TURNING INWARD
Cultivating Contemplative Life
opening
Contemplative life flows in a circular pattern: awe provokes introspection, which invokes awe.
Maybe you’re making dinner and you step outside to snip chives from the kitchen garden just as the harvest moon is rising over the eastern slopes. She is full and golden, like one of those pregnant women who radiate from within. Suddenly you cannot bear the beauty. Scissors suspended in your hand, tears pooling at the corners of your eyes, you nearly quit breathing. Your gaze softens, and the edges of your individual identity fade. You are absorbed into the heart of the moon. It feels natural, and there is no other place you’d rather be. But the onions are burning, and so you turn away and cut your herbs and go back inside. You resume stirring the sauce and setting the table.
This is not the first time you have disappeared into something beautiful. You have experienced the unfettering of the subject-object distinction while holding your daughter’s hand as she labored to give birth to your grandson; when you curled up in bed with your dying friend and sang her Haskiveinu, the Hebrew prayer for a peaceful sleep; while yielding to your lover’s lips. You have lost yourself in heartbreak, then lost the desire to ever regain yourself, then lost your fear of death. You long ago relinquished your need for cosmic order and personal control. You welcome unknowingness.
Which is why seemingly ordinary moments like moonrises and lovemaking undo you. The veil has been pulled back. Everything feels inexhaustibly holy. This is not what they taught you in the church of your childhood. Your soul has been formed in the forge of life’s losses, galvanized in the crucible of community, fertilized by the rain of relationship, blessed by your intimacy with Mother Earth. You have glimpsed the face of the Divine where you least expected it.
And this is why you cultivate contemplative practice. The more you intentionally turn inward, the more available the sacred becomes. When you sit in silence and turn your gaze toward the Holy Mystery you once called God, the Mystery follows you back out into the world. When you walk with a purposeful focus on breath and birdsong, your breathing and the twitter of the chickadee reveal themselves as a miracle. When you eat your burrito mindfully, gratitude for every step that led to the perfect combination of beans and cheese and tortilla—from grain and sunlight to rain and migrant labor—fills your heart and renders you even more inclined to be grateful.
So you sit down to meditate not only because it helps you to find rest in the arms of the formless Beloved but also because it increases your chances of being stunned by beauty when you get back up. Encounters with the sacred that radiate from the core of the ordinary embolden you to cultivate stillness and simple awareness. In the midst of a world that is begging you to distract yourself, this is no easy practice. Yet you keep showing up. You are indomitable. You are thirsty for wonder.
The Magic Carpet of Practice
For women mystics, contemplative life is not so much a matter of transcending the illusions of mundane existence or attaining states of perfect equanimity as it is about becoming as fully present as possible to the realities of the human experience. In showing up for what is, no matter how pedestrian or tedious, how aggravating or shameful, the what is begins to reveal itself as imbued with holiness. How do we make space in our lives for this kind of sacred seeing?
It doesn’t hurt to engage in some kind of disciplined practice, such as meditation or prayer. Silent sitting becomes a magic carpet that rescues us from identifying with every neurotic thought that pops into our minds and every emotional distraction that threatens to abduct us. When we purposely build periods of reverence or stillness into our days, we practice gazing through the eyes of love, and we get better and better at seeing love everywhere we look. Your practice may take the shape of twenty minutes a day on a cushion or aimless solitary walks on the beach. It can look like kneeling in a church or a mosque or simply like following the flow of one breath to the next with your full attention.
FROM ALTERED STATES TO DESERT MIND
It took me a couple of decades of meditation practice to make my way home to the feminine contemplative path. I began my quest at fourteen. My initial training was framed by a masculine approach: it was all about crushing the ego and distrusting the body. My goal was to detach from the material plane and travel in the astral realms, an approach that aligned with my adolescent craving for transcendent modes. I was a dramatic teenager (you might have been, too). By the time I began formally studying and practicing meditative methods, not only had my life already been marked by multiple significant deaths, including the passings of my older brother and my first boyfriend, but I was having spontaneous experiences of altered states of consciousness (most likely triggered by an accidental dose of LSD at a party when I was thirteen) that knocked me off my feet and left me breathless and terrified.
