Portraits In Faith: Mirabai Starr

https://portraitsinfaith.org/mirabai-...

The Wild Mercy of Mirabai Starr

“All my teachers were men. And most of them were white men. Meaning, they were the pinnacle of privilege in America and they were the carriers of these lineages that were distinctly boy-shaped. Their spiritual traditions organized established dominant patriarchal religious traditions that emphasized transcendence. This kind of vertical spirituality that is all about transcending the body and the Earth about blasting up and out of our relative experience of embodiment and seeing the Earth as an allusion to be awakened from. And I bought into it because life in the body was hard. I had had all these losses. The two significant losses were my brother and my boyfriend. I was being abused. I was being sexually abused. I hated sex, I hated my body, I hated him but I couldn’t admit it because he was my spiritual teacher. And so this transcendent spirituality was right up my alley. Also not only did this masculine patriarchal sensibility emphasize transcending the body and the Earth, but it was also about perfection and purification. And so that of course increased my self-hatred exponentially because this body of mine was not right. And so if I just could beat the shit out of it and beat it into submission then maybe I could get to God. And all of these practices of purification and perfection – this whole self improvement project is designed for failure. It’s designed to disparage who we are and what we have. And so it’s taken me decades to recover from that kind of conditioning. That somehow I was impure and imperfect and if I just worked hard enough I could get right with God. And to actually reclaim and embrace my body as holy ground and this Earth as sacred. And to see that it’s not only about me. It’s about all of us and it’s about the Earth herself. And this predicament of the climate catastrophe. And the way that women and girls have been disparaged and buried and women’s wisdom has been basically erased from the religious canon across the landscape of the spiritual traditions, is intimately entwined with this disparagement of the body in this emphasis on transcendence and purification of perfection. And that the Earth herself, our beloved mother, our lover, the Earth herself has been the most tragic victim of that way of seeing and being.

[The feminine] is about recognizing our interdependence rather than our individual heroic personality traits or sets of of skills. So the feminine is about recognizing the way in which everything is interconnected. And we are all interconnected and that we all have something to bring to the table and that nobody is more special than anybody else. And so emphasizing those qualities of interconnectedness and relationship and mutual affirmation is a task that we all have and that we’re all called in some prophetic, powerful way to embody right now. That there is wisdom in feelings and emotions, in relationships, in the body itself. That the masculine paradigm has denied for millennia. And that embodied relational feeling-centered wisdom is what’s needed to save us from the brink of extinction. And therefore yes men women people of all genders can emphasize and center those values in everything that we do. And I’m really moved by the ways in which many men, privileged white men are voluntarily abdicating their own power in order to emphasize these feminine realities and hold them up and lift them up and support them. And are stepping back and allowing these feminine voices to be centered and to be prominent. And that takes a lot of courage and a lot of humility. It’s interesting, I’ve been interviewed a lot about this and many podcasts – I’ve done a lot of podcasts and I would say 90% of them are white men’s podcasts. And they are all hungry for this feminine wisdom. And so willing to step back and allow that to emerge. And every once in a while I actually have been interviewed by women who are just recapitulating the patriarchy and are being just as as bossy and controlling and ego-centered as the men that they purport to be replacing. So it’s not just about women doing what the dudes have done. It’s about all of us reclaiming our interconnectedness and the power of loving kindness. And not just those soft kind of traditionally feminine qualities of compassion and loving-kindness and mercy and unconditional forgiveness and all of those things that definitely belong to the feminine. But also the ferocity, the wildness, the overflowing creativity that can look like chaos. And the rule-breaking, the subversive elements of the feminine that disrupt those structures that are so entrenched and so rule-bound and legislative. The feminine turns it all upside down. Breaks it all open. It’s messy. It’s not pretty always. That aspect of the feminine also is is what is needed right now.”