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A Woman's Journey to God
An interview with Joan Borysenko, Ph.D.
by Raz Ingrasci, President (Edited
by Shawn McAndrew)
Chair of the Hoffman Institute Professional Advisory Council, is also Cofounder of the Mind-Body Institute at Harvard.
The author of several best-selling books, her latest is A
Woman's Journey to God.
Raz Ingrasci: A Woman's Journey to God is a remarkable
and empowering new book, obviously for women but also for men. I
was wondering if you could tell our readers what inspired you to
write it.
Joan Borysenko: What inspired me to write A Woman's
Journey to God is that most of what we know about religion has described
a man's journey. The three main religions of the book — Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam, and Eastern religions, too — came
out of cultures that put women at a lower scale and dismissed them
in some way from spiritual life. The result is that, in trying to
rediscover their religious roots, many women have said, "You
know, what I rediscovered there doesn't feed me. The rituals are
not the kind of rituals that as a woman I find nourishing."
RI: What is missing?
JB: There aren't rituals for the various stages
of a woman's life, the things that mean a lot to us, how we grow
on our journey. So lots of women become religious dropouts and are
looking for their spirituality. I am hoping to help women not only
find their spirituality but ultimately to help religions reinvent
themselves. I'm never going to be able to change the fact that all
the teaching stories in Judaism are about men and about a male perspective,
but if I heal myself I can say, "That was part of a different
cultural perspective and I can still be a Jew."
RI: I sensed that A Woman's Journey to God in
some way evolved from A
Woman's Book of Life. Those two pieces seem to go together.
JB: Well that's true. I got interested in working
with women for two reasons. First, when I defected from my life
as an academic at Harvard Medical School I was in my early 40s.
I didn't realize then that I was right on target in terms of a woman's
life cycle. Right at that time is when women really start to look
and say, "What is the most important thing to me? What are
my values and does my life reflect my values?" I was thinking,
"This atmosphere is so toxic I'm going to die if I have to
stay for one more minute," and as a result I left academia.
But then I found that I knew so little about being a woman because
all those years I had struggled to take on a kind of masculine persona
to survive in a medical academic environment. I met up with a lot
of other "defecting women" who were also asking, "What
is it to be a woman? Who am I over here? I've been a counterfeit
male for all these years." So I began to meet with a group
of women to look at those questions. As I started to do more workshops,
not only in mind-body medicine but also in spirituality, I found
that about 90 percent of the participants were women and they had
particular spiritual concerns.
A Woman's Book of Life looks at how we develop our spirituality,
biology, and psychology across a life span. A Woman's Journey to
God is a deepening of that work by picking up on that thread of
spirituality and trying to distinguish it from religion. I am also
trying to help free women from religious anger because that's the
thing that we saw happening in women's workshops so frequently —
people blocked from truly feeling their spirituality because they
were so stuck in being angry at the patriarchy. I got to the point
where I said, "If I hear the word patriarchy one more time
I'm gonna throw up."
RI: It's interesting how, in our zeal to throw
out the patriarchy, we often abandon important parts of ourselves.
Ken Wilbur does much to help us understand that, in fact, there
are hierarchies of meaning. He calls them "holarchies"
partly to get away from the negativity of hierarchies but also to
say that the greatest holarchy is that which can include all the
rest of them. That, of course, is Spirit. Dealing with hierarchy
does give us a chance to reclaim important aspects of ourselves
we may have abandoned.
JB: Obviously what's been defined for thousands
of years are certain spiritual exercises, practices, and ways of
looking at the world which have been incredibly nurturing not only
for men, but for many women, too. The idea is that these things
aren't bad, they're just incomplete. We need to add what's lacking
and bring the feminine into balance with the masculine so that we
have both and we become whole again.
RI: Specifically, how can women go about healing
their wounds around religion and spirituality?
JB: Well, first of all, you've got to know that
they're there. One of the things we know so well about woundedness
is that it can be right under your nose and you don't even see it.
I'll give you an example from my book. It took a trip to India for
me to come eye to eye with the depths of my own anger, not only
about Judaism but also about Christianity and about certain teachers
in the Hindu tradition. Here I was counseling other people to get
over their anger and every place it seemed we went in India I came
in touch with some piece of anger I was still holding onto. I didn't
want to stay in the Ashram. I was filled with irreverent jokes.
Finally, I realized, "You know, you really haven't let go of
this. You're still furious at a whole raft of spiritual teachers."
I found my heart was absolutely clogged. I was spitting bullets.
I recognized I had to let go of all that. There was a bigger depth
than I thought, so I've been doing that work.
It's helped me because now it's made me ready to come back to Judaism.
I come back to Judaism with a Buddhist/Hindu heart and a lot of
Native American practices. But I no longer say I can't do this because
of the patriarchy. The patriarchy was then, now we have now. I'm
ready to enter a Judaism that's transforming.
RI: Please comment on how women experience spirituality
as part of life processes? Most religions seem to have God portrayed
as someone or something beyond us and outside our daily lives.
JB: I think it's the most important question.
Women's spirituality is much more about the here and now than the
hereafter. For example, I was at a sweat lodge a couple of weeks
ago and the medicine man was explaining to the women that traditionally
women did not participate in sweats. Of course, some women started
to bristle and say, "Ah, even in this earth-centered religion
the women are left out." Then he went on and said, "The
reason for that is that women didn't need to because women purified
as part of daily life every 28 days, when you have your moon time,
that is a purification of your vessel. Which is the most holy thing
because you give rise to life." So, in that tradition there's
an honoring of women.
The older I've grown, the simpler it seems that spirituality is
to me. It's really about connectedness, about all my relations,
to see that we're related to every part of life, to every cycle
of nature. We're related to the ancestors who came before the children,
who were as yet unborn. And we are related, of course, to our friends,
to our families, to our community. It is that which women, I think,
embody in daily life without necessarily giving it words. There's
an inner knowing of that. What we do springs from that.
RI: As you were speaking, I was reflecting on
the need to both search for God and to be found by God. God can
find us in the joyous, relaxed celebration of life and spirit.
JB: Exactly. It comes down to the simplest thing.
It's plain old happiness. It's the ability to feel the shutters
fall off your eyes. Suddenly you can actually take in and perceive
the world, which has always been beautiful. My God, I'm surrounded
by beauty. In just about every religious tradition, you'll find
some mystic who says, "You know when you've made the journey
to God ÷ when you're truly grateful." That's the highest
act. In a certain sense, I really don't even like the idea of there
being a journey to God or a search for God. It's just here around
us all the time. It just seems pretty funny that we're searching;
we're looking, and it's here all the time. ø
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