I dealt with the drama through poetry. I read it. I wrote it. I composed simple melodies in a minor key and sang my poems to myself beside the Hondo River, nestled among the red willows near my home in Taos, New Mexico, and made myself cry. I drew abstract self-portraits in profile in a blank artist’s book, depicting myself with enormous sad eyes, presumably evidence of deep wisdom. I was the perfect candidate for spiritual trickery.
Along came a charlatan master who convinced me that my terrifying dissociative states were evidence of my impending enlightenment and that all I needed was someone to cultivate my sainthood and that (surprise!) he was just the man for the job. He encouraged me to leave home and move to the commune in the mountains where he lived so that he could orchestrate my awakening. Although I was not yet fifteen, my parents agreed to this arrangement. It was the 1970s, the height of the counterculture movement, and conventional social structures like the nuclear family were being reevaluated. Besides, I was on fire with desire for God, and my parents (distracted by fires of their own) trusted me.
My teacher would wake me in my freezing A-frame at 3 a.m. (“the hour of the saints and masters,” he explained) and escort me to a small adobe cell to engage in rigorous yogic breathing practices that temporarily paralyzed me, and then he would wrap me in a blanket and hold me while I returned to my body, trembling.
I meditated. I meditated in the mornings before school and in the evenings before dinner. I meditated when I lay down to sleep and when I woke in the night. I had visions. I saw colors and heard weird music and remembered past lives. I pierced the veil of maya, rendering everything I could experience through my senses as illusory. And then I let my teacher have sex with me, because, according to him, that was a crucial element of my liberation and therefore of the liberation of all sentient beings.
As you can see, there were a few things about all this that were very wrong. The most obvious one is the sexual abuse, and I have spent much of my adult life healing from this violation and trying to support women and girls in reclaiming the sovereignty of their own bodies. But what I really want to talk about here is that at the same time as I was brainwashed into giving my body away to a man who had no right to it, I was being conditioned to see the body as an illusion to be risen above. Meditation was the ticket to this blessed transcendence. By assuming a certain posture and closing my eyes, by employing mantras and visualizations, I set out on the open road of consciousness, stuck out my spiritual thumb, and hitched a ride to the edges of the cosmos. I broke through into planes of consciousness where I faced up to whatever supernatural shenanigans awaited me, leaving my pesky little body in the dust. This, I thought, was what it meant to be spiritual.
Healing from my exploitation involved not only escaping the charlatan master but salvaging the sanctity of my body and inching my way toward a more female-positive approach to things. This reclamation project spilled into my spiritual life and permeated the interior landscape. I began to leave the altered states behind, trade the razzle-dazzle of paranormal phenomena for the blessing of the ordinary. I flirted with the possibility of fully inhabiting the present moment, willing to investigate things as they are and myself as I am. I started looking with curiosity and kindness. As I developed this method of mindfulness, the impulse to be present expanded beyond the cushion and into the open field of my life. I had moments of glimpsing all phenomena with a fearless and compassionate gaze: my very own dirty kitchen and the corruption in politics, changing a diaper and changing a tire, making love and making airline reservations. These moments have grown more consistent over decades of practice.
I don’t blame my adolescent girl self for falling for the illusion that the spiritual life is about transcending the body and thereby leaving my body vulnerable to exploitation. She was on the right track—hungry for truth, thirsty for the love that is as big as the universe, ready for anything. She was brave and she was wise. But she confused the fireworks for the sun.
Eventually, I needed to make my way to the desert and sit down there. Sit quietly all night and then sit still all day until the landscape revealed itself as not barren at all but rather teeming with life. (Don’t we all? Doesn’t everyone sometimes need to hang out in blessed unknowing?)
