EMBRACING
Sexual Embodiment
opening
You have experienced your body and your lover’s body as instruments, perfectly designed to play the music of the Beloved. This has at times impelled you to foist all your devotional impulses onto your intimate partners. Sometimes they appreciated it, but most of the time they didn’t even notice, or else it made them uncomfortable. You confused depressed bass players with Krishna. You tried to make pompous professors into the Lord of Love. You thought your attraction to other women would save you. They were all distractions. The radiance of the real thing was too much to bear.
Once you began to suspect that your adoration was misplaced, you shifted your quest from the bars and the ashrams to the innermost chamber of your own soul. And there (lo and behold) was the Beloved, reclining on a sumptuous bower pouring wine (naked). “It’s you!” (cried you) and you leapt into the Beloved’s arms (who laughed and covered you with kisses). It was clear the Beloved had been waiting (patiently) for a long time.
You exchanged marriage vows with the Beloved, disguised as a vow of celibacy. If I can just break my addiction to relationships, you reasoned, I can get on with loving God. For a time this promise proved promising. Then it began to fossilize. You were holding on to a notion, once a nourishing truth, and it was turning to ash in your hands. The bliss of union with the One had deteriorated into a dualistic pronouncement. Human lovers: illusory. The Divine Within: the only thing that’s real. Sexlessness seemed safe. By firing the men and women you once loved, you could avoid working out the messy particulars of the experience of incarnation, wherein your heart gets broken and your ego gets transfigured.
One day, along came someone who also loved the Beloved. And they loved you, too.
They did not love you instead of the Beloved. They loved you because they saw the eyes of the Beloved shining behind your tears. They tasted the fragrance of the Beloved between your thighs. They pondered the sacred scripture of your conversations over coffee in the mornings or wine at sunset. They claimed your relationship as the landscape where the Holy One dwells. Surprise! Their love freed you to love the Beloved. Safe in the sanctuary of their embrace, you grew strong enough to cultivate a direct connection with the sacred. You are not an obstacle, it turns out. You are the passageway from separation to union.
Now that you are well loved by a good man or a good woman, you can carry on a torrid dalliance with the Beloved. And your partner is strong enough not to mind this affair one bit. In fact, it makes them love you all the more. What is more alluring than a woman enflamed by desire for the Holy One?
All desire is holy desire. At least its roots are. Sometimes the pure flower of wanting withers and turns toxic. That’s when all kinds of aberrations and addictions start cropping up and ruining things. But the original impulse springs from love. And all love is One Love. Love is the nature of the universe.
Organized religion has desecrated the sacred altar of desire. This probably has a lot to do with the fact that men run the religious show and that they are petrified of wanting women (or other men) too much. How can they be in control of the universe when their hearts and loins are being stirred up with feelings that upset the carefully constructed and meticulously ordered structures they’ve erected (pun intended)? Religion is tidy—and therefore dependable. Sex is unpredictable—and therefore dangerous.
In every one of the world’s major spiritual traditions, we can see where men in power took a perfectly reasonable boundary and turned it into a scary sin. For example, it seems like a great idea to rein in a young man—whose hormones tend to run amok—for a spell, by means of a temporary commitment to celibacy. It’s like fasting: it flushes the systems and clarifies the perspective.
But it would be counterproductive to spend one’s entire life starving. A lifelong vow of celibacy may work fine for some people, but for others it represses wholesome desires by shoving them into the dark, where they fester into a range of unhealthy behaviors, from overeating to child abuse. This is the type of trouble that’s plagued the Catholic Church, where clergy are required to take a lifetime vow of celibacy. It is not only the Roman Catholic tradition that glorifies renunciation. Many Hindu and Buddhist monastic communities also require vows of chastity, informed by the belief that sex, if unrestrained, could lead to a breakdown of the social fabric and distract the monks from their interior life. I get it. Abstinence has its spiritual function. But forever?
What would sexuality look like if, instead of forbidding people to have sex with each other (or themselves), we encouraged mindfulness in all our sensual experiences? What happens when, as we caress our lover’s belly, we become intentionally curious about every nuance of the contact between our fingers and their skin? What about when our lover treats the curve of our clavicle and the rising of our nipples with complete attention? The power of presence softens the lines between self and other. This is what the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber meant by an “I-Thou” relationship. When we deeply connect with another being, we touch the Divine. It is difficult to objectify and abuse someone with whom you are fully present and in whose face you behold the face of God.
