"Mirabai embodies love, generosity, and wisdom. Her work and words compel us to be more, do better, love more fiercely, open our hearts and let the light in, and out." --Mona Haydar, activist, rapper, poet, chaplain "The Great Mother is a Mystery . known only through surrender. Surrender only happens through Grace. Mirabai Starr leads us deep into the radiance of the many ways the Goddess reveals herself, illuminating our Path back home." --Krishna Das, Kirtan master and author of Chants of a Lifetime and Flow of Grace "I was with Mirabai the day before her daughter Jenny died. Over the years, the intense outpouring of love from her mother''s heart has led Mirabai to the wild mercy she drinks in and shares from all the women mystics, poets, and teachers gathered together in this gorgeous book.

With free-spirited passion, erudition, and blazing candor, Mirabai generously offers the joys, sorrows, and insights of her own fully lived life as a particularly female path to the vast universal life we share. Mirabai''s writing is magic, transforming the salt of tears into the fruit of wisdom and compassion." --Trudy Goodman, PhD, founding teacher at InsightLA and cofounder of the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy in Boston "I''ve been waiting for a book like this for a long time! Wild Mercy is a profound and exquisite glimpse into the wisdom, power, and love of the women mystics. The most pressing need of our time is for the wisdom of the feminine to be heard. Mirabai Starr''s beautiful contribution allows everyone to hear those voices loud and clear! Highly recommended!" --Marci Shimoff, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Happy for No Reason and Chicken Soup for the Woman''s Soul "Mirabai Starr invites us to a sacred fiesta in a wild wood--my idea of a great gathering. It all feels, as she says, inexhaustibly holy. She has a deliciously rich vocabulary and mastery of language, which she spills out over the pages. Her friends, the women mystics, teach us that everything is holy--herbs, water, fire, the body, every last thing.

We so need this book, our world yearning for wisdom to balance the benefits and disasters of patriarchy--in religious and spiritual tradition as well as secular ones. The world will experience a rush of gratitude when this book is published." --Mirabai Bush, Senior Fellow, Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, and author of Walking Each Other Home (with Ram Dass) "It would be difficult to find a more trustworthy guide of the feminine mystics than Mirabai. In Wild Mercy, Mirabai''s writing will lovingly pierce your consciousness, illuminating pathways that draw you far below and beyond what you thought you knew about spirituality and humanity, masculinity and femininity, and truth and grace. But even more than her beautiful writing, Mirabai''s soulful guidance will lead you on a transformative cross-cultural journey as you traverse the sacred stories and wisdom of a diverse spectrum of feminine mystics. Importantly, her careful study of and sensitivity to social inequality and power dynamics enables her to highlight the deep spiritual wisdom that lies in other cultures without veering into ethnotourism. Rather, she invites readers to relinquish Western biases and entitlements as they faithfully drink from the waters that have nourished souls all over the world." --Christena Cleveland, associate professor, Duke Divinity School "Mirabai Starr has gifted us over the years with lively translations of the mystics and other blessings, but with this new book she outdoes herself! Wild Mercy is Starr''s chef d''oeuvre--in it she wrestles with one of the most important signs of hope to combat the cynicism and despair that mark our times.

I speak of the rise of women and women''s consciousness, and Starr goes to the source--to the great women mystics West and East--to awaken us and instruct us in what has been lacking under Patriarchy. She not only draws on mystics of the past and mystics in her storied life but also her own deep experiences of awe, of grief, of healing, of creativity, inviting us into her own personal journey. I loved her affirmation of family life as a spiritual practice--in this way and many others she dares to democratize the mystical experience by urging us to draw on our deep and sacred everyday experiences. She enlists our mysticism as an important dimension to humanity''s much-needed awakening and journey to its next evolutionary stage. This book is Delicious and Dangerous and Oh-so-needed in our time! Read it. And dare to live it." --Matthew Fox, author of Original Blessing, Christian Mystics, and The Lotus & The Rose: Conversations on Tibetan Buddhism & Mystical Christianity with Lama Tsomo "This is so much more than a gorgeously written book. It is an act of divine redemption, in which Mirabai Starr gives voice to every true and secret longing of the human heart.

