldn't do it. And I would go to church and it was like nothing there for me. Just to try to maintain something. I just started walking a little bit, which led me to taking a really long walk on a Camino for 500 miles. It was there where I started to feel this kind of what you're saying, this integration, like holding it. I guess that's one of the meanings of suffering, isn't it? To carry or to hold.
And it shifted it, but not in the way I wanted it to, which there was some secret part of me that wanted it to go away, not engage it but, you've talked about that too, about these different practices too, that, getting out there, poetry, art. That spoke to me. Moving, walking, putting my feet on the earth spoke to me. And it shifted, somehow, into something else. Instead of deep loss, it was deeper love.
Mirabai: Yes. Just have one quick response - when you talked about holding it, that is true. And what I have found is that when I show up to hold my own suffering in my arms, lo and behold, I am held. I feel held. And my mother-daughter roles with my daughter shifted and reversed and go back and forth. But, where I felt like Jenny when she died she became my ancestor, and that she often is holding me when I need support. When I feel despair. For instance despair for the suffering in the world, for war and genocide and all of the suffering in parts of the world that I'm far away from, but that I feel in my bones maybe by virtue of being a bereaved mother. I feel the losses of every mother ever in my own body and I feel like Jenny helps me to breathe some space into that brokenness and be able to emanate prayers of hope and healing. She's my ally in that.
Colleen: Yeah. What was coming up for me listening to you both was this line that Father Thomas has about being without consolation and how being without consolation, we're actually opening and exposing ourselves to a relationship with the God who is unmanifest and in some way. And that's honestly one of those terms too that I just let sit - unmanifest. But I felt that in that expression of the time of grief that might feel without consolation. But I actually hear from both of you, experiences within that experience of grief, touching the ground, being in nature, other human relationships that may have been openings for experiencing the Unmanifest - without name.
Mirabai: Definitely nature is a big one for me. I live right on the border of a national forest. So every day I get into the pinon juniper forest and climb mountains and ride them on bikes and just that it's essential I do. Every morning I do Centering Prayer, I do some yoga, and then I plunge into the mountains. When I'm not traveling. And when I am traveling, I still make sure that I walk. Sometimes it's even in my contracts. Like you have to take Mirabai on a walk in a park.
I have to say, Colleen, that I just published an essay called The Prophets are Inconsolable. And it's for Oneing Magazine the magazine of the Center for Action and Contemplation organization, and they have a quarterly magazine with a different theme, and the theme this fall is, The Prophets. And so I wrote an essay about the prophets being inconsolable.
Colleen: Yeah. I love that. That line from Father Thomas came from a chapter he called, Is There a Dark Night of the Self? And, I feel like we'd be remiss not to go back to your conversation with him about Dark Night of the Soul and what you gleaned from that and how that lives with you in your experiences and in your writing.
Mirabai: It's completely relevant to this conversation actually because, although I intuited this, he really articulated for me. That when John of the Cross talks about nada, N A D A, nada en español, nothing. It's like shunyata in Buddhism, that the nature of reality is empty. And that when John of the Cross talks about being nothing, “I am nothing, before God.” It's not about low self-esteem.
So, Thomas was really good about making that distinction with his brilliant psychological insight, right? I am nothing is the highest affirmation of love because it's saying that I am stripped of all my illusions of separation. Beloved, I am yours there is nothing separating us. I've been made naked spiritually so that I may have union with you. It just completely turned the whole idea on its head of Christian self-flagellation and sin and unworthiness and the meritocracy and all of that.
That it's the opposite of all that. That the mystical journey is a journey of love returning to love, and when we're able through contemplative prayer, through suffering - which is just going to happen and I don't have to engineer those opportunities - all of the ways that we show up for that spiritual nakedness, it readies us for that intimate, unitive encounter.
Mark: Keating has a poem that was published in the Secret Embrace, Out of Nothing. I won't read the whole thing but he just has this line, "To be nothing is to consent to being a simple creature. This is the place of encounter with I am that I am. When there is no more me, myself, or mine, only I am remains."
Mirabai: Beautiful.
Colleen: And maybe that's how I wanna talk about your book a bit and have you share with us more. Because you say that life is holy ground and that in itself is such a testament to this expansiveness and our ability to touch in ordinary experiences, the holiness and sanctity of all of life. But, what do you want our listeners to know about your book that you might not have already shared?
Especially maybe what's also coming up for me too is a sense that while there's such an invitation to this expansiveness, there's also a resistance to it and needing to name or needing to go to church, go to a temple, go to an ashram. Where do you think this arises from? And if anyone's struggling with letting go of the containers, what would you say to encourage them to open to this mystery?
Mirabai: So beautifully framed, Colleen. Okay, so I think it's important to say that while I am busy deconstructing religion in this book and in my life, that's not all I'm doing. I also have a profound reverence for the spiritual and religious traditions, even the institutions. I am someone who walks into a cathedral and my heart just breaks open. And in the presence of The Divine is very alive for me in many sacred spaces. This is the season of Teshuvah, of the High Holy Days in Judaism. The most profound spiritual time of year. I'm very connected to the spiritual traditions. It's just that I know that that's not the only way to encounter The Sacred.