The Shadow
Of course, desire has its dark side. When I was a teenager, I hooked up with a much older guy (a.k.a. “the charlatan master”) who lavished me with more attention than I had ever received in my life. I was beautiful! I was brilliant! And practically an enlightened being! Not only did he make me feel special, but he made me feel safe and protected. Coming from an offbeat upbringing that involved a large dose of chaos and uncertainty, the constancy of his care was a cave in which I took refuge.
It’s also where we hid. Something in my soul knew the intimacy was wrong. I remember one night at a farm in Mendocino, California, where we had a caretaking gig. We had been washing dishes in the kitchen after dinner and it was late. To get back to the cabin in the woods where we were staying with a few friends, we had to pass through a dense redwood forest. It was so dark I could not see him beside me, but I could feel him. I could hear his footfalls and smell his unwashed hair.
Suddenly, an ominous feeling came over me. The hairs on my arms rose, and a chill ran down my spine. I felt that I was in the presence of true evil, and every muscle in my body was poised to bolt. “This is ridiculous,” I chided myself. “This is your beloved. He is a saint (he told you so himself). Get a grip.” I forced myself to dismiss the creepy feeling as an artifact of my unruly imagination. Or maybe, I argued to myself, what was happening was that the forces of darkness were trying to blot out the light that was being generated by our sacred love.
By this point we had been having illicit sex for about a year. I had grown to depend on his affection and could not bear the thought of being without him. And so I stuffed that warning signal under the covers of my heart, and whenever I detected the flashing red light through the layers of denial, I rationalized it away.
I recall another time when I knew that I was snared in a toxic web with this man. We were camping alone in the desert of Canyonlands National Park. One day we decided to drop acid. Now, I should let you know here that I was terrified of drugs, having had LSD slipped to me when I was thirteen, which, as I mentioned earlier, precipitated years of flashbacks and dissociative states. But my lover convinced me that tripping in this beautiful environment with my valiant protector to guide me would be not only safe but also liberating.
It was neither safe nor liberating. As the effects of the drug crashed over me, I perceived my beloved as the devil. I didn’t even believe in such a creature, but in that moment this man, my intimate, embodied every fantasy image of Satan. He was foul and cruel, despotic and pathetic. And he wanted to consume my soul. If I could have fled I would have, but there was nowhere to go. And so I perched on a slab of sandstone beside him and silently waited out the voyage through hell. Eventually we got up and drove slowly through the campground, listening to Dire Straits on the car stereo, which calmed me a little, and when the sun began to set, splashing the desert with fractured light, we scrambled some eggs, fried some bacon, and drank beer. The Evil One faded. My man lit the Coleman lantern and read me another chapter from Autobiography of a Yogi.
There is a balance women must strike between dropping the sexual constraints imposed on us by several millennia of patriarchal oppression and maintaining boundaries grounded in self-care. On the one hand, we are calling out men who have used positions of privilege and power to molest and demean women, demanding they wake up to their unconscious misogyny and take responsibility for their hurtful actions. On the other hand, we are claiming ownership of our own desires and celebrating the freedom to fully inhabit our bodies and enjoy our interaction with other free bodies. This dance of conscious intimacy is one of the most sacred practices available to us and one of the most daring.
DIVINE DYSMORPHIA
Women know. Our bodies know. Our souls know. We are blessed and cursed with the ability to sense malevolence. We can tell when we are unsafe, when we are being violated. Even though I was raised by feminist parents and came of age in a society that was much better at empowering women than it had ever been, I was still heir to certain cultural throwbacks that encouraged me to stuff my knowing in favor of being taken care of. The charlatan—this man who secretly slept with me while I was a teenager and whom I later married—was my life. If I were to leave him, he assured me, the integrity of the universe would come undone. I left. And sure enough, when I left it all unraveled. I hurtled through the universe . . . and landed in the center of my own being.
