S 3 E 2 Mirabai Starr & the Divine Feminine

 Today we'll talk about the work of Mirabai Starr, an Inter-spiritual teacher, writer, and translator of the mystics. Mirabai is a well-known teacher of the divine feminine. She has written several books and her translations of St. John of the Cross's poetry as well as St. Teresa of Avila and St. Julian of Norwich's work won her critical acclaim. She is well-versed in the way of all things holy and feminine and wishes to empower women with the simple truth: that we are loved and holy just as we are. 

St. Philip's Rochester YouTube Channel

Mirabai Starr's Website

For more information about me and my work, please visit www.brianneturczynski.com or www.lovingtheimperfect.com

Transcript

Welcome to Loving The Imperfect, A show for seekers of deeper contemplation. I'm Brianne Turczynski, a writer, a journalist, an educator who has listened to the stories of many people throughout the years, and I continue to read and broaden my understanding of the human condition through the stories of others. This season we introduce and discuss some modern-day prophets. People who have at least one thing in common, the prophetic voice.

The purpose of this season is to introduce listeners to some new artists and writers. We hope this selection will inspire you to read, write, and create, to be a force of love in the world. 
 
 Hello and welcome back to Loving The Imperfect.

Today we'll talk about the work of Mirabai Starr, an Inter-spiritual teacher, writer, and translator of the mystics. I wanted to introduce her to you because I think she was the person who introduced the idea of the divine feminine to me. The idea that there is a feminine holy force working in the world, and it is absolutely necessary for the continuation of balanced love and creation.

 So, growing up, Episcopalian in the eighties and nineties, we didn't hear much about, the divine feminine. Our concentration was on the Holy Trinity and mostly a male perspective on faith in the Christian tradition. We didn't pay much attention to or talk about Mary, except for around, advent. So thinking about and identifying with women in a holy Christian sense was very foreign to me.

It wasn't until I started to meet some of the female mystics of the Catholic tradition that my world started to open to this idea.

Mirabai Starr grew up Jewish, but her parents, from what I've read, weren't staunch Jewish practitioners. They were more open to Eastern traditions. And so, if you have ever read her autobiography, Caravan of No Despair. You can see her upbringing was a little unconventional. One of her teachers who I think had a great influence on her, happened to be Natalie Goldberg, who, is a well-known writer and the author of Writing Down the Bones, which I personally think is the best book to read if you are writing.

In an interview that is cloudy to me now, I remember, Mirabai had a problem of some sort. I forget what it was, but she was telling this to Natalie Goldberg, her teacher, and Goldberg said to her: all shall be well, and all shall be well, and every manner of things shall be well.

Which is a quote from St. Julian of Norwich in her book, The Showings and these words had a profound impact on her and gave her a feeling of comfort, much needed at whatever this time was in her life, that she was struggling. Little did Mirabai know at that time, that one day she would be a translator for Julian of Norwich's the showings, and having read many of her works, I will say that her writing is so filled with life that it has a sort of greening power to use a word from Hildegard, another great woman Saint. It's just the way that she crafts her writing just feels like you're being immersed in holy water. She just has this quality of being able to. Express herself and craft her sentences in such a way that it just feels like you're being baptized and it's amazing.

In her translations of the showings, she talks about the way that she translates these works, and she also has translated works from St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila. The way that she does it, she says in here, that she tries to maintain the integrity of the original work without changing the words too much.

So, she says in the introduction to the showings, Julian of Norwich’s The Showings, when she talks about how she changed some of the words a little bit.

She says:
 “While Julian often calls God her beloved, she also refers to him as Lord on many occasions. In the spirit of inclusivity, which I see as specially aligned with Julian's insights, beloved is the default name in my translation. After all, this is a mystic who freely sees that God is also our mother, gently and lovingly defying the patriarchy at almost every turn.

