Mirabai Quotes

Don't forget love; it will bring all the madness you need to unfurl yourself across the universe.

I want you to have this, all the beauty in my eyes, and the grace of my mouth, all the splendor of my strength, all the wonder of the musk parts of my body, for are we not talking about real love, real love?

My lover's gone off to some foreign country, sopping wet at our doorway I watch the clouds rupture. Mira says, nothing can harm him. This passion has yet to be slaked.

The Great Dancer is my husband," Mira says, "rain washes off all the other colors.

I have felt the swaying of the elephant's shoulders; and now you want me to climb on a jackass? Try to be serious.

This Beloved of ours is merciful and good. Besides, he so deeply longs for our love that he keeps calling us to come closer. This voice of his is so sweet that the poor soul falls apart in the face of her own inability to instantly do whatever he asks of her. And so you can see, hearing him hurts much more than not being able to hear him… For now, his voice reaches us through words spoken by good people, through listening to spiritual talks, and reading sacred literature. God calls to us in countless little ways all the time. Through illnesses and suffering and through sorrow he calls to us. Through a truth glimpsed fleetingly in a state of prayer he calls to us. No matter how halfhearted such insights may be, God rejoices whenever we learn what he is trying to teach us.

There is a secret place. A radiant sanctuary. As real as your own kitchen. More real than that. Constructed of the purest elements. Overflowing with the ten thousand beautiful things. Worlds within worlds. Forests, rivers. Velvet coverlets thrown over featherbeds, fountains bubbling beneath a canopy of stars. Bountiful forests, universal libraries. A wine cellar offering an intoxi cation so sweet you will never be sober again. A clarity so complete you will never again forget. This magnificent refuge is inside you. Enter. Shatter the darkness that shrouds the doorway… Believe the incredible truth that the Beloved has chosen for his dwelling place the core of your own being because that is the single most beautiful place in all of creation.

One night as I walked in the desert the mountains rode on my shoulders and the sky became my heart, and the earth - my own body, I explored. Every object began to wink at me, and Mira wisely calculated the situation, thinking: My charms must be at their height now would be a good time to rush into His arms, maybe He won't drop me so quick.

Your God would never punish you for being a human being: this life itself is your penance...But it is also more than that: it is a crucible for transformation. Each trial, every loss, is an opportunity for you to meet suffering with love and make of it an offering, a prayer. The minute you lift your pain like a candle the darkness vanishes, and mercy comes rushing in to heal you.

When we show up to make art, we need to get still enough to hear what wants to be expressed though us, and then we need to step out of the way and let it. We must be willing to abide in a space of not knowing before we can settle into knowing.

Without the energy that lifts mountains, how am I to live?

The heat of midnight tears will bring you to God.

Our capacity to forgive is our superpower.

Mystics seem to have no shame about contradicting themselves left and right. They blithely proclaim that the cure for pain is in the pain itself and that the cry of longing is the sigh of merging. That's because the path of the mystic reconciles contradictory propositions (such as harrowing sorrow and radical amazement) and blesses us with an extended capacity to sit with ambiguity, to treasure vulnerability, to celebrate paradox as the highest truth.

We would much rather be undefined than ordained in traditions that don’t fit our curves.

I think that much of our depression, anxiety, and addiction has to do with what John writes about: the soul's need and longing for transcendence. This need is instinctual and unavoidable.

The more you 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 purposeful focus on breath and birdsong, your breathing and the twitter of the chickadee reveal themselves as miracles. .

civilization able to produce a Mahavira, a Mirabai, a Malik Ambar, a Periyar, a Muhammad Iqbal and a Mohandas Gandhi is a place open to radical experiments with self-definition. It

Mirabai composed many ecstatic songs which are still treasured in India; I translate one of them here: “If by bathing daily God could be realised Sooner would I be a whale in the deep; If by eating roots and fruits He could be known Gladly would I choose the form of a goat; If the counting of rosaries uncovered Him I would say my prayers on mammoth beads; If bowing before stone images unveiled Him A flinty mountain I would humbly worship; If by drinking milk the Lord could be imbibed Many calves and children would know Him; If abandoning one’s wife would summon God Would not thousands be eunuchs? Mirabai knows that to find the Divine One The only indispensable is Love.