Yet, while I am now so intimate with my own core that I am unlikely to stray far, I still waver. I still find myself subtly seeking the approval of men, and something in me relaxes when I get it. I still buy into society’s standards of feminine beauty. I confess to being overly concerned with my body mass index. I can (and do) look at women who are much heavier than I am with appreciation of their beauty. I find their soft curves sexy. But I strive for a jutting clavicle, an angular pelvis, a concave belly in myself. I count every calorie I consume, reflexively tallying them at the end of each day. I compulsively exercise, eager to make up lost days at the gym. Whenever my jeans become a little tight, my self-worth begins to deflate.
It embarrasses me to admit this, and yet it would be disingenuous to pretend that just because I am writing this book on feminine wisdom, I am wise about all the ways I may have internalized five thousand years of values that benefited men over women. I long ago realized that my eating issues are less about aesthetics than they are about power. I’m not trying to win a swimsuit competition. I am trying to muscle in a place at the table with the big boys. If only my hips were straight and my chest flat, I could pass as a guy! Then I would not have to apologize for my existence, for my passion and my opinions.
I am a woman with curves. Even if I were to starve myself (which I tried throughout my twenties) I would still have wide hips and full breasts. My thighs would still be thick, and my ass would still be rounded. So this antifat crusade is an exercise in futility. I am not suggesting that women simply capitulate and abandon all efforts to be healthy and fit. Tending the vessel of this body is a sacred act. Eating clean, healthy foods and engaging in physical exertion are forms of prayer. But I am not always clear on the difference between self-care and body dysmorphia. I don’t always know if I am watching what I eat and lifting weights out of liberated self-love or unconscious self-hatred. I’m working on this. It’s hard to see our own shadow; it straggles in our wake.
What I strive to remember is that it is a worthy practice, a holy path, to honor and celebrate the body. And not just the limited ideals of the body imposed upon us by men (and unconsciously upheld by women who judge themselves and each other as not measuring up to the impossible standards of the fashion and beauty industries). The awakened woman honors every shape and size and hue of the physical form. The Divine Feminine is a prism who throws her radiant reflections in all directions. She is prepubescent, and she is ancient. She is lithe, and she is voluptuous. She is rich brown and she is opalescent. She has two breasts or one or none. She is sighted or blind, in robust health or grappling with a terminal diagnosis. She is gorgeous and perfect. She is desirable, and her desires are worthy. Her desires are holy. To desire her is to be blessed.
THE MIDDLE WAY
When the Buddha arose from his long samadhi (deep state of meditation) under the bodhi tree, his first discourse was about the Middle Way. He was advocating for a balance between excessive self-indulgence and radical asceticism. He preached the four noble truths in an effort to point out the road to true happiness. The first truth the Buddha identified is that existence is predicated on suffering, or dukkha, which has also, and more expansively, been translated as “unsatisfactoriness.” The second truth is that suffering has a cause, and the cause is tanha, “desire” or “craving.” The third truth is that we can reduce suffering by letting go of desire. And the fourth truth is that there is a remedy for this syndrome: the eightfold path, which consists of right views, right intention, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right meditation.
The glitch originates with a fundamental misunderstanding of the Pali word tanha. If we simply translate it as “desire” we are likely to pathologize a perfectly natural and impossible-to-eradicate attribute of the human condition. Many people have ended up using this “truth” as an excuse to beat the shit out of themselves and each other on the grounds that it must be unspiritual to fancy a good cuddle or a chocolate brownie sundae (with coffee ice cream, thank you).
I have a feeling this was the opposite of what the Buddha meant for us to take away from his famous Deer Park Sutra, his first sermon following his awakening. I believe that what the Buddha meant (and plenty of people agree with me here, like the American-born teacher of Tibetan Buddhism Pema Chödrön, who expresses this more artfully than I ever could) was something like this: When we can allow things to be just what they are and show up for reality with open hands, clear eyes, and a compassionate heart, a space opens in which there is room for both the fire of desire and also equanimity. We can want without clinging. We can release without pushing away. And when we surrender to reality, reality doesn’t hurt as much.
The way of the feminine is about neither repressing nor indulging. Well, maybe it’s a tad indulgent, since it’s about reclaiming the holiness of passion, blessing the burning of yearning, saying yes to the wild, untamed, unrestrained dance of life. It’s more about celebrating the holy sweetness of the body: sex, food, exercise, rest.