We do not need to be afraid of the emptiness. It is in boundlessness that we meet the Real and recognize it as the face of Love. It is in groundlessness that we find our way home. When religious ideologies and their associated spiritual practices begin to take us away from our lives instead of connecting us with the center of ourselves, we need to be willing to let them go. To not be in a hurry to replace them. Instead, we can shift our focus back to the ordinary and bless it with the gift of our full attention. Then watch in awe as it brims with holy light.
NONDUALITY AND DEVOTION
Perhaps you, like I, have associated spirituality with rising above the human condition, rather than with consciously embodying it. We’ve set mind against body, elevated abstraction over engagement. We buy into a belief system that bullies us into affirming our essential coidentity with the Divine, even when we do not subjectively experience it.
Isn’t it peculiar how many of us on a contemporary spiritual path have stumbled into the trap that sets up devotion and nondualism as mutually exclusive? Nondualists have grown rigidly dualistic in this regard! We deem the devotional impulse to be delusion and set up absolute consciousness as exclusively true.
If I’ve left you in the dust here, let me catch you up with some working definitions. Nondualism, also known as nonduality, is the belief (yes, belief, as opposed to fact) that Ultimate Reality is undivided, “not two.” Notice that it does not assert that all is one but simply acknowledges that in a state of awakened consciousness all subject-object distinctions do not exist. They are transcended. There is no “I” as opposed to “other.” Any concept of ourselves as separate from God dissolves in the open sky of pure awareness. This is very nice, but why do nondualists have to also dis the devoted?
The prejudice I keep encountering—especially among what I would characterize as the Neo–Advaita Vedanta crowd, and which I’m attempting to expose here—goes like this: Nondual consciousness is superior to the devotional experience because devotion implies a naïve belief in the separation from the object of our longing (God; Love). Nondualism gets the cosmic joke and knows that it’s impossible to be separate from the one we love because there is only one Ultimate Reality and we are part of it. Therefore, devotion is an immature inclination that is born of sublimated emotional impulses. But nondualism is a sign of spiritual maturity and should be the goal of all spiritual practice (without being goal oriented, of course, which would be dualistic).
This argument is not fair. And it is not feminine. By that I mean that if the feminine is all about incarnation and embodiment (which is what I am proclaiming in this book), then she rests squarely in the realm of form. And in form we have separation as well as unity. We have mountain ranges and blue spruces, inner cities and dive bars, old white dudes and radical black feminists. We have teenagers in prison and moms who pine for them, grieving widows and philandering husbands, people for whom meditation practice compels them to offer themselves in service to those on the margins and other people who don’t give a shit. This world is filled with glorious, untidy multiplicity. Sometimes God feels very far away, and so we long for God. Not because we believe that God and self are ultimately existentially separate, but because here in the midst of our relative reality our souls yearn to return to where we come from: Absolute Love.
So when we engage in devotional practices like chanting the names of the Divine in any of the world’s great sacred languages or making offerings to Christ or Krishna or Quan Yin, we are opening our hearts, and our hearts are boundless. That’s where we awaken to the essential truth of not twoness. This is not an -ism; it’s a lived reality, germinated in the rich, dark soil of our devotional, form-filled experience. Rather than serve as an obstacle to undifferentiated consciousness, devotion becomes the path to what the great feminine mystic Julian of Norwich called “oneing.” A position of twoness (our little selves pining for the Divine) becomes the springboard into the infinite landscape of not twoness. And this experience of unity with the All (which is, by its nature, usually fleeting) fills our hearts and compels us to devote ourselves all over again.
I have never experienced the sublime quiet of formlessness as being at odds with my longing for and praise of God. To my mind, we are vast enough beings to synthesize these seemingly opposite attributes into a robust and animated third truth. We do not require adherence to any particular dogma—even those that seem especially enlightened—to guide our way home to the Divine. Most of the mystics I adore have had a similar hybrid of devotional and nondual experiences and outlooks. Maybe you are this breed of seeker. Let us engage, and even invent, practices that feel aligned with our own spiritual sensibilities. Trusting our soul’s innate knowingness, flinging ourselves into the mystery. Practicing in multiple spaces, with diverse communities and alone, allowing your edges to melt into the One. Then letting your heart break open all over again when you remember the unbearable beauty of the Beloved’s invisible face.
