What is Women’s Spirituality?
Despite being denied the option of valiant spiritual seeking and apprenticeship, women through the ages have managed to live spiritually rich lives. Some have ducked social mores to live as free-spirited thinkers. Others have lived within their families and their inner journeys have been closely interwoven with their roles in their families and relationships.
Theirs is collectively what one refers to as ‘women’s spirituality’, different from mainstream wisdom traditions (or ‘men’s spirituality’). Does it have an idiom of its own, wedded to the rhythms of women’s lives? I will try to tease out its dimensions and defining characteristics through the examples of some of the women I have interviewed.
Integration: To begin with, because most of them couldn’t really leave their homes and relationships and set off to follow the call of the spirit, women found the means to look for meaning and achieve inner growth where they were. Even today, when many do have the option of checking out, the issues of homes, children and relationships remain. It is useful then to see how women living in the world (as opposed to a renunciate’s life) have harmonized the inner quest with their current contexts. Many wisdom traditions talk about the householder’s life with its myriad demands and problems as being a better testing ground for the fruits of spiritual understanding, than the rarefied and controlled atmosphere of an ashram or mountain cave. Women more than men, because of their circumstances, have exemplified this ideal of integration and harmony.
An outcome of this integration has been the incorporation and employment of their familial roles by women as opportunities for spiritual practice. Motherhood and parenting, nurturing and sharing, even household chores that women have been tied to in a way, have been creatively used as means for deepening awareness, connecting with a sense of being more spacious than one’s ego-self, for practicing compassion, patience and unconditional love. By saying this, I do not intend to glorify patriarchal gender roles, but rather present an insight into how common householder women have practiced and achieved these spiritual values despite the repression and lack of opportunities. Those that got on to the path seem to have walked it with courage and skilful means – blood, bread, babies and all.
A movement that exemplifies this integration is that of Lakshmi Bhagavan, a spiritual teacher who lived in the city of Mumbai. Lakshmi Bhagavan lived in a one-room tenement, had been married and widowed and earned her livelihood sewing children’s clothes. Her spiritual teachings were never didactic discourses, but in response to questions people put to her. Through her encouragement, discussion groups started around the country where women meet twice a day and talk about how best to cultivate and put to use spiritual insights in their daily lives.
The women of Lakshmi Bhagavan’s gatherings come from all walks of life: some face conflict and abuse, while others come looking for a more fulfilling way to live. Challenges are discussed, and the perspective of Divine Oneness applied to all issues. The basic teaching is of oneness, its applications are many and varied. All are welcome in the groups. Lakshmi Bhagavan actively discouraged and periodically spoke out against the making of any sort of distinctions, whether based on religion, caste or community, or self and other, for according to her this defiled the sacred unity in which we all exist and which, in our realized selves, we are.
Emotionality: Because of the extraordinary development of women’s heart qualities, what with nurturing their families and being natural emotional caregivers for their children, their spiritual paths too seem to acquire a primacy of emotion. It may play out in the form of their being more drawn to devotion, love and seva (service). Even when women study contemplative and logic-oriented disciplines, they bring a heart quality to its study that is unforced and unaffected. Women, for instance, don’t really need to be explained how to ‘care for all beings like a mother cares for her only child’ (a method of arousing unconditional love in Mahayana Buddhism)! And when they become teachers, they become mothers of the spirit—bringing warmth, nurturing and compassion to their students’ practice, even becoming strict when the need arises.
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