I sometimes call heaven the world to come. The devil is the spirit of evil, and the fiend is the adversary. There were other terms I could not bring myself to alter. She says such as, well and woe. Again and again, Julian, like the Buddha, acknowledges that this life is a continuous flow of suffering and joy, and that everything changes. She points us in the direction of the more real thing, underlining the passing phenomena of the relative world. But joy and suffering do not carry the same poetry as well and woe, which brings me to an important disclosure: As a translator, the beauty of language is as important to me as the discursive content. I don't just want my translations to be true. I want them to be beautiful. A pleasure to read, a heart opening encounter. And Julian, also refers to Union with God as oneing. Isn't that beautiful?

The soul longs to be one with God, and he wants nothing more than to one himself with her.”

 So she paints the picture—very much it hearkens back to the Song of Songs or the Songs of Solomon, where relationship with God is really just this beautiful, romantic dance and this longing after each other, because you want to be with each other so much, this human God relationship.

The term oneing: O-N-E-I-N-G is now the name of the journal put out by the Center for Action and Contemplation, where Mirabai acts as one of the faculty members there. My husband and I visited the center in August for our 20th wedding anniversary, and I was able to see with my own eyes the large oak that Richard Rohr has often sat under to meditate.

And I spoke to one of the staff members there named Anna, I think, or Annie, who was kind and gave us a tour of the small complex. And it was the place where many of my own spiritual teachers walked and prayed. And I was happy to have seen it all for myself. And there is something I admire very much about Mirabai, and that's that she is so comfortable with her body. 

As she's spoken about how her relationship is with her body, is that her body, mind, and spirit are one. And we say that all the time, but there seems to be, and I'll only speak for myself here, there seems to still be this sort of schism between my spirit and my body her body is one with her spirit. We are loved just as we are. And she said in an interview once she used to think poorly about wearing makeup and jewelry because maybe she felt being natural was more in the way of spirituality.

To say, oh, I don't need those things and I'm just going to be as natural as I can. But as she aged, she thought enough with this and she said, “I’m adorning the goddess” meaning herself.

I too thought I was being frivolous with trying to put on as much jewelry as possible. And, you know, showcasing myself as this adorned being. But when I heard her say this, I thought: Okay, sure. You can practice detachment, and if all of those things fell into the lake, you know, would you cry? No. Right. You still have your life, you still have your children, you still have your partner, and when I heard her say this, I thought, isn't stripping myself this way, a form of silencing my creativity and silencing or squashing who I really am?

I collect stories. That's who I am. And each piece of jewelry I have has a story to it, every single one.

And I like to carry these stories with me, these pieces of jewelry were given to me by family members or friends or students, and I want to carry them with me when I go places. And so that is my way of remembering who I am.

So, I have no qualms now about adorning myself with these stories. So, she has taught me through different interviews and different things that she says because she's so comfortable with herself.

She empowers me to be comfortable with my myself. And I think that women need more women like this in their lives. She has taught me through different women's saints and sages of many different religions because she is an inter-spiritual teacher, she used to teach interreligious classes at the University of New Mexico.

She has taught me that to be a woman is a special thing in this world. So, in need of tenderness. In her book, Wild Mercy, she highlights different women throughout history and religions, connects them through the thread of mysticism. And so, this book is sort of like a guiding writing practice, and in each chapter she highlights maybe one or two saints around the world, and then she gives you a writing exercise.

And if you are an aspiring writer and you need some prompts or you're working on yourself. Those writing exercises are really nice it's really generous of her to do that because it's not like just you're reading a book, you're going to get something out of it once you're finished.

There was a section that really interests me in this book, especially when she discussed Householder Yoga. She says:
 “If yoga means path to union with God, then hooking up with a life partner and having kids together can be as valid and certainly as rigorous as living in an ashram engaged in spiritual discipline all day and into the night, and as transformational too. Every culture and religious tradition controlled by men has placed higher importance on spiritual study and ritual observance than on feeding babies and cleaning up after them.

Women have internalized our own devaluation. No wonder many women with the privilege of making the choice are choosing not to have children. Child rearing is arguably the most difficult path possible, a hero's journey that leads us on harrowing adventures, but for which we receive almost no credit.”

