In my experience, almost all women leading spiritually-oriented lives become engaged in social service of some kind of another in response to an inner calling to relieve the suffering of others. For instance, the nuns of Sri Sarada Mission.
The Sarada Mission is an independent sister organization of the Sri Ramakrishna Mission and takes its name from Ma Sarada, also known as the Holy Mother, who was Sri Ramakrishna Paramahansa’s wife and a realized spiritual master in her own right. Managed by the nuns themselves, the Sarada Mission provides women the opportunity to lead spiritually oriented lives which includes education, scriptural knowledge, and active involvement in social service. In this, the Mission carries forward the legacy of Sister Nivedita, the Englishwoman who followed in Swami Vivekananda’s footsteps in making spirituality practical through her pioneering work in women’s education, her social activism, and her participation in the movement for India’s independence from the British in early 20th century.
These women bring spiritual insights and values to bear upon the problems of the world. Insights such as interconnectedness, compassion, dissolution of the ego-self and so on, can become powerful agents of change if applied appropriately in the social sphere. Also known as ‘engaged spirituality’, it calls for a widening of the sphere of spiritual practice, that spirituality needn’t remain confined to cloisters and ashrams but spread out into the world and find creative and contemplative ways of dealing with its issues.
This is a space of innovation, and I will speak of the work of two women who have taken on this challenge in our times.
Mae Chee Sansanee Sthirasuta, a prominent woman spiritual leader of Thailand, started a centre some years ago to teach meditation. The suffering she witnessed among people who came for the courses inspired her to do more. Several projects were born out of this inner call, which have included working with abused women and children, taking care not only of their physical needs but their spiritual well-being as well, and attempting to transform their pain into love. Realizing that it was not enough to help the victims because they were not the only ones who suffered in a conflict situation, Mae Chee began visiting prisons to help inmates become aware of their innate goodness and act from a place of service and love in order to “break the cycle of violence,” in her words.
Another spiritual innovator is the American ‘engaged Buddhist’ Joanna Macy, who has used the teachings of Buddhism to foster a new kind of environmental activism—one that is attuned with and based on the interconnected nature of reality. She is an eco-philosopher and has created a ground-breaking theoretical framework for personal and social change, as well as a powerful workshop methodology for its application. Her wide-ranging work addresses psychological and spiritual issues of the nuclear age, the cultivation of ecological awareness, and the fruitful resonance between Buddhist thought and contemporary science. Many thousands of people around the world have participated in her workshops and trainings. Her work helps people transform despair and apathy, in the face of overwhelming social and ecological crises, into constructive, collaborative action. It brings a new way of seeing the world, as our larger living body, freeing us from the assumptions and attitudes that now threaten the continuity of life on Earth.
Empowerment: In the Asian context, because they have been otherwise so repressed, women’s spirituality carries an additional patina of social revolution. Women spiritual masters, poets and yoginis have been harbingers of change—by walking the path of inner revolution, they have broken through walls of prejudice and widened the possibilities available to all women.
Also, when we speak of women’s empowerment today, we tend to emphasize its need in social, political and economic spheres—in the workplace, in social systems, in marriages and family situations. But what about inner empowerment, born in the individual’s being, which comes of self-knowledge and freedom from ignorance? It can be argued that external liberation is of little use without inner freedom. It is imperative then, to distil a contemporary paradigm for women’s empowerment based on this inner spiritual aspect, through the examples of women who are walking on the difficult path of spiritual heroism and have risen beyond their social and economic contexts to achieve liberation of self, mind and being.
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