How to Embrace the Sacredness of Everyday Life with Mirabai Starr

Episode Transcript:

00:00:00 – Mirabai Starr
Not only do we not need the institutionalized, organized religious paths to get us to some kind of spiritual intimacy, but religion can be an obstacle to a spiritual experience. But I’m not throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

00:00:22 – Chris Forbes
Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good. Wolf, thanks for joining us. Back on the show today is Mirabai Starr star, an award winning author, internationally acclaimed speaker, and a leading teacher of interspiritual dialogue. In 2020, Mirabai was honored on Watkins list of the 100 most spiritually influential living people. Drawing from 20 years of teaching philosophy and world religions at the University of New Mexico, Taos, Mirabai now travels the world, sharing her wisdom on contemplative living, writing as a spiritual practice, and the transformational power of grief and loss. She has authored over a dozen books, including the one discussed here, ordinary mysticism, your life as sacred ground. I also want to let all of our listeners know that we now finally have a great YouTube page, so you can watch your favorite interviews on there. You can find it on YouTube at the one you feed pod hi, Mirabai.

00:02:14 – Eric Zimmer
Welcome to the show.

00:02:16 – Mirabai Starr
Thank you so much. I can’t believe we’re here together in person.

00:02:19 – Eric Zimmer
I know. I think this is your third or fourth time on the show, and we are doing it in person at your place near Taosh. And it’s beautiful here. The mountains in the distance. It’s lovely.

00:02:31 – Mirabai Starr
It’s such a joy to work in this space.

00:02:34 – Eric Zimmer
So we’re gonna be discussing your latest book, which is called Ordinary your life as sacred ground. But before we do, we will start with the parable, like we always do. In the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and they think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent, and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

00:03:20 – Mirabai Starr
For so many years, I have been on a spiritual path, and I mixed it up with perfection and purification, like there was some kind of end result of all the spiritual practices that I had been doing and all the spiritual traditions I had been immersed in. And that end result was something like enlightenment, or in the christian language, it would be salvation. You know, each spiritual tradition has some version of an end goal. And so no matter what I did, it fell short. And so my ideas of somehow arriving at a place where I was awake and free and fully compassionate were never enough. Like, I never got there. And so I kept feeling like all I was doing was feeding the bad wolf, that I couldn’t access the good enough Wolfenhe and making sure that she would prevail. And I think I’ve just let that go. Not only I think, I know I have, and that’s incredibly liberating. So that the bad wolf and the good wolf have merged into this glorious, messy, beautiful, vibrant being. And that’s the one I feed the good enough wolf.

00:04:47 – Eric Zimmer
I like that. I like that idea. Throughout your book, this idea is really on display. This sense that in the midst of our ordinary lives, with all their challenges, and in the midst of our own emotional and behavioral things that we might call emotional or behavioral failings, that even in the midst of all that, there is some sacredness available. And like you, I think I for years had sort of a end goal, which was being enlightened so that I never felt any more pain. And as a former heroin addict, I clearly like that’s what I was aiming at, right? Like, I drove my life into the ground. I burnt it down to chase that feeling. And I think that I was able to pivot to some degree and go, oh, maybe I can get something like that out of spirituality. And that’s a much better way to pursue it. I mean, don’t get me wrong, a much better way to pursue it. But like you say, always sort of not quite getting there or having these experiences that were, you know, life changing in some ways, but then life goes back to being life, right? Right. It’s like a drug. You go up, but you gotta come back down. And so I, like you, have gotten a lot better at accepting who I am and my life, the way that it is. But that’s always an ongoing challenge, I think.

00:06:19 – Mirabai Starr
And it’s humbling. It’s humbling. Like this is it. What you see is what you get, you know, the person who wakes up in a bad mood or who eats too much or, you know, whatever it may be that we judge ourselves about. It’s easy to say it’s all sacred, but it is sometimes. Like, really, this is it. But it’s when you’re nothing. Trying to use spiritual practice as a bypass, such a great term spiritual bypass, or as a drug or as a way to check out of reality, which I think you and I, having been on a spiritual path for a long time, were probably conditioned to do. To use spirituality to get away from life, whether it’s beliefs or practices or rituals or texts, you know, and to actually show up for the full catastrophe, as orbit the Greek called it, is so much more ample and generous a way to live. And it includes everything. And everything belongs. As my friend Richard Rohr says, everything belongs.

00:07:26 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. I’ve been thinking a lot about change and when not to change, I guess, or when to give up trying to change, because I think there are changes that we can make in our lives and often need to make that are really positive.

00:07:43 – Mirabai Starr
Right.

00:07:44 – Eric Zimmer
And I think the more that the way I behave aligns with who I want to be inside, the more peace I have. And so there are positive changes that are worth aiming at, and we fall short of those, but doesn’t mean that they’re not worth aiming at. And there’s plenty of times where it seems to me that that needs to be set down.

00:08:03 – Mirabai Starr
Mm hmm.

00:08:04 – Eric Zimmer
And so I think a lot about when to use each thing.