Mirabai herself adopted two mixed race children who were both previously abused in their former families. And so, her child rearing experience I'm sure was very difficult. In fact, her daughter Jenny passed away suddenly at 14 years old.

So now Mirabai has sort of dedicated her life to helping other families go through the grieving process, because that really, I think, steered her life in a different direction, but that really resonated with me. I was glad that she included that because I was a stay-at-home mom for many years and it was hard because I had my master's in education but when I graduated, jobs weren't available. We were going through a recession. I continued to work at Starbucks, and I had been working there for like 10 years and so, my husband and I agreed that if I got pregnant, I would stay home with the kids.

And so that's what happened. And I had two kids, and I was a stay-at-home mom. I felt like what I was doing wasn't important. All my friends were all going to work, and it felt like they were doing very important things. 

There's this stigma, I think, about stay-at-home moms or something. Like there was this sort of cold war going on between the women who worked and had kids, and the women who didn't work and had kids. There was resentment, the stay-at-home mom resenting the fact that she's staying home and not using her true gifts to help the world, you know, in her mind, and the working woman feeling like she's missing out on raising her children and resenting her job and feeling guilty, and the stay-at-home mom feeling guilty because she's not using her gifts.

And so, both sides, no matter what you're doing, you're dealing with a ton of guilt all the time. We're talking about women here, so I'm not going to go into what men think or what men thought. We're just stay focused on women. I'm sure men deal with a lot of guilt as well. but that was an agreement that my husband and I had before we even got married. 
 
 And so that's a very important discussion, people dating people, that you talk to your partner about these things, because that was something I felt very strongly about. I think it's important for women though, because reading that gave me so much comfort and it affirms what I did. And yes, it was hard. I remember trying to write poetry and you'd get into this really deep thought, and it would be beautiful, and it would form in like this beautiful image in your mind, and then the kid would start screaming in the background and the little bubble that you just made that was so beautiful, that image would just pop, and then you would never be able to get it back.

I don't know how many poems I lost, how many little scenes of a story I might have lost. But it's not like I'm pining for these things. You experience life and new visions will come, new stories will come, new poems will come, and there'll be 10 million times better than the ones you created that never manifested back then. So, I don't worry about it anymore, but I think it's important for women to find strong women who will speak to them this way, the way that Mirabai speaks, if you just listen to some of her interviews, you can hear it how strong she is, and how if you came to her with any problem, she would be able to give you strength.

Those are the kind of women we need to find for ourselves. If we don't have this voice, this affirming female voice as women, our presence, which is needed in this world, will be silenced and overshadowed by those addicted to violence, small and large.

I'm just going to share a couple quotes with you that I brought out of her book Wild Mercy. 
 
 

She says:
 
 “Love, and to who we are, which is love. We are endlessly forgetting and remembering. In fact, we could look at all the spiritual practices, all rituals and ceremonies and creative arts as bells designed to wake us up from the slumber of our separateness.”
 
 
 

And then she also said this other thing, which I thought was interesting. She wrote about her friend Sarawati, who is a yoga teacher, and her friend says:
 
 “The masculine aspect of our being learns to cultivate softness, and the feminine learns to cultivate stillness.”

And I think that that's really great, these two things, that's what's most difficult for us. I think stillness for a woman is very difficult, because we're so busy all the time and our brains are going a million miles a minute, and there's a lot to take care of and a lot to do, and a lot to nurture. 

So I think stillness for females is very difficult. And I think that softness is very difficult for men to be soft, to invite the feminine within themselves. We all carry the masculine and feminine within us, and we need to balance these two elements in ourselves so if you're a man that's just all masculine, you might need to work on exhuming your feminine side a little bit more and cultivate a softness. And if you are a female, and you have too much of that feminine to do too much and be too much and whatever, and to create too much, maybe you need to bring part of that masculinity out in you, that stillness that men are very, very good at. Many men are so good at just sitting and not saying a word. And it can be very frustrating for the for the partner, for the wife to talk to them, because it seems like they have nothing to say, but in their stillness, there is wisdom in that. And I appreciate that part of men. And so, yes, I think that we do need to balance those two elements out within ourselves. So, I thought that was a really good quote. 