Reimagining the Mary Magdalene Archetype
In Dark Night of the Soul, John of the Cross describes Mary Magdalene’s passion for Jesus as symbolic of the birthright of the human soul so on fire for God that she will do whatever is necessary to get to her Beloved. Mary storms the halls of the rich and powerful, demanding to see her Beloved, and when she finds him dining with the dudes she cracks open a bottle of priceless nard (an aromatic oil) and washes his feet with it. Then she dries each foot with her hair. Is Jesus mortified that his female disciple would show up uninvited in an exclusive male space? Nope. Is he horrified that she would squander such an expensive substance? He is not. Does he tell her she does not belong? He doesn’t. Instead, he praises her for her love and uplifts her as an example to us all.
In Hinduism, the feet of the guru are incomparably holy. To touch the dust of the Beloved’s lotus feet symbolizes the relationship between teacher and disciple. There is another biblical story in which the Magdalene washes her Beloved’s feet with her tears. She is watering the lotus feet of the guru from the wellspring of her love and her pain, and the Beloved blooms for her and for all beings!
As it turns out, the woman in the Gospels who washes Jesus’s feet and dries them with her hair may not have been Mary Magdalene at all. Recent scholarship suggests that conflating an unknown female “sinner” with Mary Magdalene may have been a way the early Roman church attempted to marginalize and discount her power and influence on Jesus’s life. Mary was, in fact, a woman of means, and a close companion of Jesus, on whose resources the young Rabbi Jesus and his immediate followers seemed to depend. The church has continued to minimize Mary Magdalene’s legitimacy ever since and to use her as an excuse to denigrate women and bar them from positions of religious authority.
Not only was Mary Magdalene an apostle in her own right, but she was probably the Apostle of the Apostles, a status officially conferred upon her by Pope Francis at the late date of 2016! The Magdalene was present at the foot of the cross as Jesus suffered and died, present at his burial, present to anoint his body the morning after Shabbat, when he first revealed his resurrected self and sent her off to spread the good news of his deathlessness to the rest of the disciples. It was around six hundred years later, during the rule of Pope Gregory I, that Mary Magdalene was relegated to the status of repentant prostitute. From then on, her mastery was (intentionally) blotted out.
Was there more to Jesus and Mary Magdalene’s relationship than master and disciple or even religious colleagues? Probably. It seems unlikely that a young Jewish man in first-century Palestine would have been unmarried, no matter how countercultural his lifestyle may have been. It is with good reason that the literary imagination has been captivated by the question of whether or not Mary Magdalene and Jesus of Nazareth were lovers and whether they may have conceived a child together. To me, these questions are not unlike the issue of the virginity of Mary, mother of Jesus. Did Mother Mary really get pregnant without having sex, or was her “virginity” more a matter of the purity of her surrender to God?
These are intriguing speculations, yet potentially misleading. The sexual facts of the matter can distract us from what is an even more subversive question: Why did the Christian community fail to acknowledge Mary Magdalene as the intimate spiritual companion—probably closest disciple, maybe even spiritual equal—to Rabbi Jesus? And how has this mischaracterization of Mary Magdalene excluded women from full participation in Christ’s lineage? Mary’s way was the way of the heart. She exemplified devotion. The institutionalized church is the way of the analytical mind. Mary’s teachings are rooted in the body and grounded in direct experience with the sacred. The dogma of the church demanded unquestioned adherence to established doctrines and prescribed rituals. Given her personal relationship with Christ—a connection that did not require the intercession of a male authority figure—it isn’t difficult to see why Mary Magdalene would be perceived as a threat.
NEITHER MADONNA NOR WHORE
Our postmodern world is starting to recover from the Madonna and whore dichotomy bequeathed to us by the Roman church, in which our only choices as women were to either serve as loyal (read: chaste, boring) wives or dwell at the fringes of society as dirty and defiled (yet irresistible) prostitutes. We have developed a more nuanced view of female sexuality and have mostly dismissed chastity as an arcane and counterproductive concept (though it creeps into the culture in all kinds of insidious ways, leading women and girls to question our own worth when we ought to be cherishing ourselves).