In fact, it is a fact I think that many of us can attest to, that sometimes religious beliefs and practices and people can be an obstacle to an actual spiritual experience, paradoxically. So it's both. There's both this deep sense of connection to the traditions, to the wisdom ways. I give thanks for the keepers of the jewels who reside in each of these religious traditions and preserve what is best about them.
So I'm not telling people don't ever go to church again. What I am suggesting is that you don't only look to your religious institutions and organizations and communities and practices for your personal, intimate, experience of The Divine. But look to the dirty dishes and the grief and loss and the love making and the making of the salad. All of those things are when we show up with presence become great inflowing of The Sacred presence.
And as a lifelong interspiritual practitioner myself, I lived at Lama Foundation as a teenager, which is the first place where a Centering Prayer retreat ever happened. I had Father Theophane wash my feet. The first time I'd ever experienced foot washing in the Christian tradition and it was one of the most mystical experiences of my life in the Lama Dome. So many beautiful spiritual experiences happened there and my interspiritual education happened there because at Lama, it's often referred to as a meeting of the ways. All of the great teachers and teachings came and continue and it's still a vibrant community to the intentional community to this day, come through Lama. And so I learned from many of the great wisdom teachers of our times. And I incorporated many of those practices.
But it was Thomas Keating, after the Snowmass dialogues, when I spent some time at Snowmass with him with a few other interspiritual young people, who said, it's great to draw from all of these different wisdom wells but the danger is the lack of rigor - is that you just get lazy and you just take the parts you like and don't show up for hard work of grappling with some of the more difficult challenging aspects of the religions.
His voice is always in my head and heart as I continue to walk an interspiritual path. That the path of love is the narrow gate. It's the most demanding of all paths because it demands that we show up for things as they are, not as we necessarily want them to be. That we come with our beginner's mind, with an openness to not knowing, and to come back to love again and again and again.
Is this teaching, is this text, is this exchange contributing to greater love or closing the door? And so that discernment, that process of discernment takes discipline, it takes muscle, spiritual muscle. And it was Father Thomas who taught me to keep training my heart and mind.
Mark: You mentioned ways that you do that, Centering Prayer, walking, getting out and walking in the world and in nature, are there other practices? Cause that's an interesting question to me about, yeah we can get a little bit of this, a little bit of that but not, as you said, have the rigor inside of a practice. So are there other practices that you maybe talk about in the book, that you have found to be helpful in that way to continue in that, having a discipline and going deeper that the practice might assist?
Mirabai: Yeah, for me writing as a spiritual practice is my core practice and it's the one I teach in all my workshops and retreats. It's giving yourself topics or prompts and then writing without stopping. It's all in the book. The guidelines are all in the book and I didn't make any of this up. The inter-spiritual path, reclaiming your life as sacred ground, writing as a spiritual practice, grief and loss as a spiritual path. I'm in great community of beings who recognize and teach these things. I just need to say that.
But, writing as an embodied, very physical spiritual practice to explore a particular question through writing that then if we don't censor ourselves, and if we come back to our bodies and use sensory details in our writing, rather than abstract philosophical or theological concepts, the writing, even very specific storytelling becomes an opening to a greater sense of connection. To The Sacred, it's the most powerful practice I know, actually. And singing, I love to sing.
Colleen: We're kindred in that way. I love to sing and write too. Yeah. Gosh, this is so lovely beyond expectation actually. I've been on the edges of you and close to workshops where you've passed through with Stillpoint and things like that but ,gosh this just makes me want to get to know you better and engage more deeply in your work. And you're still offering courses, yes, through the Wild Heart Community? Anything to share about that?
Mirabai: We have an ongoing grief community called Holy Lament Where much of what we've talked about today is explored. And it's the most beautiful collection of people. And people come and go but we explore twelve, what I call, thresholds in the landscape of loss. These places in the journey of grief that can become openings to that sacred presence that I think our hearts long for. Not despite the difficult things that happen to us, but really through them. And so that's an invitation to people. It's all on my website. My name, mirabaistarr.com Holy Lament, and all of y'all are welcome there.
Colleen: Everyone, please make your way to her website and bookstores or online. You can find Mirabai's latest book, Ordinary Mysticism: Your Life as Sacred Ground in your bookstores and on websites. And we are going to let Mirabai go now but not without immense gratitude. I just felt at some point listening, I felt Father Thomas smiling that you would just spend some time sharing with the Contemplative Outreach community. We know they will really cherish your memories of him and thank you so much for joining us.
Mirabai: I loved him so much. You're welcome. I really love Thomas and I'm feeling that welling up of affection and reverence for him right now as you speak so thank you for that. And you both have been wonderful. And I hope all of you who've been listening have found something yummy in this exchange.
Colleen: Absolutely. Thank you.