00:08:08 – Mirabai Starr
I love that. Eric. I’m not saying anything goes. This is not a sloppy, you know, just whatever. It’s all sacred. And just do whatever you want and behave however you wish and do whatever you want to your body and not worry about the consequences or treat your loved ones like shit and not worry about how that affects your relationship. No, it’s not in anything, ghost. In fact, this path of reclaiming everything, everything is sacred, requires a certain rigor and discernment so that you can really show up for reality with an open heart and a clear mind and a brave way of being. It’s sort of like my interspiritual work, which you’ve spoken with me about in the past. We’ve had conversations about walking an interspiritual path and how some people see that as being somehow superficial, like just taking a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Whatever makes you happy. And it’s like a self gratification or something, rather than engaging deeply with one tradition and reaping the harvest of that discipline that comes with committing to a single spiritual tradition. And I’ve called that into question because I grew up in my spiritual life anyway, with that, that messaging that you should pick one path and go deep rather than explore multiple spaces. But my lived experience, Eric, was always that in encountering and cultivating intimacy with multiple spiritual spaces and traditions, I experienced great depth of transformation, of spiritual presence, that it was anything but superficial and lightweight, and a little bit of this and a little bit of that. It was deep encounters across a broad spiritual landscape. It’s the same thing with this ordinary mysticism business. It’s not like, oh, it’s okay, whatever you do is holy and you have a path. Both paths, the ordinary mystical path and the interspiritual path and the path of the feminine mystic, which you and I have also just spoken about, require that you show up as awake and committed to loving kindness as you can possibly be. And it gives you much more freedom without someone telling you the way you’re supposed to do it.

00:10:43 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. There’s a line in the book where you’re talking about intention. You say, to be a mystic in our times is not about renunciation, it is about intention. And then you go on to say, set your intention to uncover the jewels buried in the heart of what already is. That’s a great line. Choose to see the face of God and the face of the bus driver and the moody teenager impealing a tangerine or feeding the cat. Decide. Mean it. Open your heart and then do everything you can to keep it open. And I think that’s speaking to this commitment, right? Like, decide. Mean it. Like you’re bringing your whole self and your whole effort to this. And then you also say, but setting our intentions blesses the outcome without investing them with shame or blame if they don’t work out. That’s the flip side of it.

00:11:32 – Mirabai Starr
Yeah, that’s right. You know, I always appreciated Pema children. Always. Always. Who happen to have been just a little sidebar. My social studies teacher when I was twelve.

00:11:43 – Eric Zimmer
You have got to be kidding me.

00:11:44 – Mirabai Starr
You didn’t know that story, huh? Yeah. Before she became Pema, she was still Deirdre. And in fact, it was in my probably 6th grade year that she went off to Boulder to be with Choim Trunpa Rumpesche and become Pemachan.

00:11:59 – Eric Zimmer
That’s wild.

00:11:59 – Mirabai Starr
Yeah, so years later, yeah, Natalie Goldberg was my english teacher. Palma Chodron was our social studies teacher. Ramdas and Trampa and all of the characters came through Taos in those days to our alternative school. So I come by this path I’m.

00:12:15 – Eric Zimmer
On, honestly, I was gonna say, yeah, you may not have had much choice.

00:12:20 – Mirabai Starr
Yeah, it really feels that way. But Pema, years later, when I started reading her as Pema Chodron, she spoke about this revolutionary concept that all of our gifts, all of our beauty, all of our wisdom is completely and inextricably entwined with our shadows, with our neuroses, with our insecurities. And I was like, really? That is such a relief. That was my intuitive experience that those two things could not be separated and they were not mutually exclusive. And I think that message from Pema 2030 years ago, I don’t remember when it was start where you are. That was the book just really paved the way or unpaved the way, because it rewilded the way of my heart so that I could accept that truth.

00:13:11 – Eric Zimmer
You used the word shadow there, and it made me think of later in the book, you talk about your shadow, and you brought up one of your sort of shadow sides, which is that you keep trying to simplify your life, and to use your phrase, you remain frenetically overextended. And I relate with that to some degree. And I think about it a lot. I’m like, well, my ability to, like, want to do things and to engage deeply and be somebody, that’s like, I see something, I’m going to go over there. I’m going to go get like. That’s one of my very best traits. And its shadow is exactly as you’re saying that it gets me to a place where either, like you say, I’m overextended, although I’ve gotten a little bit better at that. It’s more my mental state is always out in front of me, and so I have to work hard to reel it back in. And so I wouldn’t want to get rid of that part of me that would be destroying part of, I think, who I really am. But I also don’t want to let it run the entire show.

00:14:17 – Mirabai Starr
Exactly. That’s. That’s a beautiful example. Yeah. And the things that we do, probably you, you do this. I know I do. Are beautiful, wonderful things. You know, today is a perfect case in point. Before I saw you, I did eleven things and crammed them all in and managed to have a couple of bites of a taco, you know, to keep the machine of my body going. And I kept stopping in between taking a breath and going, wow. Here you go, Mirabai. This is what you do. But they’re all beautiful. I mean, starting with a yoga class, like, get into the car and drive to yoga. Check. You know, and then take care of the two year old for an hour while her mom has a massage, check. They’re all wonderful, but it’s easy to get lost. But when you remind me of what I said myself in my little book, it’s like I can take a breath again and say, yes, it’s all intertwined and it’s all sacred.

00:15:14 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. And there is a way I have found to be going, going and to be present.

00:15:21 – Mirabai Starr
Yes.

00:15:22 – Eric Zimmer
It takes a little more effort, I think, because, you know, there isn’t the spaces, but I know I can have those two experiences, right? One of which is like, I’m doing all my things and I feel present and I feel content and I feel connected, and I can also be doing the exact same things and feel completely frenetic.

00:15:43 – Mirabai Starr
Right. That’s such a great insight. You know, what I think is the key to the distinction between the frenetic and the present is humor. There’s always part of me that’s not always, but often is right behind the little stress monkey going, look at you, cutie, you’re doing it again. And isn’t this hilarious? And same thing with my judging mind, the mind that judges other people as being unconscious or somehow otherwise falling short of my standards, being a human being. And as soon as I hear that little critical voice in my head, right behind it is the chuckle, like, look who thinks she knows what they don’t know.

