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The Talk

Mirabai Starr is a Professor of Philosophy and World Religions at the University of New Mexico-Taos and a best-selling spiritual author known particularly for contemporary translations of sacred literature.

As a teenager, she lived at the Lama Foundation, an intentional spiritual community in New Mexico, USA. It was at Lama that Mirabai encountered many of the leading teachers and timeless wisdom of diverse spiritual paths: Hindu; Buddhist; Sufi; Jewish; Christian, and Native American and was especially influenced by Ram Dass, Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, and the teachings of Murshid Samuel Lewis.

Mirabai lives in the mountains of Northern New Mexico with her husband, Jeff Little. Between them, Mirabai and Jeff have four grown daughters and many grandchildren. Mirabai’s youngest daughter, Jenny, was killed in a car accident in 2001 at the age of fourteen. On that same day, Mirabai’s first book, a translation of Dark Night of the Soul, was released. She considers this experience, and the connection between profound loss and longing for God to be the ground of her own spiritual life. Now a certified bereavement counselor, Mirabai helps other mourners harness the transformational power of loss.

Her latest book, Wild Mercy, explores the wisdom of well-known and less-known feminine mystics from the past millennia, exploring what wisdom they have for us today in this time of spiritual and ecological upheaval.