Women & Spirituality

Mirabai Bush is the author of Working With Mindfulness, co-creator of Google’s “Search Inside Yourself” program, cofounder of the Center for Contemplative Mind and Society and a founding board member of the Seva Foundation. She teaches contemplative practices, and has facilitated retreats, workshops and courses on spirit and action for over 20 years. To commemorate International Women’s Day, Mirabai spoke with Purnima Ramakrishnan on March 6, 2021.

- By Mirabai Bush

Q: Thank you for joining us today, Mirabai. It is an honor, a privilege, and a great blessing to have you with us.

Thank you, Purnima. I love talking with you, so this is a joy for me, too. And you chose a really wonderful subject that makes us all think and rethink our assumptions.

Q: So what are the unique challenges and opportunities for a woman on a spiritual path?

I will probably speak as if I am speaking to all women. I realize that’s how I was thinking about these questions, and so for those men who are listening in, just imagine that you are privileged to be in this room with an extraordinary group of women. I am imagining the big circle of us who can’t see each other, but we know we are here.

Unique challenges and opportunities for a woman on the spiritual path? There’s so much, and there are layers of challenges. Of course, it’s different in different cultures, but it is probably global that women experience a certain amount of negative bias in different ways.

There are differences between men and women physically, mentally, and psychologically, but the spirit within us is one. How we wake up to that is, however, conditioned by our cultures. The first time I was in India, from 1970 to 1972, I remember a pretty strong belief that women couldn’t be enlightened. I was actually not looking for enlightenment in the sense of trying to be a saint, but I was looking toward waking up to the potential of who I could be as a human being.