00:16:33 – Eric Zimmer
That’s really good to cultivate inside. I have an external version of that in my best friend Chris, who’s the editor and founder with me of this show. And he just probably in the same way that we all have qualities that we sometimes will take too far, his humor. Not that he takes it too far, but, like, as a defense at points, right? But it’s almost impossible to get him to be consistently serious about anything, which is one of his best traits. Perfect for me, because when I do get so focused, that sense of humor tends to sort of constrict and shrink and does not really allowed to with him around, you know? So it’s a real gift to also have people that can do that for us.

00:17:15 – Mirabai Starr
Yes, definitely. I have one of those, too. Ah, that’s beautiful.

00:17:21 – Eric Zimmer
Speaking about our failings or our not living up to the people we want to be, you have something in the book. I never can say her name. Right, but you’re talking about the french nun, Therese.

00:17:33 – Mirabai Starr
Therese of Lisieux.

00:17:34 – Eric Zimmer
Thank you. My mouth doesn’t make those sounds. You talk about how she hated herself for hating the way the sister beside her in the refectory chewed her food. And I am an extraordinarily sound, sensitive person. And so somebody chewing loudly around me, or, like, chomping on their ice, it brings up this, like, just strong irritation that no matter what I have tried to do, I can’t turn off.

00:18:02 – Mirabai Starr
Wow. Yeah. Dysphonia or something. I know about this.

00:18:06 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. I cannot turn it off. So it’s good to know that a saint had the same problem.

00:18:11 – Mirabai Starr
Oh, okay. So what a wonderful next step of our conversation, Eric, because I think one of the things I’m trying to do with ordinary mysticism and with my work in general, because I’ve been so deeply immersed in the teachings of the mystics across the spiritual traditions over the years, is let people know that your Life is not counter or in opposition to the lives of these saints and mystics that we know about. It’s not like we should not put them on a pedestal, because what that means is then we feel like we could never hope to emulate their beautiful, wonderful spiritual qualities. All of them, I assure you, had their. Their neuroses, their mistakes, their indulgences, their misbehaviors. You know, they all also felt like they fell short all the time. There’s a part of this Book in the back that is called you’re not in trouble, which is a phrase that my brother in law says sometimes to all of us to remind us and to himself, that those 10,000 things a day that you think you screwed up are just fine. You’re just fine. You’re not in trouble. And so I think all the saints and mystics that we revere probably had those conversations with themselves as well. And so when we can see their humanity, the humanity of the people like Therese or Teresa of Avila, who could be moody and demanding, or Francis of Assisi, who would get angry and climb up on the roof of the church that was being built in his name and tear the tiles off and throw them to the ground, because he was looking for a community of voluntary simplicity. And the people who were trying to follow in his footsteps were getting it all wrong, and he’d get pissed off. And sexism and racism in the people that we revere, we get to look at those qualities and say, ah, they are just like me, and we’re all doing the best we can to live lives of loving kindness and service and maybe not selflessness, but less selfishness, less self centeredness.

00:20:27 – Eric Zimmer
Yes. So how do you think about that when it comes to more modern teachers and the sex scandals that we see. Right. Which are, you know, rife throughout, I mean, really everywhere. And so it’s easier to say somebody in, you know, back in the 15 hundreds or 14 hundreds who acted a certain way that that’s so far away, we can sort of separate the person from the message easier than today or ten years ago. How do you think about that?

00:21:03 – Mirabai Starr
I think about it a lot because having, you know, grown up since early teens in. In the spiritual arena, multiple spiritual spaces, buddhist, Hindu, Sufi, and others, I’ve seen a lot of bad behavior in the teachers that I have loved and followed, and I’ve tried to give them a pass. And the philosophy of the guru doesn’t do anything that’s not for the benefit of the disciple. Gets them a lot of leeway, but I’m not buying it anymore. I no longer even believe in a fully enlightened being, and that’s like sacrilege in my spiritual community because I have a guru named Kurali Baba. He’s been my lifelong teacher and beloved kind of spiritual anchor. He will remain so probably till the day I die. He’s in me. There’s nothing I can do to extricate myself from my love and devotion to him. And yet I no longer believe that the guru won’t do anything that isn’t of benefit to the disciple. I’ve seen them all make mistakes that have done harm to the people who have followed them. Sexual impropriety, homophobia, and everything in between. And we know better now. Well, even in the sixties, even the difference between the 1960s and seventies, when I was starting on my spiritual path, and now there’s just no excuse. There’s a power differential between the teachers and the students, for one thing.

00:22:47 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:22:47 – Mirabai Starr
And for the teacher to use that power differential to his own benefit and gratification is wrong.

00:22:55 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. And I think it’s pretty clear that one of the things that makes something a cult is when you can’t question the people at the top. The minute that they’re infallible, you’ve got a pretty good idea it’s time to go. Right. It’s wise to just say, okay, I need to go somewhere else and seek my guidance and wisdom, because that’s dangerous.

00:23:18 – Mirabai Starr
Well, exactly, Eric. And so that’s a mark of what makes a teacher an authentic teacher in my mind is when she carries wisdom transmission, shakti, energy, whatever you may call it that’s real and is willing to apologize and admit when she’s off the mark. That goes such a long way. Someone who is humbly able to say, you know what? That was not okay, and I’m sorry.