It’s that keeping the heart open, even in hell, makes space for the Beloved. It is in the darkest nights of our souls, when all we know is that we know nothing, that the presence of the sacred may quietly well up, mingling with our pain and connecting us to a love that will never die.

My friend, I went to the market and bought the Dark One. You claim by night, I claim by day. Actually I was beating a drum all the time I was buying him. You say I gave too much; I say too little. Actually, I put him on a scale before I bought him. What I paid was my social body, my town body, my family body, and all my inherited jewels. Mirabai says: The Dark One is my husband now. Be with me when I lie down; you promised me this in an earlier life.

It lasts, and will last forever, because God loves it. Everything that is has its being through the love of God.

the heaven to which Jesus points is the spaciousness within ourselves—one that makes room for those who threaten us, for those who are different, even for those who have betrayed us.

This magnificent refuge is inside you. Enter. Shatter the darkness that shrouds the doorway. Step around the poisonous vipers that slither at your feet, attempting to throw you off your course. Be bold. Be humble. Put away the incense and forget the incantations they taught you. Ask no permission from the authorities. Slip away. Close your eyes and follow your breath to the still place that leads to the invisible path that leads you home.

She turned her attention from Maharani Putlabai to Mirabai. Why was the younger queen on a chair and not a cushion? Perhaps it was a statement of her middling position—that she was not high enough for the zenana throne, but she was respected enough not to be somewhat elevated.

Julian of Norwich's message is as relevant now as it was in the Middle Ages: God loves us completely, exactly as we are. “Then he

Take no pride in the body, It will soon be mingling with the dust. This life is like the sporting of sparrows, It will end with the onset of the night.

Jamás os pedíais nada el uno al otro, ¿verdad? Y nunca os contabais nada. Os sentabais, os mirabais y adivinabais lo que pasaba por dentro. ¡Un asilo de sordomudos, en definitiva!

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.

When someone tries to put you back into a box from which you’ve already escaped, you might recall a line from the Indian poet Mirabai. She said, “I have felt the swaying of the elephant’s shoulders and now you want me to climb on a jackass? Try to be serious!

When someone tries to put you back into a box from which you’ve already escaped, you might recall a line from the Indian poet Mirabai. She said, “I have felt the swaying of the elephant’s shoulders and now you want me to climb on a jackass? Try to be serious!”13

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.

Shabbat is about harmony. It’s about restoring balance—the balance between the masculine and feminine aspects of our own souls and the balance of power between women and men. It’s about building community and remembering our interdependence with each other and with the Earth herself, taking responsibility for our habits of consumption and allowing ourselves to rest and recharge. Shabbat is about forging a direct relationship with the Shekinah, the feminine face of God. It’s about taking refuge in her arms. Her time of exile is over now. We do not need to keep sending her away. We are called now to reinstate the feminine to her rightful place in our lives, in our relationships, and throughout creation. She belongs here and it’s time to celebrate her presence, draw on her strength, drink in her consolation, and let her guide us in repairing the world.

Let nothing disturb you. Let nothing upset you. Everything changes. God alone is unchanging. With patience all things are possible. Whoever has God lacks nothing. God alone is enough.

Ever since that troublemaker Eve handed that gullible Adam the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, they say, human beings have been continuously messing up and suffering the consequences. But in the depths of your darkest despair your Beloved calls to you: "Look," he says, and opens the fathomless beautiful wound of his heart so that you can peer inside. All creation is nestled there, bathed in beauty. "Do you see any sin here?" he asks. "Do you detect a shred of retribution?" You do not. All you perceive, from horizon to endless horizon, is love.

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?

Awake to the Name To be born in a human body is rare, Don’t throw away the reward of your past good deeds. Life passes in an instant – the leaf doesn’t go back to the branch. The ocean of rebirth sweeps up all beings hard, Pulls them into its cold-running, fierce, implacable currents. Giridhara, your name is the raft, the one safe-passage over. Take me quickly. All the awake ones travel with Mira, singing the name. She says with them: Get up, stop sleeping – the days of a life are short.

