The Feminine Mystic

Most forms of meditation involve a discipline aimed at taming the mind, but do they sometimes go too far and break the spirit? Viewed from a conventional feminist perspective, the answer is often yes. The self-denying disciplines of higher awareness can look all too much like the self-destroying subjugation that women have endured for ages.

The feminist writer Carol Lee Flinders has been practicing meditation for more than 30 years. While others might argue that her two passions -- feminism and spirituality -- are incompatible, Flinders disagrees. In her new book, At the Root of This Longing: Reconciling a Spiritual Hunger and a Feminist Thirst (HarperSanFrancisco), she contends that these seemingly disparate paths have much in common and may, in fact, be destined to converge.

Flinders was a 23-year-old graduate student in comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1967 when she met Eknath Easwaran, a Hindu master who has been her teacher ever since. One of the lessons he taught her, she says, is to focus on the 'experiential realization of what we call God, or divine consciousness.' This is the truth that all great religions share: 'the possibility of complete union with that force, within oneself, and recognizing it within the people around you.'

Flinders, the co-author of a popular vegetarian cookbook, Laurel's Kitchen, now lives with her husband and son at the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation near Petaluma, California. The child of 'cheerful agnostics,' she has no inherited faith, but in her practice she draws on the teachings of many traditions -- including Native American prayers, Taoist verses, the Bible, and the Upanishads. 'I cannot describe my spiritual practice as Buddhist . or as Hindu or Catholic or Sufi,' she writes, 'though I feel that in a sense it is all of these.'