00:23:48 – Eric Zimmer
Yep. You and I both know Henry Schuchman, and I interviewed him just a few days ago. And I’m not saying Henry’s a guru. Right. But he’s somebody that a lot of people look up to, and he’s a very wise teacher. He’s one of the most gifted teachers. I think that morning, as we were preparing, he was down on the floor setting up lights with the other people there. And that’s the kind of leader that I’m looking for and the kind of leader I want to be.

00:24:14 – Mirabai Starr
Yeah.

00:24:15 – Eric Zimmer
Is the person that’s not setting themselves so far away from everybody else that’s right in it with everyone. And it was just another thing that I looked at that made me love Henry, you know, because it was just. He was right there. He’s the teacher, and yet he’s willing to sit down and help you screw in the light bulb.

00:24:33 – Mirabai Starr
Exactly. I love that.

00:24:35 – Eric Zimmer
I do think it’s interesting, though, to think about. I think there’s a further distinction. I think your first distinction is true, that nobody should be given a pass that, like, bad behavior should be called out and it should be stopped. But then you get to the next level, which is, what about their message or their teacher?

00:24:52 – Mirabai Starr
Okay.

00:24:52 – Eric Zimmer
Right. I think we’re all wrestling with this. Even outside of spiritual circles, in this day and age. It’s the musician as a person and then what they created. And can you. And should you separate those things?

00:25:06 – Mirabai Starr
Exactly. And sometimes, I think in our hyper aware era, we ourselves might cancel ourselves because of white guilt or fear of what, you know, doing something that is inappropriate or cultural appropriation or all the things that I, for instance, wrestle with and talk ourselves out of our prophetic calling. Again, it’s this idea of perfection that we may hold in our minds. And so how do we step up as teachers, as prophets, as contemporary mystics, which so many of you who are listening qualify as being, without being so hard on ourselves when we miss the standards we hold ourselves to or hold others to? So I think that’s a beautiful example, Eric, is that there is such power that certain people carry to transform our consciousness and open our hearts. Those very same people are human beings, and they’re going to sometimes do things and say things that cause harm? Do we cancel them completely? Do we call out the behavior and affirm the beauty that they carry? That’s what I would vote for. But again, that takes rigor, it takes discernment, and it takes the discipline of keeping your heart open so that you don’t just write them off, but you forgive and allow and are willing to listen and engage in hard conversation.

00:26:46 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, it really is challenging. I mean, I spent, I mean, a number of years of my life as a, you know, out and out criminal. You know, I’ve got a grocery list of crimes, and that’s not me anymore, but it was. And so where in here do we hold people’s ability to change and also not be naive? That some people don’t change, aren’t capable of changing, don’t want to change even what they say? I don’t think there’s any answers, but I think it’s a question I think about a lot.

00:27:19 – Mirabai Starr
Yeah, I love that you’re asking these questions, and you’re asking them publicly, because I think we all need to be listening in to the nuances of this question.

00:27:28 – Eric Zimmer
So let’s come back to your book. And there’s just so many beautiful lines. But I thought I’d have you read the first few paragraphs of a section in the book that I think covers a lot of what we’ve been talking about. I’ll let you find it. The section is called the myth of the perfect family. It’s in the first chapter, intention.

00:27:47 – Mirabai Starr
It’s hard to give up our fantasies of a life where beauty is built in and we don’t have to work at finding it. It’s easy to recognize the presence of the sacred in the saintly hospice chaplain who turns your mother’s deathbed into a temple in an epic sunset over the South Pacific. Or in the birth of a baby to a couple who had given up hope of ever conceiving, let alone carrying a child to term. But what about your boring job, your addicted partner, your home town that feels more like a strip mall than a community? What about your dining room table at dinner time? One of the things it means to be an ordinary mystic is to bow at the feet of your everyday existence, with its disappointments and dramas, its peaceful mornings and luminous nights, and to honor yourself just as you are. Remember Steven Stills of Crosby, stills and Nash? He told us that if you cant be with the one you love, you should love the one youre with. I say, if you cant be the one you wish you could be, love the one you are. And if you don’t have the life you imagined you would have or should have by now, how about loving the life you are living? A mystic finds the magic in the midst of the nitty gritty, the crusty spaghetti sauce pot in the sink and the crocus poking out of a spring snowfall, the unsigned divorce papers on the kitchen table, and the results of your latest blood work on your computer screen.

00:29:30 – Eric Zimmer
I love that. I think that’s really beautiful. It made me think of something, this idea of having to look for beauty instead of it just being always built in. I think it’s a great way of really thinking about, for me, the effort that it takes. I wish it didn’t. Like you’re saying, I wish that, like, my grateful awe eyes were always open and I just wandered around and, you know, beauty at everything. But I don’t. I have to consciously, moment by moment, remind myself to try and look for it.

00:30:06 – Mirabai Starr
And there are practices that help, you know, I mean, in many ways, I’m deconstructing religion in this book, saying not only do we not need the institutionalized, organized religious paths to get us to some kind of spiritual intimacy, but religion can be an obstacle to a spiritual experience. But I’m not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I love many of the practices and sacred texts and prayers and even ideas and concepts that are at the heart of the different religious traditions. And one of the kind of universal practices that I think helps build these wonder muscles and open these beauty eyes is contemplative practice of any kind. Whether it’s seated meditation on a cushion on a daily basis for 20 minutes, or whatever it may be, or walking in the woods in a mindful way, or reading poetry, where you really show up for the feast of words. There are many different ways to cultivate a contemplative life. It helps so much to awaken the heart of the mystic so that you will perceive beauty when you look.

00:31:46 – Eric Zimmer
There are sort of two arms, as I think of it.

00:31:49 – Chris Forbes
Right?