Whoever you are, whatever you thought you knew about how the Holy looks or acts, get ready to be loved into deeper reality by someone you can trust to show you the way." --Barbara Brown Taylor, New York Times bestselling author of An Altar in the World and Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others "Wild Mercy is a magnificent contribution to the wave of feminine wisdom emerging into a world that has been starved of it for too long. With the kindness of a sister, the eloquence of a poet, and the authority born out of translating the text of mystical giants, Mirabai takes us by the hand, ushering us into a more immanent, devotional, and utterly human way to walk the journey home with depth and substance. May Wild Mercy flood our troubled world with grace." --Miranda Macpherson, author of The Way of Grace: The Transforming Power of Ego Relaxation "In Wild Mercy, Mirabai Starr creates an eloquent invocation of the Divine Feminine. She mines the canon of women mystics to evoke the soft, mysterious embrace of the Beloved. In her own words and theirs, Mirabai takes the blazing thread of devotion and weaves a tapestry of ultimate longing. This book is her path through the thicket of existence, her way of consecrating the lila, the exquisite dance of illusion, and of making the jumble of human experience into One Love.

" --Ram Dass, author of Be Here Now and Walking Each Other Home (with Mirabai Bush) "Mirabai Starr has already been a firmly rooted beacon shining a light into the places history might have obscured the wisdom of women. With Wild Mercy she seductively weaves the wisdom of the world''s traditions--East, West, indigenous, and divined--as only she can, into a tapestry that takes up residence in our modern lives as inspired, healing, practical action, simultaneously comforting and fierce, as wild mercy must be: to live, love, and save the planet by. We are left knowing the truth of our own hearts'' healing as the balm of salvation for the world." --Rev. Angel Kyodo Williams, Zen priest and author of Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation "Mirabai Starr. Perhaps nowhere else is her penetrating mysticism conveyed with such feminine ferocity as in her new book, Wild Mercy. From divine sexuality and fleshly exploitation to the sacred art of grieving, dying, and mortality salience, Mirabai takes the heart of the reader into the crevices between creation and contours, beginnings and finales, tapping the tender crescendos of living into the holy. Both powerful and compassionate, both fearless and commanding, this book is an invitation to unfold into an ampler version of the self.

This is not a dispassionate read. It''s an invocation of action and harbinger of complacence. This book is a must-read for every person willing to accept the decisive challenge of existence: to awaken." --Joanne Cacciatore, PhD, associate professor, Arizona State University, and author of Bearing the Unbearable: Love, Loss, and the Heartbreaking Path of Grief "Mirabai Starr has crafted a book out of her own unique life, steeped in the outpourings of the women mystics. This is the robust, sensual, full-to-overflowing prose of one who has soaked herself in poetry and in the life-practices of those mystics: she is not "talking about"; she is reporting from the road. Be warned--to open this book is to embark upon a journey." --Eve Ilsen, singer-storyteller, psychotherapist, and rabbinic pastor "It is by empowering the sacred feminine and by listening to the earth as she tries to communicate with us that we will ultimately heal." --Lama Tsultrim Allione, author of Wisdom Rising: Journey into the Mandala of the Empowered Feminine "Here''s what will probably happen when you open this astonishing book.

You will realize you are in the lap of the Great Mother and she''s reading to you. Your body, habituated to the terror of being a woman in a world that disregards women, will unclench. Your worry if you are as deeply flawed as you are pretty sure you are, will abate. And then Mirabai will take you a few steps further as she introduces you to a great number of soul-afire women mystics, many of which you likely haven''t encountered before. Your heart, so unseen for so long, will begin to burst with pride--knowing that you are uniquely made to bring through you the very balm that the world and your fellow humans needs most. Of course, Mirabai will keep going, showing you how their wisdom can fuel your community activism, your participation in restorative justice, and your ability to tend our ailing planet Earth. The task of the divine feminine (or the divine feminist!) is not to take a wrecking ball to the patriarchal structures inside of which we all suffer. None of us can make sustainable change--whether inside us or out in the world--using the same ways of thinking (or wrecking) that created the deep hole we are trying to climb out of.

This book will offer you new ways to think--and to feel, act, and commune. To read it is.