Mirabai composed many ecstatic songs, which are still treasured in India. I translate one of them here: If by bathing daily God could be realized Sooner would I be a whale in the deep; If by eating roots and fruits He could be known Gladly would I choose the form of a goat; If the counting of rosaries uncovered Him I would say my prayers on mammoth beads; If bowing before stone images unveiled Him A flinty mountain I would humbly worship; If by drinking milk the Lord could be imbibed Many calves and children would know Him; If abandoning one’s wife could summon God Would not thousands be eunuchs? Mirabai knows that to find the Divine One The only indispensable is Love. Several

Questioner: In the tradition, we were always taught to be reverential towards God or the highest aspect. So how to reconcile this with Mirabai or Akka Mahadevi who took God as their lover? Sadhguru: Where there is no love, how can reverence come? When love reaches its peak, it naturally becomes reverence. People who are talking about reverence without love know neither this nor that. All they know is fear. So probably you are referring to God-fearing people. These sages and saints, especially the seers like Akka Mahadevi, Mirabai or Anusuya and so many of them in the past, have taken to this form of worship because it was more suitable for them – they could emote much more easily than they could intellectualize things. They just used their emotions to reach their Ultimate nature. Using emotion and reaching the Ultimate nature is what is called bhakti yoga. In every culture, there are different forms of worship. Some people worship God as the master and themselves as the slaves. Sometimes they even take God as their servant or as a partner in everything that they do. Yet others worship him as a friend, as a lover, or as their own child like Balakrishna. Generally, you become the feminine and you hold him as the ultimate purusha – masculine. How you worship is not at all the point; the whole point is just how deeply you relate. These are the different attitudes, but whatever the attitude, the love affair is such that you are not expecting anything from the other side. Not even a response. You crave for it. But if there is no response, you are not going to be angry, you are not going to be disappointed – nothing. Your life is just to crave and make something else tremendously more important than yourself. That is the fundamental thing. In the whole path of bhakti, the important thing is just this, that something else is far more important than you. So Akka, Mirabai and others like them, their bhakti was in that form and they took this mode of worship where they worshipped God – whether Shiva or Krishna – as their husband. In India, when a woman comes to a certain age, marriage is almost like a must, and it anyway happens. They wanted to eliminate that dimension of being married once again to another man, so they chose the Lord himself as their husband so that they don’t need any other relationship in their lives. How a devotee relates to his object of devotion does not really matter because the purpose of the path of devotion is just dissolution. The only objective of a devotee is to dissolve into his object of devotion. Whichever way they could relate best, that is how they would do it. The reason why you asked this question in terms of reverence juxtaposed with being a lover or a husband is because the word “love” or “being a lover” is always understood as a physical aspect. That is why this question has come. How can you be physical with somebody and still be reverential? This has been the tragedy of humanity that lovers have not known how to be reverential to each other. In fact the very objective of love is to dissolve into someone else. If you look at love as an emotion, you can see that love is a vehicle to bring oneness. It is the longing to become one with the other which we are referring to as love. When it is taken to its peak, it is very natural to become reverential towards what you consider worthwhile being “one” with. For whatever sake, you are willing to dissolve yourself. It is natural to be reverential towards that. Otherwise how would you feel that it is worthwhile to dissolve into? If you think it is something you can use or something you can just relate to and be benefited by, there can be no love. Always, the object of love is to dissolve. So, whatever you consider is worthwhile to dissolve your own self into, you are bound to be reverential towards that; there is no other way to be.

If by bathing daily God could be realized Sooner would I be a whale in the deep; If by eating roots and fruits He could be known Gladly would I choose the form of a goat; If the counting of rosaries uncovered Him I would say my prayers on mammoth beads; If bowing before stone images unveiled Him A flinty mountain I would humbly worship; If by drinking milk the Lord could be imbibed Many calves and children would know Him; If abandoning one’s wife could summon God Would not thousands be eunuchs? Mirabai knows that to find the Divine One The only indispensable is Love.