00:31:49 – Eric Zimmer
There’s the actual contemplative practices that you’re describing, which are a practice and discipline. And then there’s the how does what we see or realize there trickle out into all the other moments of life? That’s sort of that second part of it is like, where I’m really interested in kind of what I’m writing about in the upcoming book and taught in the habits that matter program is not how to do the formal practice, more formal practices, but how to drip it into all the rest of your life.

00:32:23 – Mirabai Starr
Beautiful. You said it earlier, when we were speaking, before we got on air, that your deep and long time, rigorous commitment to a sitting practice is changing, and that now it’s kind of just infiltrating every aspect of your life. And I think that’s the fruit of this kind of contemplative practice that you’ve cultivated for so many years and that I have as well. And many people I know and love are kind of walking away from the cushion and seeing how that contemplative habit shows up when it’s needed most, you know, in line at the store, in traffic, and an argument with a beloved. You know, it’s just like weightlifting. I think you and I are both exercisers.

00:33:10 – Eric Zimmer
Yes.

00:33:11 – Mirabai Starr
I find that when I do my exercise practice, every aspect of my life is strengthened and I feel better and I have more. More energy to do what I love. It’s not like I’m so virtuous because I lift weights or I hike every day or I do yoga and all the things that I do, I spend a lot of time doing physical practices, and my body really thanks me for it. The harvest is everywhere in my life.

00:33:41 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I agree. I agree. It’s important. And I do think that both elements of that formal practice, whether it be meditation or exercise, being things that you sort of do, make it more likely that you’ll be strong in the rest of your life, or you’ll be wise in the rest of your life or awake in the rest of your life.

00:33:59 – Mirabai Starr
And we need to be willing, like you are, to allow that to morph and change. For instance, I live, and we’re looking out the window right now together, which is cool, right on the edge of national forest. So my two dogs, Lola and Ruby, demand to take a long walk every day because that’s all they’ve ever known. So we get out into those mountains every day. And for many, many years, I have not only had a practice of silence when I was walking, but I’ve written about it. So I’ve, like, come out publicly and said, take a walk, but don’t have your earpods in your ears. And don’t catch up on phone calls and texts. Be present in the.

00:34:41 – Eric Zimmer
Unless you’re listening to the. When you feed. Just kidding.

00:34:43 – Mirabai Starr
Unless you’re listening to the one you feed. And then you can catch up on all the past episodes. So recently, I started listening to the audible version of braiding sweetgrass. Well, I just finished it yesterday, so it took a long time because it’s a long book, and it’s one of the most powerful transformative books I’ve ever read. I loved it so much, and I make a living out of reading transformational books. I loved it so much, and it got to the point where I was not going to get through it because it’s so long and I have so many things to do unless I bent my rule of walking in nature and not listening to anything. So I started listening to it on my walks, and it was extraordinary. It was so liberating to break that rule. There was one point where she was talking about moss and lichen. Robin Wal Kimmerer reveals nature as God, as divine, as sacred, so beautifully, but so she can get totally into something like lichen and moss, and it’s utterly captivating and transformational and heart opening. And while I was walking, she was describing a certain kind of lichen, and I was seeing it in the rocks on the path where I was walking. It was such an epiphany. It was a spiritual experience. It was a mystical experience, and it wouldn’t have happened. That epiphany, that mystical experience, that ordinary mystical moment would not have happened had I stayed rigid about my spiritual practice of silence while walking.

00:36:14 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. It makes me think of in the book, you say there’s a tension, a paradox for you when you think about where we gain real wisdom. Is it lived experience or is it the distilled transmission from books or scriptures? My answer is both, and I think you’re describing this in a slightly different way, which is that your conditioning is to have that experience, you need to be quiet while you’re walking. It’s the lived experience side. But what you found was that in the right way, the scripture.

00:36:51 – Chris Forbes
Right.

00:36:51 – Eric Zimmer
We’ll call our book of scripture. Right. The scripture was the thing that enlivened that moment in combination with lived experience. And so they’re sort of separate, but then ultimately they become, ideally, they’re not separate.

00:37:05 – Mirabai Starr
Exactly. And in fact, what I found was, and this has just been in the last week, that I discovered this by listening to her book, that I do both. So I listen for a while, and then I turn it off and I walk in silence for a while. So I’m doing both. And that works beautifully. It’s a tapestry.

00:37:24 – Eric Zimmer
I do, too. That’s my general. Like, if I’m out for a long hike or bike ride, I’m like, okay, half of this, I can listen to music, or I can listen to a book that I’m into, I can talk to a friend, and half of it, I’m just going to turn all that off and just be out here. And I can do both, like you said. And that seems to allow me to get the best of both worlds.

00:37:47 – Mirabai Starr
And this is the liberation that I’m hoping we can all give ourselves permission to experience with an ordinary, mystical life, to release, to jettison, to give up and walk away from all the rules and regulations that legislate, that control our spiritual experience and allow ourselves to kind of undomesticate the path to the sacred, to draw on the spiritual traditions, the age old methods and practices and poetry that feed our souls, and to also be willing to not know and allow it to be revealed in your regular, everyday life.

00:38:32 – Eric Zimmer
I think the other thing that you do in this book and I think is really important is to. I’m going to use my own words here, bring down the bar of what constitutes a mystical experience, because I struggle with this. People use the word joy all the time. Joy is not a word that I feel like is exactly in my emotional register. I just don’t think it. I mean, I’m not saying it’s never there, but that’s not my lived experience of my emotional register. And so when I think that that’s the bar I’m aiming at all my experience is not good enough, and I’m not good enough, instead of going, here’s me and the way I see and relate to the world. And in the midst of that, there are moments of beauty and maybe joy or contentment might be more my emotional register. Right. I’m a little bit more equilibrium. I think, in reading your book, you’re a little more like up here and then down here, like, you’ve got a wider emotional register, which is not better. It’s different. And so, for me, there’s been a process of recognizing that it doesn’t have to be one of these earth shattering moments of complete liberation or a blinding flash of enlightenment for it to be something that is still really beautiful and beneficial.