Teresa of Ávila
The important thing is not to think much,
but to love much, and so to do whatever best
awakens you to love. TERESA OF ÁVILA
I like to believe that we are all encircled by an invisible ring of loving ancestors, made up of our mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers, plus women of wisdom no longer living whom we honor as mentors, whether or not we ever met them in the flesh. I also sense there the presence of the goddesses whose stories guide our steps, along with countless unseen beings we may never even know are here with us. Let me acquaint you with the one I consider to be my personal “matron saint”: Teresa of Ávila. Investigate her masterworks (which I have had the privilege of translating into contemporary, accessible English), such as The Interior Castle and The Book of My Life, and see if she takes up residence in your own inner sanctuary, too.
Teresa is a luminous example of a devotional nature that conjoins with the lived experience of nondual states. Born into the turbulent epoch of the Spanish Inquisition, Teresa was a first-generation conversa from a Jewish family that had the good fortune to be able to buy their way out of exile and the gumption to go through the motions of converting to Christianity. But when Teresa’s father was a boy, his own father was accused of secretly practicing his ancestral Jewish traditions, which resulted in his family being publicly shamed. Actually, since Jewish rituals are mostly observed in the home and presided over by the women, it would most likely have been Teresa’s grandmother who had been doing the practicing. Perhaps she dared to light the Sabbath candles and welcome the Sabbath Bride, the spirit of Shabbat, and then bless the children. Yet the whole family took the heat. They were dragged from their house and paraded around the streets of Toledo for seven Fridays in a row, forced to kneel at every Catholic shrine in the city while church officials denounced them and ordinary citizens spat at them and hurled anti-Semitic curses.
Teresa’s father was determined that his own children would never endure the humiliation he suffered. He turned his back on Judaism and fostered a devout Catholic household. By the time Teresa was born in 1515, the only flavor of religious experience available to her, both in the Spanish culture at large and in her own traumatized family, was Christianity, and to speak of any other option was to risk banishment or death. But it had only been a few years since the great expulsion of Jews and Muslims in 1492, and so the fragrance of Judaism and Islam lingered in the air every Spanish Catholic breathed. That’s likely why Teresa’s prose is peppered with the Jewish impulse to argue with everything, especially God. And why the poetry of her protégé, John of the Cross, is steeped in images of gardens and wine, which we find everywhere in Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam.
Teresa grew up with an ambivalent relationship with the church. She loved Christ but was wary of Christianity. Whether or not she was conscious of her own Jewish roots and the very real danger these posed, she seems to have perceived the heavy hand of the institutionalized church as an impediment to her lived experience of faith. Why, Teresa must have wondered, must intimacy with the Beloved be relegated to second place behind corporate loyalty? Even as she declared herself a faithful daughter of the church until the day she died, the spiritual vacuity of some of its customs left Teresa cold.
When she was twelve, her thirty-three-year-old mother died in childbirth with her ninth child, and Teresa turned to Mother Mary. She nurtured this relationship with the Blessed Mother throughout her life, but this connection did not magically subdue the girl or render her meek and mild. By the time she was sixteen, Teresa was constantly getting into trouble. At last, she became embroiled in a scandal dramatic enough that her father sent her away to a convent to be “educated” (i.e., controlled). In her writings Teresa never specifies what transgression she committed. Did she lose her virginity? Did she take an unchaperoned walk in the garden with a boy? Was she caught kissing a girl? All we know is that by banishing her to the nunnery, Teresa’s father was wagering that his wayward daughter would chill out and learn some womanly skills before returning home to commence a respectable life, marrying an appropriate gentleman and making babies.