If by bathing daily God could be realised Sooner would I be a whale in the deep; If by eating roots and fruits He could be known Gladly would I choose the form of a goat; If the counting of rosaries uncovered Him I would say my prayers on mammoth beads; If bowing before stone images unveiled Him A flinty mountain I would humbly worship; If by drinking milk the Lord could be imbibed Many calves and children would know Him; If abandoning one’s wife would summon God Would not thousands be eunuchs? Mirabai knows that to find the Divine One The only indispensable is Love.

E quando a gente faz as coisas com amor, há 99,99% de chances de dar certo. Com

Não sabe onde ela mesma se encontra agora, há muito tempo seu coração caiu num pasto qualquer e por lá ficou, chafurdado na lama em meio aos cascos dos cavalos, e agora não há mais nada mesmo que ela possa fazer, a não ser se levantar e procurá-lo lá de cima,

Isso porque do avião, no alto dos ares, até o amor tem menos gravidade.

Letting your heart break open all over again when you remember the unbearable beauty of the Beloved's in visible face.

My God is too vast to be contained by theology, too mysterious to be defined, too holy to be personified. My God neither punishes nor rewards, but invites me into a living relationship that unfolds in the heart of all that is. My God belongs to everyone, and this belonging connects me to the web of all life.

maioria dos homens gira no reino do vício, sexo, dinheiro e poder. Isso porque ele traz algo pior em relação aos outros animais, já que busca um subterfúgio para a dor. A dor da vida humana, que acabou se tornando a semente de uma mentalidade coletiva, uma forma de pensar de toda a humanidade que sempre brinda o sofrimento.

I am told that only two groups carry very little negative baggage inside of Christianity: Franciscans and Quakers.

Mesmo que tudo passe e mesmo que tudo pereça, as pessoas continuam a correr, talvez por ficarem tontas que nem barata depois que aquilo que é amado vai embora.

Ela gostava dele por causa de tantos pedacinhos. Gostava da respiração que subia e descia. Das cicatrizes de pele acordada. De gente que viveu muita coisa.

É muito triste quando se descobre que um amor perdido dói mais do que atropelamento de caminhão.

E há coisas na vida que se faz uma vez só.

Aconteça o que acontecer, a mudança é inevitável.

O Quebra-Cabeça funciona assim: a ponta de uma peça se encaixa com o furo de uma outra e formam um castelo, um parque, um lago de patos. Juntas fazem uma cidade ou o mapa do mundo. E todas as peças têm outros furos e pontas e muitos encontros são necessários para que se possa ter uma história.

Antes de mais nada, é preciso raspar com a unha a primeira casquinha de ferida. Limpar o terreno do acidente. Tirar com um pano molhado a mancha do último sangue derramado. Para ter a coragem de, quem sabe um dia, olhar o machucado que ficou.

O Tempo Pequeno vai se espremendo dentro das células das pessoas nas grandes cidades, soprando em seus ouvidos, rápido, poluindo e apertando tudo. Mas as pessoas não sabem disso.

Não morrer é uma opção. Viver, uma decisão.

Por mais que o homem invente a desordem, a natureza sempre dá um jeito de estatelar sua beleza e harmonia pelos confins do mundo.

sin has no substance because it is the absence of all that is good and kind, loving and caring—all that is of God. Sin is nothing but separation from our divine source. And separation from the Holy One is nothing but illusion. We are always and forever “oned” in love with our Beloved.

kilims

The call to love beyond our own flesh and blood is ancient. It echoes down to us on the lips of indigenous leaders, spiritual teachers, and social reformers through the centuries. Guru Nanak called us to see no stranger, Buddha to practice unending compassion, Abraham to open our tent to all, Jesus to love our neighbors, Muhammad to take in the orphan, Mirabai to love without limit... It is the ancient Sanskrit truth that we can look upon anyone or anything and say: Tat tvam asi, 'I am that.' It is the African philosophy: Ubantu, 'I am because you are.' It is the Mayan precept: In La'Kech, 'You are my other me.

MIRABAI STARR Author of God of Love: A Guide to the Heart of Judaism, Christianity and Islam and Wild Mercy: Living the Fierce & Tender Wisdom of the Women Mystics