00:40:02 – Mirabai Starr
Are you listening, y’all? This is so good, Eric. This is the essence, and I forget myself all the time of what I’m trying to say. Your life is not only good enough, whoever you are, whoever’s listening, it is the most beautiful thing it can be. In jewish mystical teachings, every one of us is imprinted the day that we’re born with what is ours to do and be in this world. To mend, actually to mend the torn fabric of the world of reality, Tikkun Olam, to repair the world. And often our lives are an adventure of discovering what that is. But it’s so important as you’re saying, to not discount what and who you are, because I promise that your version of Tikkun Olam, what it is, any of you, any of us are here to do and be in this world, is hidden in plain sight, nestled at the heart of who you already are. Someone with an emotional register of equilibrium or an Enneagram four like me, that experiences the heights of drama, some might say, but ecstatic states and deep pain and grief. And, you know, I find the presence of the sacred in both. It’s probably harder for me to actually be present when things aren’t intense.

00:41:39 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, it is sort of accepting us. I love the way you describe this in the book. You say, for me, almost everything that happens is a big deal. I’ve always been this way. I can take the most prosaic encounter and convert it into a melodrama where my husband Jeff will gloss over a torn rotator cuff as if it were a hangnail. I just love that because you’re just like, in that sentence, you’re letting yourself be the way you are, and you’re letting him be the way he is, and you’re not making one of those better than the other.

00:42:12 – Mirabai Starr
That’s so true. I mean, and it’s easy. It’s easy to let go of the judging mind when we set our intention, when we realize that everything belongs, that everything is sacred. I mean, it’s not always easy, Eric, but it’s often much easier than we make it out to be. To just allow things to be what they are and to allow our beloveds to be who they are. I’ve been married for 26 years. This is my second marriage. It’s his second marriage. And I knew right from the beginning that we were really different. We had really different temperaments. And that the way he is is adorable. His quirks and behavioral challenges are endearing to me. They were endearing at the beginning, and they’re endearing still, I think, because I know, I knew that he accepted me unconditionally and that there was something wonderful ahead if I could also accept him, and therefore myself, unconditionally. Not that we don’t have our moments, we do. But there is this kind of. What would you call it? We adore each other for all of those quirky little things that make us who we are.

00:43:29 – Eric Zimmer
Yep. I think you were using at the beginning of that, that it’s easy to let go of those things when we think that everything belongs. And I would say that it actually, that that makes it possible. It may still be very difficult within that. But if you can’t take that first step, if you can’t at least go, this has a place. This belongs. This is okay. I may still resist it 90% of the time, and I can work on that. But if I can’t do that first step, it’s not even possible to let things, myself and others, be the way they are.

00:44:05 – Mirabai Starr
Mm hmm. Yeah. And it probably does start with our sense of ourselves as adorable. Like, can you cultivate that for 1 minute? You are adorable, Mirabai Starr. You’re adorable. And see if that tenderness doesn’t start shifting things so that everything becomes adorable.

00:44:26 – Eric Zimmer
You were speaking just now about your husband, and in the book, you’re talking about this idea that the general prevailing wisdom, let me see if I can say this right, is that in the beginning of a relationship, we are infatuated. And so we see people as really great, and then over time, we see who they really are. And you and I think Leonard Cohen and I don’t remember who else you quote, flip that on its head and say, actually, no. Your initial impressions when you saw someone as beautiful and wonderful and special and unique, that’s what’s real. And what has happened is time has dulled that.

00:45:12 – Chris Forbes
Yes.

00:45:13 – Eric Zimmer
And that is a complete reinvention of the way we think about each other.

00:45:19 – Mirabai Starr
Oh, I’m so glad you picked up on that. Cause that’s one of the great enlivening insights of my life. And I’ve carried that into the realm of grief, too. That when people die in our life, you know, in our world, in our close world, we often glorify them. Like, suddenly the person who acted like an asshole, suddenly the person who misbehaved is wonderful, and their character defects become just interesting aspects of who they are and were. And not only that, but we start to see them as maybe an ancestor who carries wisdom and guidance for us. And there might be people who say, you know what, honey? That’s magical. Thinking that person was a jerk in real life. That doesn’t make them suddenly an enlightened being now that they’re dead. And, I mean, I’ve kind of received that messaging. Maybe some of you have, too. And I think there’s something true in that sense that the loved one who’s gone, even if they were difficult and problematic in your life when they were alive, become something holy, something generous, something gener, someone generative, they become a life giving source for you, a source of wisdom, of courage, of energy, of guidance. An ancestor that isn’t just an idea, but an entity a reality. I don’t know. Whatever your beliefs are about life after death. In one of my books, Caravan of no despair, my memoir of. It’s called a memoir.

00:47:03 – Eric Zimmer
This is your first book? I read in our first interview about.

00:47:05 – Mirabai Starr
That book, yes, a memoir of loss and transformation. I have a chapter called believing everything, where I systematically kind of like Descartes when he came up with, I think, therefore I am. I systematically go through all the possibilities, all the things that the different world religions say, atheism says about what happens to after you die. And I conclude that they’re all true. So whatever you believe about what happens after death, I have experienced, and many of you have too, the true presence of loved ones who have died, as real, as available, as helpful, as beautiful. And that’s kind of like that insight about when you fall in love, you’re seeing the real person, and over time, that gets dulled. As you said, I think when someone dies who they really are, their essence is liberated and accessible.