Contemporary Western women have begun to recognize that we have options in this life beyond pleasing men and bearing their babies. Increasingly, men are no longer as conditioned to put their wives out to pasture, sexually speaking, after we have raised their children or to treat their spouses as their mothers once they are partnered up. Such things still happen, of course, but heightened awareness about the fullness of a woman’s personhood makes it a little harder to hide. Although our consumerist society continues to objectify young women, the cultural conversation is shifting to awaken men’s consciousness around safety, consent, and the inherent dignity of female bodies. At least white bodies. Black and brown women are still both publicly policed in ways no white woman would be and also disproportionately subject to acts of sexualized violence in staggering (and largely underreported in the white-dominated mainstream press) numbers.
Women have reached a tipping point all over the globe, refusing to be disrespected for another minute. From Hollywood to Washington, DC, from India to Mexico, inside our churches and within our extended families, we are coming together to support one another in redressing the harms incurred as a result of the age-old sanction of sexual abuse. Those of us with the privilege to express our anger without fearing for our lives are engaging in fierce truth telling, defying all the unspoken rules that make us pay for speaking out.
We haven’t made as much headway when it comes to women’s power as we have with women’s sexuality. We still seem to expect our female political leaders to be tough and shrewd, and then we blame them for being “too masculine.” In the spiritual arena, women who become leaders often capitulate to the masculine prerogative, earning titles and amassing followers who then assign these women a kind of elevated status that sets them apart. While women’s access to seminaries and our ability to be ordained is a cause for celebration, female rabbis, roshis, priests, and swamis often unconsciously recreate the very structures feminism seeks to dismantle. They issue commands, demand obedience, and preside over rituals reserved for elite religious officials, effectively barring anyone who is not formally sanctioned from sharing spiritual gifts of their own.
Sacred Spectrum
Embodied feminine spirituality is not confined to the domain of those who identify as female. Just as rigid religious affiliation is evolving before our eyes into recognition of the living truth at the heart of all spiritual traditions, so too does a more fluid relationship with sexual identity liberate us to cultivate a direct and authentic connection with the sacred. Many First Nations peoples have recognized for millennia that some individuals are gifted with both a male and a female soul, which endows them with the ability and the responsibility to serve as healers for their communities.
My friend Kishan is a sun dancer in the Lakota tradition. They have also been a nonbinary person for as long as they can remember (“they” is the pronoun many nonbinary people prefer). Originally from Trinidad, Kishan carries their Afro-Caribbean roots into their Lakota life. My friend is a contemplative activist who spends long hours in silence and stillness every day and is also engaged in social justice issues in Albuquerque, where they also live.
One day, in meditation, Kishan was told that they must go on a solitary vision quest on ceremonial land, dragging the sacred buffalo skull tethered to their pierced back, and that they must do this on behalf of the Divine Feminine. Like any respectable prophet, Kishan second-guessed the divine summons, and then gave in.
In the midst of their solitary agony, Kishan had a vision of Jesus. They understood that Jesus was there to share their suffering and that they were never really alone, that no one is ever truly alone. The masculine model of suffering alone for the sake of spiritual development has no place in the sacred heart of the Christ. Jesus was helping Kishan to carry their cross, to bear the buffalo skull, to receive a healing vision, to dance to the sun for the Divine Feminine.
Jesus coming to the aid of a dark-skinned nonbinary sun dancer from the Caribbean who carries a buffalo skull in honor of the Divine Feminine? Yes! Kishan is not the only person I know who is challenging existing stereotypes of feminine spirituality. One of the most gifted philosophy students I ever had the honor to teach, the child of a Jewish mom and a Chicano dad, not only transitioned from male to female but also converted to Islam, upending half a dozen cultural assumptions about what it is to be a woman on a path of spiritual awakening (combined, by the way, with a committed practice of social justice). And then there’s Billy, a transgender man who used to be a neo-pagan feminist named Annie. Billy told me that when he was a member of an exclusively female Wiccan group, he spent a lot of energy trying to embody the Goddess. This never felt quite right. Now that he’s a man, Billy revels in being the consort of the Goddess, rather than trying to be the Goddess. If anything, he says, he has begun to embody Pan, the horned god, who loves and protects the Goddess and all her children.
More and more children in Western society seem to be entering adulthood with an expansive sense of their own gender identity. I see this expressed in the classrooms where I teach and filling the horizons of every social media platform. These youth approach sexuality with an open heart and a curious mind, ready to love whom they love, without the burden of preconceived gender roles to limit their encounter with the beauty of the other. This spaciousness gives me hope for a more peaceful world, one in which it is the heart that leads the way.
