I fell under the spell of macho meditation practices as a younger woman. My back ramrod straight, I did not move. I did not speak. I did not think. Day after day. Sesshin after sesshin. I would master my mind, focus my intention, attain enlightenment.

Only I became a mother instead, one child on my hip, a baby at my breast, kicked out of the zendo when my sucking child cooed once too often along with the birds.

I had been looking for a peak experience, a revelation. I wanted to get it and I didn’t realize how utterly my aspirations had been co-opted by patriarchal spiritual delusions that privileged silence over storytelling, the mind over the heart, celibacy over fertility, enlightenment over the healing wisdom of the darkness.

There is reason to believe that meditation evolved from the hunting behaviors of men — the need for radical stillness and the readiness to act when he moment was right.

But there are other ways, long poo-pooed and dismissed by the spiritually adventurous. Women’s ways. Yet how many of us admire the shaved-headed robed powerhouse macho zen women and overlook the old grannies with beads wrapped around their wrists muttering prayers and spells? I know SO many women who can’t stand to meditate and yet still think that somehow mindfulness is a good idea and that they “should” be doing it.

Maybe not.

It turns out in those hunter-gatherer societies the bulk of the food was gathered. Yes, you need a few hunters and the occasional mammoth steak, but the gathering of seeds, berries, nuts, roots, and little critters is what really sustains us. Women’s work sustains us. Prayer sustains us.

Those little old grannies with their beads knew how to birth babies, settle quarrels among the children, rock a baby to sleep, feed families when there was no food, pray away illness when there was no medicine, and ease the passage of the dying.

This is why I pray the rosary. It’s women’s work. It’s gathering and muttering and telling and spelling. It aligns me with those old grannies, dismissed, overlooked, forgotten, who sustained us and held us and tried to make sense of a world gone wrong.

They hid their devotion to the Great Mother, the Great Granny, in those beads, even as the Church (and all the patriarchal priesthoods) told them that silence was best. (i.e. Shut the fuck up.)

What we need now are voices telling stories, people who can speak to our hearts again, a world fertile and reborn again.

I don’t want to be the Dalai Lama. I want to be my grandmother.

 

Perdita Finn’s upcoming book reveals what happens when a former Zen Buddhist monk and a feminist writer experience an apparition of the Virgin Mary.