00:47:59 – Eric Zimmer
For me, that belief system is a double edged sword, and I’ll tell you that the good side of it makes complete sense to me, which is believing, particularly with your current partner, that the person you saw them first as is who they really are. I have this situation, though, when a relationship ends, I suddenly see that person as the end all and be all of everything that ever could be good in the world because I can’t have it.

00:48:29 – Mirabai Starr
Yeah.

00:48:30 – Eric Zimmer
And so for me, I actually think this insight of yours is really good, because what I can do, instead of saying, is it true? Is to ask. My favorite question is, is it useful in the case of somebody who, say, someone has left me and is moving on, probably not useful to deify them. Probably useful to think about the parts of them that I didn’t like as a way of moving through, but with the people I’m with or the people who have passed on in the way you’re describing, gone. It’s probably really useful to see them as beautiful, wonderful people, knowing that the truth is, of course, they’re all both, but it’s more useful to see them that way. I often, more than I think about is it true? Because so many things are true at the same time, is which of these ways of thinking is more useful to me being the person I want to be? I mean, and I never thought of this idea. It’s new to me that you’ve just said here, this idea of the way I saw them in the beginning is how they really are. How useful is that in me with my current relationship right to think back to how luminous she seemed to me then and go, yeah, that’s real. That was really her. Like, that’s a beautiful and useful thought. Yes.

00:49:58 – Mirabai Starr
And that’s the way of ordinary mysticism, is how do we see the divine, the sacred, the luminous and numinous in the people in our lives, including the people for whom it is difficult to see. In whom it is difficult to see.

00:50:16 – Eric Zimmer
I’ve got a couple that I think, you know, that’s a deep practice.

00:50:22 – Mirabai Starr
It is, and I’m not always good at it, believe me. True confessions.

00:50:25 – Eric Zimmer
Yep. I think I’d like to talk about letting go. You say, sometimes when I’m wrestling with a problem or a decision, I remember I don’t have to figure out I can give it over. My default is to the great mother. I murmur words like, here, mama, you take it. And then I get on with my day and wait to see what happens. I think a lot about letting go, and I thought we could just talk about it in general.

00:51:12 – Mirabai Starr
There’s such a fine line between letting go and checking out. There are certain things that the holiest, most sacred, most awake thing you can do is to not turn away, but to stay present with difficult feelings. For instance, like jealousy or grief, just missing someone you love. And those of us who’ve been on a spiritual path of any kind know all the tricks. To be okay with difficult feelings, to meditate our way out of it, or to just let go and be grateful. There are lots of good tools and techniques, but sometimes the magic is in not letting go in showing up. So, say we’re talking about addiction. To be with the difficult, almost unbearable feeling of craving. Sometimes that’s the way through, right? Is to not run away from it, not indulge in the substance. To make the feeling go away. But staying with the hunger and exploring it with curiosity and tenderness. And then the letting go. When. At the times when we’re able to let go, or when it’s useful to use your language, Eric, to let go becomes a true freedom. A true path to freedom.

00:52:49 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I think that is another one of those things that’s really hard to sort out, when I should allow a feeling to be. Because that’s either instructive or it’s a way of being present. It’s a way of not running from my emotions. And when it’s time to try, as we’re saying, to let go, it’s a very subtle thing to sort of figure out. I think. I think about it with anger often, right. Anger is certainly a useful generative powerful emotion. And it can also get stuck in the on position, which is what we would call in. We used to refer to in twelve step programs as resentment. And they used to say all the time, resentment is the biggest thing that causes people to go back to drinking. Now, I don’t think that’s true for everybody. Like, I’m an absolutely, like, fear based person. That’s much more likely to me than being mad at somebody is to think terrible things about myself or whatever. So it’s not everybody, but I think it’s interesting to think about when a feeling gets stuck. And we do need to work on saying, hey, let’s turn the channel. Let’s make a conscious effort to think something different. Let’s let go whatever form that takes. I often feel like, I don’t know, even today, how to sometimes decide which is which.

00:54:17 – Mirabai Starr
Well, there’s a lot of conditioning that’s going to get in the way, you know, and a lot of it is, if you’ll forgive the term, patriarchal conditioning, you know, a paradigm that conditions us to believe that the more spiritual thing to do is to transcend the feelings. And I remember when my, when my daughter died, not long after, within a year or so, my teenage daughter was killed in an accident, car accident. I was in Mexico and someone brought me to a shaman, a mayan shaman in the Yucatan. I’ve spent a lot of time in the Yucatan. I feel very at home there. Fluent in Spanish. I’m very connected to the land and culture. So this wasn’t like a totally shocking foreign thing, but basically the, the dude said to me, you need to let your daughter go. Yeah, it was within the first year. It was definitely within the first year. I was like, oh my God, I have to let her go. I mean, I might as well, someone might have said, climb Everest by tomorrow at noon. There was no way that that was going to happen. And I felt like there was something wrong with me, that I was flawed because it was such an impossible thought. Not long after, I was back home here in Taos and a visiting Zen teacher came, who happened to be a woman. We had Duksan and we were sitting together in an interview and she was just asking me what was up. And of course, that’s what came up is my daughter died a year ago or less, whatever it was. And, you know, when you have a great trauma, many of you know, you experience traumatic brain damage in a way. And so you forget about time is very fluid for me. In those first year, couple years after Jenny’s death, but anyway, it was early on, and I was talking about my difficulty in letting go, and she was like, are you kidding me? You’re a woman. You’re a mother. We’re not supposed to let go of our children. And when a child dies, it is a fundamental rupture of that truth, that that attachment is appropriate. When the Buddha talked about attachment, either he didn’t know about a mother’s attachment to her child, or that’s not what he was talking about. That’s not the kind of attachment that we were being encouraged to use contemplative practice to see beyond. That’s an attachment that is appropriate. And that was so helpful to me.