The Divine Masculine
Sometimes guys challenge people like me: “Hey, why don’t you ever talk about the Divine Masculine?”
I have a couple of responses. One is: “Because thousands of years of male domination have sort of thrown the world out of balance, and this conversation about the Divine Feminine is an effort to rectify that a bit.”
My other response is: “I have no idea what that even looks like.”
Then I remember to take off my armor and allow myself to feel what the Divine Masculine looks like in my heart. And I realize it looks like my husband, Ganga Das (a.k.a. Jeff). And my brother, Roy. And my dear friend, a Roman Catholic priest and iconographer whom I affectionately call Father Billy. And at least a dozen other men I know and love (or admire from afar).
My husband embodies that mythical blend of manly man and nurturer. When we first got together, Ganga Das had three daughters of his own, and I brought two more into the mix. The man ended up with five daughters! And a couple of wives. Well, not at the same time. In fact, there was a respectable gap between us, during which he engaged in the rigors of shadow work—at first through attending a group or two, then by reading books like Iron John and Codependent No More, and ultimately by turning fully inward to face himself with curiosity and courage. By the time I got him, he was deliciously seasoned and ready to step up as a divine dude.
Ganga Das does all those things men have been conditioned to do for women. He fixes broken stuff, navigates us through cities and wildernesses, whacks the weeds with his gas-powered weed whacker, grills chicken on the barbecue, and lights the pilot of the radiant floor system at the end of October. I cannot tell you how much I appreciate all of these tasks, how I rest in them.
He also prepares the perfect cup of tea with milk and honey and presents it to me with a gallant flourish. He listens to the same litany of self-doubts—ever newly reimagined—while we’re soaking together in the tub. He thinks I’m smart and also wise, and he finds a way to mention this almost every day. Whenever I take off my clothes he gasps as if I were Venus stepping off the half shell and into his arms, even though we have been together for a couple of decades and I’m showing signs of wear and tear by now. When I have some new accomplishment he celebrates me, and when I am disappointed he comforts me, and when I am sick he tends me. But he does not overdo the praising or the commiserating or the nursing. His care is grounded in dignity—both his own and mine.
In case you are currently turning green with envy, let me just say that the other thing that makes my husband a reliable example of the Divine Masculine is his very human collection of flaws. Ganga Das is a Vietnam veteran, and he is not all that connected to his emotions. He can be very supportive to others in distress, but he rarely allows himself to fully feel his own feelings. The only times I have ever seen him cry were for about thirty seconds when his father died and maybe another half a minute when my daughter died. It was not as if he didn’t love these two people with all his heart. He did. And he mourned them. But something in his psyche has been quashed by a combination of his middle-class American upbringing, being drafted as a young surfer into the army and shipped off to Southeast Asia, and subsequent years of living in an ashram engaging in rigorous sadhana (spiritual practice). As a result he does not do well with messy feelings. Instead, he makes jokes. He is very funny. This playful spirit has gotten him far—and also far away. I live with this paradox. So does he. It does not trouble me.
So what does the Divine Masculine look like as it’s walking this earth? It looks like men who can make fun of themselves, laughing at the great cosmic joke happening in the form of their own lives, and cracking up the rest of us with their irreverent holy wit. It also looks like kindness. Cascades of loving-kindness, freely offered, without a trace of entitlement. Like Hanuman, the monkey god in the Hindu tradition, whose saintliness is intertwined with his thinking that he’s nothing special, the men I perceive as the most luminous examples of the Divine Masculine would never, ever agree with me about their divinity. They think they’re just monkeys.
Phases of Life
Our relationships with ourselves and each other morph as we mature. Change is built into our bodies. Hormones influence the shape of our desires. Wisdom grows even as fecundity diminishes. What once drove us begins to slow down enough to let us hop off and amble. We start to notice the ubiquitous beauty that we had been too distracted to notice. We come home to our own dear bodies in ways we never could have experienced when we were in full flower. What used to matter doesn’t so much, and new things become important. We are developmentally designed to accept these changes, even if we are culturally conditioned to resist them. Sometimes our most profound spiritual experiences unfold after middle age.