Accustomed to an unusual degree of freedom in her motherless household, at first Teresa pushed back against the rules and restrictions of religious life. Naturally gregarious and talkative, she felt stifled by the imposed silence and solitude. Little by little, however, her psyche seemed to settle and her nervous system to relax. She began to take refuge in the daily sessions of contemplative prayer, finding a secret oasis in the quiet spaciousness between periods of vocal liturgy.
So it was a different kind of subversive act, another act of rebellion altogether, when Teresa informed her father that she wished to actually join the convent to which she had been exiled and profess her vows as a nun. Her long-suffering dad did not see this coming. He tried to talk her out of it. It was obvious to everyone who knew her—to Teresa, most of all—that this was not a girl suited to monastic life. Indeed, Teresa spent the next twenty years languishing in self-imposed isolation from the world she loved. She could not accommodate herself to a small and regimented reality. And so finally, after a couple of decades, she created a new one. From the inside.
But first she had to experience a radical conversion of the heart.
It wasn’t until Teresa was in her late thirties that she stumbled upon her Beloved at last and fell headlong into a love affair that would transfigure her life. One day, as she was striding through the convent hallway, she noticed a statue of Christ scourged at the pillar, bound and crowned with thorns. In preparation for an upcoming celebration, someone had left it leaning against the wall. Annoyed, Teresa bent to pick it up and carry it to an appropriate location. This is when her glance caught the gaze of the suffering Christ, and their eyes locked.
His countenance undid her—the blend of harrowing pain and unconditional love, of vulnerability and intimacy. Teresa’s heart filled and flooded, releasing her from her exile in the religious desert and catapulting her into the garden of mystical connection. She flung herself onto the stone floor in full prostration and, unleashing tears she had contained all her life, apologized to her Beloved for having neglected him, promising always to remember this great love. In fact, true to her defiant nature, Teresa refused to get up until he could assure her that he would never let her forget how deeply she loved him. Christ heeded Teresa’s demands. Their love was a flame that animated her till the day she died, an ever-flowing cup of wine that continually intoxicated her.
This “second conversion” of Teresa’s in the convent hallway triggered her propensity for experiencing ecstatic states. But this tendency toward rapture was balanced by her desire to be of service. She wanted everyone—especially women—to have access to direct connection with the Divine inside the sanctuary of their own souls. She founded a reform movement called the Barefoot (Discalced) Carmelites, in honor of her commitment to the contemplative values of voluntary simplicity, solitary quietude, and intimacy with the Beloved in unceasing prayer.
When Teresa was fifty-two, she encountered the brilliant young mystic who would come to be known as John of the Cross, another member of the devotional/nondual hybrid tribe I have been describing. With characteristic charm and eloquence, Teresa persuaded John to partner with her in founding contemplative communities all over Spain. The pair was persecuted for their efforts. When John was twenty-nine, a group of mitigated (mainstream) Carmelite brothers broke into his room in the middle of the night and abducted him. They carried him to a remote monastery in the hills outside Toledo and locked him in a tiny, fetid cell that had once been a latrine, where he languished for nine months.
John’s horrific incarceration became the catalyst for his spiritual descent into the depths of darkness that paradoxically delivered him to a wellspring of light. From this unexpected luminescence he drank deeply. With nowhere to hide from the pain of betrayal by his own brethren, and feeling abandoned by the God he loved, John gradually transformed. His inner reality became a state of spiritual nakedness, and there he experienced union with the Beloved, the object of his heart’s deepest longing. This transformation gave rise to the teachings for which John of the Cross is famous, what he called “the dark night of the soul,” as well as to his ecstatic poetry.
Meanwhile, Teresa plunged into a period of unrelenting visions, voices, and raptures, which often unfolded in public settings, such as the convent chapel during Mass, in which she occasionally levitated! These dramatic episodes caught the attention of the Spanish Inquisition; coupled with the impurity of her blood, tainted by her family’s recent Jewishness, this was all the excuse they needed to investigate her. They demanded that the middle-aged nun document every spiritual incident she had ever experienced, as far back as she could remember, so that they could determine whether this pattern indicated delusion caused by the devil or supported her claims of being blessed by the Divine. If they could prove that Teresa had been captured by the spirit of evil, they could justify shutting down the reform she led. But Teresa so charmed the inquisitors with her wit and insight that they ended up blessing her dissident project in spite of themselves.
