Mirabai Starr

Welcome to the temple of your regular life.

So begins beloved spiritual guide Mirabai Starr's stunning exploration of finding the extraordinary in the everyday. In Ordinary Mysticism, she helps readers discover their own inner mystic and let go of the limiting belief that spiritual life exists only in traditional places of worship. Mysticism, she explains, is a direct experience of the sacred — no church or clergy required. Our everyday life can be an encounter with the sacred if we pay attention. Starr explores the magic of mundane life, from weeding in our humble gardens to a slow evening walk with a friend to a full kitchen table surrounded by family. Embracing mysticism in our everyday is a way of being more alive in the world, an awakening to the interconnectedness between all things.

You can visit an ashram in the Himalayas or kneel in a church pew to connect to the spirit or examine life's big questions — but these aren't the only opportunities to discover the sacred. Life, Starr reminds us, is holy ground. Lyrical and tender, filled with profound wisdom and mind-opening insights, Ordinary Mysticism is about finding wonder in regular life, grounded in lessons from spiritual teachers across the centuries — from Julian of Norwich to Ram Dass. Starr combines their ancient wisdom with the story of her own personal and spiritual journey — from surviving the heartbreak of her fourteen-year-old daughter's death to growing up amid the 1960s counterculture that introduced her to mysticism to her self-made spiritual practice of today. Alongside storytelling and age-old teachings, Starr offers practices and writing prompts for help our souls seek holy ground.

When you decide to walk the path of the mystic, the mundane shows up as miraculous, the boring becomes fascinating, and your own shortcomings turn out to be your greatest gifts. May we all find meaning and wonder in our most ordinary moments.

Your Life as Sacred Ground

Ordinary Mysticism

Laura Mei

One of the things it means to be an ordinary mystic is to bow at the feet of your everyday existence with its disappointments and dramas, its peaceful mornings and luminous nights, and to honor yourself just as you are. If you can't be the one you wish you could be, love the one you are, and if you don't have the life you imagined you would or should have by now, how about loving the life you are living? A mystic finds the magic in the midst of the nitty gritty – the crusty spaghetti sauce pot in the sink and the crocus poking out of a spring snowfall, the unsigned divorce papers on the kitchen table, and the results of your latest blood work on your computer screen. I know that's not always easy; I am continually challenged to stop arguing with reality and instead, soften into what is. 

You are a source of illumination in ways you may never guess. An everyday mystic is always on the lookout for what is true, what is beautiful, what breaks open the husks of conventional perception and sanctifies the imagination. Read everything: Latin American fiction and the 

 and the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous, Walt Whitman and Adrienne Maree Brown. Slow it down. Contemplate a page, read on, go back. This is the path of the ordinary mystic—practicing to become an instrument through which the spirit of the universe makes her music, entering the natural world as if it were a cathedral, and praising with the whole of your heart and your full body. Listen deeply for that one universal note. When everything by which you once defined yourself is taken away, rest in that emptiness. Because art and love, mountains and canyons, have taught you how to dissolve into beauty—and dissolving feels like wholeness.

To find the mystical in the everyday is not a solo enterprise. It’s not just about enlarging your capacity for wonder, deepening your equanimity quotient, or brushing up on your relationship with a higher power. Give up the never-ending self-improvement project—it’s futile and beside the point. We need each other. We belong to each other. We stretch and grow each other. Sometimes you are the seeker; sometimes, the teacher. Each of us has something essential to contribute, inextricably bound with our individual quirks and gifts. Quit dividing the world into those who have the magical qualities to fix what is broken and the rest of us—all the broken ones. We are one glorious, messy human family, of which you are a beloved member.

Find your people—what Ram Dass called your soul pod—and if you can’t find it, build it. Tend it with all your heart. Then community becomes a path of healing, homecoming, and happiness, even if it doesn’t look like your idea of the grouping of souls you would have arranged had you been in charge of the universe. If you cannot see the face of the divine in the elderly lady who sings too loudly at church or in your best friend’s introverted new boyfriend, you are not likely to find it anywhere.

Ordinary Mysticism quotes

Join the club