Women have innovated with emotionality as a path to inner realization. To refine it into a spiritual practice, they have had to grow out of the confines of grasping and emotional bondage that often passes for love. One such path is that of Sufism, which with its emphasis on an intimate love-relationship with God, can be characterized as a feminine path. Interestingly, many male Sufi mystics refer to themselves as women awaiting union with their Beloved (God). In this sense, their ‘maleness’ and their ego-self is surrendered to the Divine Beloved in a transcendental and transformational experience of love, and feminity becomes a metaphor for the spiritual thirst.
In these lines taken from a poem in Hindustani by Amir Khusrau (1253-1325 AD), addressed to his teacher and spiritual friend, Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya, the poet adopts the voice of a lovelorn woman.
Chhap tilak sab chini re mose naina milaike…
(You have taken away my identity with just a glance)
Gori gori baiyan, hari hari churiyan
Baiyan pakar dhar linhi re mose naina milaike…
(In my fair delicate wrists are green bangles
Which you have held just with a glance…)
Medieval women mystics like Rabia and Lal Ded, Meera and Andal have expressed this transformational divine love and an intimate relationship with God in beautiful poetry. Their words are drenched with God-intoxication and a sense of uncompromising freedom. Meera says:
“The earth looked at Him and began to dance.
Mira knows why, for her soul too
is in love.
If you cannot picture God
in a way that always
strengthens
you,
you need to read
more of my poems.”
One such modern woman mystic who walks the path of divine love is Anandamurti Gurumaa. This dynamic woman, who belongs to a new generation of teachers, finds kinship with the medieval Sufi woman mystic Rabia-al-Basri because of her self-enabled realization without a male guru, and her emphasis on Divine Love. In fact, Gurumaa sees herself as an inheritor of the Sufi tradition and her teachings are replete with references to Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi, Baezid, Rabia, and Mulla Nasruddin stories. She sometimes refers to herself as a baawari jogan (woman intoxicated with God’s love), a very Sufi reference. Gurumaa denies having any gurus, Sufi or otherwise. The Sufi component in her teaching, then, does seem to come from an experienced and felt space.
Social Engagement: Though the spiritual path is by definition of the individual, driven by her inner seeking and understanding, it has an important social dimension as well. One of the ways in which women have engaged spirituality with society is through seva, or unconditional service.
Perhaps because they see the wisdom of engaging with the concerns of home and community, women spiritual seekers and teachers are often involved in issues of social justice, peacemaking, education and empowerment. Through serving causes that may be considered ‘worldly’ at one level, they are affirming allegiance with the ideal that lies at the core of an integral perspective—of the profound interconnectedness of life and all its phenomena and its indivisibility into compartments (even if these compartments are those of spirituality and the world).
Women spiritual masters who employ the ideal of motherhood in their relationships with their students are able to tap into this psychological space that dates back to our early infancy and where we feel completely loved, thereby helping us get out of destructive emotional patterns born of insecurity and stress. To the guru as mother, we can bring our broken selves and hope to be made whole again.
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