I see John and Teresa as a kind of Möbius strip, each one curving to complete the other. While they both exemplify this dual/nondual love dance, their personalities led them to express it differently, and their genders seem to have reinforced their distinct experiences. John’s outward demeanor was characterized by reticence, quietude, invisibility. Inwardly, John was on fire with passionate yearning for union with the Beloved, intent on escaping from concepts and the house of the senses to meet up with the Beloved for a secret rendezvous in the garden. Outwardly, Teresa was dramatic, emotional, extroverted. But her inner life was bathed in the sweet peace of companionship with the One she loved.
Let’s say that Teresa’s way is the way of the feminine. She fully inhabited and embodied her life. For Teresa, merging with God meant turning inward and following the fragrance of love all the way to the center of her own being, where the Beloved dwelled. It’s from here that he called to her and from here he welcomed her home. She found traces of this presence everywhere she went. This is the trajectory Teresa so masterfully describes in her guide to spiritual development, The Interior Castle. Her spirituality is Christ-centric. Jesus is the form that connects Teresa to the formless. The space where she meets her God is intimate, womb-like, and profoundly personal. The convention among the Spanish mystics of referring to God as the masculine Beloved (He) and the soul as the feminine lover (she) reflects the earthy eroticism of this relationship.
As we have seen, most of the world’s great religions have tended to emphasize transcending the body and other mundane distractions. This is no surprise, since their primary administrators have historically been men determined to conquer their bodily attachments to be worthy of the Divine encounter. Meanwhile, back in the kitchen, it is the women who transmit the living heart of religion, lighting the candles, singing the prayers, cleaning up the afterbirth, and bathing the dead. “God,” Teresa famously declared, “lives among the pots and pans.”
Like a favorite aunt discovered in adulthood, Teresa has become my “shero,” my confidante, my role model for living a passionately engaged life in which the lines between immanence and transcendence disappear and contemplation and action are inseparable. But I did not always recognize Teresa of Ávila as my ally. In fact, when I first encountered her I tried to sidestep her. She appeared to be standing between me and my love interest, Saint John of the Cross, whose quiet radiance I have always adored. For John, union was a matter of “climbing a secret ladder in disguise” up and out of this relative world to a place where “all my senses were suspended,” as he declares in his own masterwork, Dark Night of the Soul.
But then there was Teresa, overshadowing him with her flashy fire. While John, in characteristically masculine fashion, slipped into his solitary cave in the hills above the monastery in Segovia to meditate on La Nada (Holy Emptiness), Teresa charged across the Castilian countryside, founding convents and subverting authority. For John, union with God was about dismantling, disassembling, deconstructing all corporeal and conceptual forms in a passionate pursuit of the Formlessness that lies beyond the realm of the senses and intellect. For Teresa, union was a matter of embracing every particle of inescapable reality as imbued with, dripping with, overflowing with divinity.
I used to think these perspectives on the Holy One were mutually exclusive. John’s desert spirituality. Teresa’s earthy warmth. But as it turns out, they are identical. John’s practice of resting in the emptiness sparked his blaze of adoration. His passion for God is unmatched in the literary canon of any religion in any age. Teresa’s impulse to pray and praise yielded her to a state of blessed nonduality. For her, the highest form of prayer was what she called “The Prayer of Quiet,” in which the soul simply rests in the presence of the Friend and any trace of separation between them evaporates. Once I recognized that both of these approaches—the dual and the nondual, the devotional and the ascetic—abide comfortably together in my own soul, any meaningful discrepancy between these two Spanish mystics dissolved.