My friend Gangaji offers a powerful example of the way our inner lives can shift as we age, bringing us into closer contact with our embodied experience. After a lifetime of seeking, this contemporary American spiritual teacher had an awakening at the age of forty-eight, when she met her own teacher and all her striving for things to be different than they were fell away. As I pointed out to Gangaji, this is the same age that Teresa of Ávila was when she had what is referred to as her “second conversion,” in which she spontaneously realized that her heart had been closed to the truth of love that had been with her all along in the form of Christ and would be present forevermore. For both Gangaji and Teresa, direct connection to the simple truth of What Is changed everything. Up to that point, both women had expended an enormous amount of energy trying to meditate their way through the problem of being human.
“I remember sitting on the curb as an eleven-year-old girl in Mississippi trying to figure out how to get out of here,” Gangaji told me. By “here” she meant the full range of impediments imposed by her restrictive Southern life. Conditioned to believe that the right man would save her, the young Gangaji learned to use men as an escape. Sexual bliss, like ever-deepening states of meditation, succeeded in providing temporary relief from her human suffering, but true serenity eluded her until she met the Indian holy man Papaji. That’s when she discovered that “what we perceive to be in the way is the way.” She let go. She relaxed. And peace (and a good sense of humor and a big dose of loving-kindness) came flooding into the space that had been taken up by all that effort.
As we spoke about this, Gangaji had an epiphany. She was eleven when she started her quest, the same year she had her first period. She was forty-eight when her quest ended with meeting Papaji, which happened to coincide with the beginning of her menopause. Many of the experiences of those middle years—both the sexual and the spiritual—were at least partially informed by biochemistry, as they are for most women.
As the hormones began to flow, young Toni (renamed Gangaji by Papaji after he became her teacher) was swept into a dance of desire and discipline that unfolded over the course of the next four decades. These experiences carried her to great heights of bliss and deep desert spaces. As her physical reality shifted in midlife, her soul was able to naturally access the sweet ease she had always sought through spiritual practice. Gangaji laughed in delight as this realization unfurled.
We made the connection between Gangaji’s experience and the Hindu teaching of the “phases of life.” Hinduism, one of the most inclusive and accepting of all spiritual traditions, recognizes that human life tends to follow a certain trajectory. The “student” phase begins with puberty. This is when we hunger to learn all we can about life. We may sit at the feet of a teacher, absorbing all the knowledge and wisdom we can take in. In our midtwenties, most of us answer the call to partner up. This is known as the “householder” phase. We start families and engage with our communities. It is a time that is characterized by duty. In middle age, traditionally marked by the birth of the first grandchild, we return our attention to the inner life. This is the “retirement” phase. We may leave the comfort and security of home and set out on a new quest, very different from the adventure seeking of our youth, informed now by a lifetime of suffering and sweetness, of mistakes and breakthroughs. In old age, we return home, no longer driven by the need to gain spiritual wisdom. Instead, we radiate wisdom by simply being. Such a luminous elder is called a “sannyasin.”
Many of the women I know are in the retirement phase. This does not imply that they play golf all day or travel around in their RVs (though spiritual development certainly does not preclude such activities). What it means is that they have managed to raise families or have wound down careers or otherwise lost interest in an externally focused life.
The fires of spiritual longing that were kindled in their youth and dwindled as they matured are now flaming up again. But these impulses have shifted, deepened. While their appetite for direct spiritual experience has intensified, they are no longer as motivated by the desire for personal enlightenment (or even the belief in such a thing) as they once were. Their own awakening is intimately entwined with the liberation of all beings. They experience the tribulations of the world in the cells of their own bodies, and they dedicate the fruits of their spiritual efforts to the whole of the human family and to the Earth. They have stepped across the threshold from fertile woman to wise elder, and this new landscape is more wondrous than they could have imagined.
deepening
For this chapter, I’m giving you a freewriting prompt. If you’ve never done freewriting before, see “Writing Practice Guidelines”.
Your prompt is this: “My deepest desire is . . .” Let whatever arises in your mind and heart spill onto the page (or screen) as you respond to it. Allow yourself to be surprised—maybe even shocked—by what comes up. Your desires could relate to your sexual appetites or emotional needs. They could be about how you want to embody yourself—or the Divine. Don’t hold back. Get naked.