You ended up kind of rediscovering contemplative tradition, I think, in India. I mean, digging into all the things you did along the way. You have a pretty amazing story of your own at this point, I have to say. Tippett: That’s really great, lovely language. It no longer seems to me like - Joan experienced it as a great God in heaven speaking to her, but I feel like I’ve been able to hear better what it is I’m supposed to be doing with my life and then doing it. Later, when I began to learn various contemplative spiritual practices, meditation, yoga, and so on, I realized that what I loved about it was that they help you get calm, clear, open, better able to hear. So somehow that stayed with me, that sense of wanting to be able to hear clearly what it was I should be doing with my life. She did everything she heard, no matter how out there it was.
As a little girl recognizing how confusing life is, I thought, “Wow, that would be so cool if you could hear what it was you were supposed to do.” And then the basics are that she started hearing God talking to her and telling her what to do. She did start out as a kind of ordinary little girl. Bush: For one thing, her life is a lot more interesting than mine, so I liked that. I think it’s such an interesting idea that - how does Joan of Arc inspire the aspirations of a girl in Madison, New Jersey? There were a lot of really pretty extraordinary and some preposterous stories of saints, but I really loved Joan of Arc. I think you know that Catholic children are - part of the way morals and ethics are taught is through the models of the lives of the saints. So I was in church every morning for my whole childhood. They were both across the street from us. I’d go to mass every morning, and then I’d just go right over to the school. There wasn’t daycare, so my mother would drop me off at the church. When I was 7, my father left, and my mother had to go to work. Bush: Well, my early life - I was brought up Catholic. Tippett: How would you start to describe the spiritual background of your childhood, of your early life? She’s just written a new book together with Ram Dass, Walking Each Other Home: Conversations on Loving and Dying. Mirabai Bush is co-founder and former director of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society. Tippett: I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being. But I have found it to be very powerful if you can find the right way to do it. It always edges on sounding like a Hallmark card. I have been more and more willing to take the risk to offer those practices even in very secular working situations recently than I used to be, because people really want to be loved, it turns out. Bush: “The L-word” was “love.” It’s really when someone’s heart opens that things really change. Mirabai Bush: In the beginning, you couldn’t ever say what the environmental leaders would call “the L-word.” It’s a rediscovery and reclaiming of contemplation, in many forms and many traditions, in the secular thick of modern life. Her odyssey from India to now tells a defining narrative of our time, and it’s not just a story of tools that help us be more successful. Mirabai Bush is called in to work with educators and judges and social activists and soldiers. More recently, she helped create Google’s wildly popular employee program, Search Inside Yourself. in 1973, she started a company called Illuminations and was featured alongside a young Steve Jobs in Fortune magazine. Back then, if you had told me that I would someday be training employees of corporate America to apply contemplative practices to help them become more successful, I would have said you’d been standing too long in India’s hot noonday sun.” Yet as soon as Mirabai Bush returned to the U.S. Krista Tippett, host: “In 1972,” Mirabai Bush writes, “I was a 30-year-old American traveling in India, with the smell of incense in my hair and mantras repeating in my ears.
0 kommentar(er)