In the terms of devotion, the lover (the soul) and Beloved (the Divine) begin as one. The lover suffers from the illusion of separation, but then lover and Beloved are restored to oneness. The soul’s longing leads to divine union. In the terms of nonduality, the lover and Beloved have never been two; they have always been one and ever shall be. The soul’s task is simply to remember.
Finding Our Inner Queendom
Teresa of Ávila’s theology of innerness was revolutionary. She saw that the soul of every human being is designed as a kind of queendom—a magnificent “interior castle”—with softly rounded rooms leading ever inward toward a luminous center inhabited by Love itself. It is a blessed realm meant for all of us. Teresa of Ávila extends a radical invitation to drop our moralistic self-recriminations, dispense with dogma, strip off the cloak of our preconceptions, and step naked into the arms of the Beloved. The intimacy we discover there inspires us to harvest the fruits of love and feed the hungry world.
In her vision of the soul as an interior castle, Teresa identifies seven stations of the journey to divine union, using the analogy of seven primary dwellings within the palace. The outer spaces represent the beginning of our journey home. The light of the Divine is dim at first, and her voice is faint. But both the radiance and the God song increase in clarity and volume the closer we come to the center.
The early stations are concerned with discipline and humility. Here we intentionally cultivate self-knowledge. We engage in contemplative prayer as a way to be closer to the Beloved. We may not always see her or feel her in the dark. It’s like sleeping next to someone at night, Teresa tells us. You don’t need visual or tactile evidence to know she is there. In fact, it would be crazy to believe she is gone just because you don’t see her. Listen for the sound of her breath. Take comfort in her proximity.
As the journey unfolds it builds momentum. We have met the one we love. We have fallen head over heels. Our love has been reciprocated. The wedding date is set. Now we cannot wait to consummate. We defy convention and take the most direct path to union, even if that route does not appear on any map. Who has patience for maps? We dispense with all suggestions and plunge into the wild. We turn inward.
Contemplative life is a tapestry of intention and surrender, of reaching out and letting go, of stillness and exhilaration, form and formlessness. It is devotional and nondual. It is grounded in our connection with the Earth and our interconnectedness with all beings. And it is about moments of rapture in the face of the most ordinary phenomena, in which our particular embodied experience gives way to an undifferentiated melding with All That Is. This is the dance of masculine and feminine, which call each other from the core of our soul DNA, demanding reunification and wholeness.
GARDEN OF PRAYER
Teresa compares developing contemplative life to cultivating a garden. In her Vida (Life Story), she thrills herself by coming up with the analogy of “four waters of prayer.” The first water of prayer is labor-intensive. We walk to the well, lower a bucket down, down, down, and then haul it up. Water sloshes over the sides, and we lose about half. Then we have to schlep it across the yard to the garden, where we carefully pour it on the ground and beg the seeds to germinate. This equates to intentionally nurturing a discipline of contemplative practice.
The second water of prayer still requires effort, but there is some support. We crank a waterwheel, which draws the water from the source and channels it along an elaborately engineered aqueduct, delivering the water through a spout into a waiting vessel some distance away. The water splashes noisily and makes a big deal of itself as it arrives. We keep meditating. We have moments of insight.
The third water of prayer is more direct. Through an arrangement of irrigation ditches (a system designed by the Moors of medieval Spain), we simply lift a wooden gate and the water flows from the acequia madre, the “mother ditch,” along each channel, nourishing the tender shoots by soaking the ground around them. We rest in deepening states of quiet.
The fourth and by far most efficacious water of prayer is rain. And rain is grace. It can be neither forced nor engineered, neither cajoled nor bargained for. Rain is a gift from Spirit. Our only task is to receive it and lift our hands in praise. Our individual identity softens, and we remember we are already one with the One, and always have been, and ever shall be.