00:56:48 – Eric Zimmer
There’s a story in the buddhist tradition that I sometimes have taught in the habits that matter program. What is your take on that story?

00:56:57 – Mirabai Starr
So just a nutshell version, y’all, of that mustard seed story, or the Kisa Gautami story is this is a young woman whose child has died, and she is absolutely distraught. This is a perfect example, Eric, that you brought this up. She’s beside herself with anguish, and she is carrying the corpse of her childhood around her village and wailing and saying, can anybody bring my child back to life? And, of course, makes everyone very uncomfortable. She’s kind of nuts. She’s crazy with grief. And finally, someone says, we can’t do it. I can’t do it. But there is this guy who’s teaching in the forest not far away, and people say amazing things about him. Why don’t you take your child to him and see if he can do it? Because if anybody could, he could. Of course, it’s Siddhartha, Gautama, the Buddha. And so she’s very excited by this possibility. And she hauls the corpse of her child into deer park or wherever the forest is, where the Buddha is giving his discourses. She charges in, like Mary Magdalene, where Jesus is feasting with the tax collectors. She just comes right on in, and she lays her child at his feet, interrupts his discourse, and says, master, I hear that you can bring my child back to life. Can you please? And the Buddha looks at her with unconditional compassion and says, okay, I’ll tell you what. Go back to your village, knock on every door and collect a mustard seed from every household that has not experienced the death of a loved one. Bring back this collection of seeds. I will concoct a magic potion that will bring your child back to life. So thrilled, she hauls her baby’s body back to the village, knocks on every door, and of course, not a single household has been free of the experience of the death of a loved one. And she goes back to him, and she says, you tricked me. And in that moment, in his absolute. Ugh, just makes me cry. His absolute, unconditional, loving response to her that no words needed to be exchanged. She woke up. What did she wake up to? She didn’t let it go. She didn’t rise above and transcend her grief. What she experienced in her body was the felt sense of, oh, everybody experiences loss, grief, sorrow. Someone we love is gonna die, and we’re going to wish they hadn’t. I belong to this web of interbeing, as thich nhat Hanh called it, and we all do. That was the liberation, as we belonged to each other.

00:59:42 – Eric Zimmer
I love that story for that reason. And when you were talking about the Buddha and attachment, I was bringing it up, because to me, that story isn’t a Buddha saying, get over it. It might seem like in a superfluous reading of it, that that’s what happens to. She realizes everybody else has death, and she goes, okay, well, I do, too. And now I’m not grieving. That’s not what it is about. It’s about I’m just not alone in my grieving. And what’s happening to me is not a mistake. Yeah. A problem that I have done something or goes against the order of the universe. And I’ve experienced similar things, like losing a dog. I’ve told this story on the podcast many times, but I lost one dog, and I was like, all right, that’s terrible. Deeply grieving. And then not long after, we lost another dog who got cancer, who was young, and there was a part of me that went, that’s not right. That’s not fair. Two dogs in that amount of time. He was too young. He was. But I had enough wisdom to just go, that’s what happens. Living things get sick. They die. And it didn’t lessen my grief at all, but I didn’t have a bone to pick with the world over it or the universe. It actually allowed me to inhabit my grief.

01:00:54 – Mirabai Starr
Beautiful.

01:00:55 – Eric Zimmer
And I think that’s that story, right? She’s actually able to inhabit her grief, which means she will heal in whatever. When we could have a long conversation about what healing from grief even means. But there is a healing, and she’s able to begin that path by realizing that what’s happening to her is not unique, and she’s connected to everyone else.

01:01:17 – Mirabai Starr
And there’s something deliciously holy about that realization.

01:01:21 – Eric Zimmer
Yep. It’s the realization I think that is at the heart of when twelve step programs work. That makes them work. That is one of the key things, fellowship. You walk in and all these shameful, awful things that you’ve thought and felt and everything, and you hear people all around you saying the same thing and laughing about it, and you go, oh, my God, I’m not alone. And up till that point, at least my experience and hearing enough other people talk to it, you think you’re uniquely insane. You think you’re uniquely crazy. Why do I keep doing this? So, yeah, it’s that recognition. As you said, we belong to each other.

01:01:59 – Mirabai Starr
Beautiful.

01:02:00 – Eric Zimmer
Well, I hate to end interviews where I’m the one who’s saying the last thing really well, but I feel like we kind of hit just a beautiful stopping point.

01:02:09 – Mirabai Starr
And for me, this whole thing was a conversation. It wasn’t just me talking about my little book. I loved that. It was conversational.

01:02:16 – Eric Zimmer
Yes. And I hope we featured your wonderful little book. Enough listeners, Mirabai and I are going to continue to talk in the post show conversation. And we’re going to talk specifically about something that is more interesting than you think it is, which is the process of translating old texts, beautiful texts, into English that Mirabai is really, really good at. If you’d like access to our post show conversations, ad free episodes, and to be part of our community, which we’d love to have you in, go to oneyoufeed.net join thank you, Mirabai.

01:02:50 – Mirabai Starr
Thank you, Eric. What a joyous.