 So, what is the divine feminine to me? The divine feminine is all creation. All creation. The trees and the rivers and the earth. To me it is also the spirit of gentleness, and if we are listening very closely this time of year, you'll feel this spirit descend upon the world. It is there for us to see and experience and embody, but this takes a bit of effort on our part. This time of year, when everyone is running around and so worried and stressed about getting the right gift for someone or cooking the Christmas dinner just right and making everything perfect in their home.

I invite you to do the opposite and settle into the undercurrent of stillness and gentleness that is waiting for us just behind the veil. My husband and I celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary this year and the day my husband and I got married was November 4th, 2005.

In Michigan, this can be an iffy date. Sometimes it's very cold and rainy, but on this day in 2005, it was 70 degrees, and all the colorful leaves were still on all the trees. They hadn't blown off yet. So, our pictures turned out really well and there were ladybugs all over, and they kept landing on me and my white dress, and it was just so magical, and I really felt like our ancestors were blessing us that day and blessing our wedding.

So, we were married at Addison Oaks, which is a county park, about 20 minutes from our home now where we live. And it has a large old house on the property where the weddings take place, and that's where we had our wedding.

So anyways, during the wedding reception, people kept coming up to me and saying, now stop and look and soak this in. And they would actually grab a hold of my shoulders and say this to me and make me stop in my tracks and look around and observe my surroundings and be present in that moment and they'd say, this is your wedding day. And it goes by so fast. You'll forget everything if you don't stop and look around once in a while. And at the time I thought they were being silly to stop me while I was dancing or stop me while I was walking to greet guests.

But these mysterious voices and mysterious hands that gripped my shoulders to remind me to slow down gave me a tremendous gift I remember the scenes on that day each time someone said this to me. I remember that scene now.

So, my advice for all of you listening is that you stop and look around and observe the smells and the sights and the voices of this season, and the people who are with you. Even if it's just listening to the birds for a moment. What birds have stuck around to keep you company all winter?

For us, it's the sparrows and the cardinals.

So, I'll leave you now with a poem that I believe Mirabai wrote.

It's at the very end of the book and there's no signature under it, so I'm assuming it's her poem. 

LOVE SONG TO THE GREAT MOTHER

Beloved One, 
 Our sister, Mother Earth, 
 Sacred Woman. Holy Girl. 
 Crucible of Mercy and Fire of Truth. 
 Thank you. 
 We have called and you have come. 
 
 You descend on the wings of pain, 
 The wings of joy, 
 Bringing solace and vitality.
 You rise through the roots of the trees 
 Spreading shelter, offering refuge. 
 You enter through the cries of the young 
 Demanding protection for the vulnerable. 
 
 Even as we bow before your beautiful body, 
 You affirm the beauty of our bodies. 
 You bless every particle of creation 
 With your Divine Presence.

We welcome you who have lived long enough in exile,
 To dwell among us again. 
 We offer ourselves as your loving stewards, 
 Your beloved reluctant prophets, 
 Radiant reflections 
 Of your own Sacred Self. 
 Thank you. 
 Thank you.
 And again, we give thanks. 
 
                                                       —Mirabai Starr

Thank you for joining me on Loving the Imperfect. Next time we will explore the work and workings of Lech Walesa, who recently toured the United States and Canada with a message for the people. The former president of Poland, started the movement Solidarnosc in the 1980s or Solidarity, as we say in English, and it won him the Nobel Peace Prize and helped to topple the Berlin Wall and communism in Poland, so I hope you'll join me then. Thank you for joining me this time, I hope you have a great Christmas. Look to the blessed mother this advent season. This is a time of waiting, waiting, a blessed, sacred liminal space of waiting, and it is a time to welcome silence and contemplation.

I'll see you next time. Bye bye.