Spiritual Warriors
Contemplative life is not for the timid. It’s scary to be quiet, and it takes courage to be still. No one could be expected to sit on the battlefield of her own mind without being armed with the sword of unconditional truth in one hand and the sword of unconditional love in the other. And yet neither is the journey inward a journey for the elite. It is not necessary to pass through elaborate initiations and pay for expensive seminars to earn access to a place where we can meet Reality and say yes to it. When we turn inward, investigating the present moment with patience and inquisitiveness, we become a beach across which the wave of love may break and transform the topography of our soul. My friend Miranda Macpherson calls this inflowing experience “nectar,” invoking both its sweetness and its nourishing quality.
Miranda had a spontaneous awakening while sitting in the cave of the twentieth century’s great teacher of Advaita Vedanta (nondualism) Ramana Maharshi (1879–1950) in India. At that point, she had already spent years leading groups in contemplative practices. She was a spiritual director directing other spiritual directors. Her specialty was interspiritual devotional practices, such as guided visualizations and chanting, and she drew on wisdom teachings from all the world’s great traditions. The core element of Miranda’s approach was prayer (devotion), and the various methods of praising the One filled her heart and affected her students in a similarly uplifting way. It was hard to avoid getting hooked on these sweet encounters with the reality of love.
But the reliably overflowing spirit vessel emptied out that day in the cave. Miranda heard Ramana’s voice (though he had left his body decades earlier). “Be still,” he said. “Be nothing. Do nothing. Get nothing. Become nothing. Relinquish nothing. Rest in God.” In that moment, without hesitation, Miranda surrendered. She released the rich content of her spiritual life and let go of the sublime teachings she had studied. As she stepped into the nondual void, all those years of meditating and praying, of chanting and visualizing, fell away, and Miranda plunged into the heart of the mystery. This unsettling descent into spiritual and conceptual groundlessness continued to unfold for many months, and her former life unraveled with it. She left the center she had founded in London and entered a period of relative seclusion in California.
Then, one day while Miranda was running in the woods, a Hindu chant bubbled up from the ground of her being and emerged in song: Sri Ram Jai Ram Jai Jai Ram Om. This flow of sacred song took Miranda by surprise. She had not sung devotional music in many months. She had become incapable of engaging in the dualistic practices that had formerly been so central to her life. But now the love energy was flowing freely into the hollowed-out space of her soul.
“My heart felt as if it just exploded with light and love and ecstatic praise,” Miranda told me. “In that moment I realized that it was That praising That in my heart. As the Sufis say, ‘It is the Beloved’s own love that loves the Beloved in me.’ This was the day that prayer, devotion, and chanting returned to my life, but not as a method to get anywhere.” Rather, Miranda describes this upwelling of adoration as a natural recirculation of that nectar of grace, which is our true nature.
When we sing sacred music, we sit beneath a rushing fountain of love that washes over us and leaves us in a state of holy hush. Ecstasy empties into stillness. The Holy praises herself and grows silent. Into that silence we may fall and fall forever.
Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bodhi Svaha! This is the great Buddhist blessing at the end of the Heart Sutra, known as the Prajnaparamita (which is the embodiment of the Divine Feminine, by the way). “Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone beyond the beyond. All hail to the one who goes!”
deepening
To cultivate contemplative life, I suggest making a commitment to a daily sitting practice for thirty days. If you have a regular practice now or have sustained one in the past, try a new method and see if it revitalizes your contemplative experience. If you are new to meditation, I encourage you to investigate some of the traditional techniques listed below. It’s best to learn these methods under the guidance of a teacher or experienced practitioner. Yet even just ten to twenty minutes of following the arc of your inhale and exhale while in a seated posture, with eyes closed or softly gazing downward, can change your life.
Notice, as you experiment, whether you are naturally drawn to devotional practices or to a practice of total absorption. Where does your heart feel most happy? Or is it happy in both? Try various methods, including (but not limited to):
• Mindfulness (secular)
• Vipassana, or insight meditation
• Metta, or loving-kindness
• Tonglen, or “sending and taking”
• Zazen
• Centering Prayer
• Lectio Divina, or secular reading
• Mantra
• Dhikr, or repetition of divine names
• Visualization
Keep a daily journal of your experiences to track your journey.