“When Kali dances, Shiva’s divine abode trembles.”
What if sacredness does not require us to shed our humanity at the temple doors but bows down with us in the dirt of our worldly existence, lovingly collecting our shattered fragments with its boundless heart? For millennia, spiritual mystics have spoken this message of freedom—you are not too holy to be held, and you are not too spiritual to be human. Sacredness isn’t something out there we have to ascend a mountain to reach—it is the Beloved walking hand in hand with us through every inhalation and exhalation, gently carrying us across life’s rocky terrain.
Kabir, Rumi, and Akka Mahadevi invite us to act outwards but look inwards, while Meister Eckhart, among the ancient mystics of the West, unleashes the power of gratitude to the universe. They ask us to pause and witness the sanctuary within—our breath—and allow transformation through stillness of minds and gratitude to our hearts.
When Shiva’s abode trembled
In August this year, the earth tore open her most sacred landscape. Nestled deep in the Himalayas, where the fingers of God touch Earth, a massive glacier collapsed, causing a mountain of ice, water, and rock to cascade through a remote area on the Tibet-Nepal border. Trees were uprooted, bridges destroyed, and villages demolished overnight. The clouds wept at the sight of devastation in what can only be described as Mother Kali’s dance of destruction. Thousands of people vanished, leaving behind the agonizing silence of unanswered phone calls from frantic loved ones.
What I find noteworthy about this immense tragedy is how these people reacted to their homes being destroyed. For them, the flood was a spiritual event in their lives. When glaciers melt and create floods, Tibetans believe that the Earth is weeping—that Kaliyuga has begun and the subtle and ancient land, river, and lake spirits are being disrupted. They also believe that when the khangba, or snow frog, gets angry, it will send floods to punish humans for their wrongdoings. The glacier, to them, is not a dead mass of ice—it is a living, breathing deity, woven inextricably into the spiritual fabric of their world.
And in that very same breath, the Himalayan community showcased great resilience. Search and rescue teams found survivors against impossible odds, while brave locals rebuilt their homes and flood defenses with their bare hands, driven by the need to protect their centuries-old monasteries and the belief that blessings of these holy sites would shield them from future destruction and the wrath of the gods.
This is the secret truth of the mystic way—the same divine power that brings blossoming flowers beneath our bare feet brings a glacial mountain crashing down. The sacred is both benevolent and primordial, holding the earthquake and the flower, annihilation and the fierce love that rebuilds. To be human within this paradox is not to understand it but to stand within it—to grieve deeply, love completely, and remain fully awake in the presence of the unfathomable Infinite.
How to live like this right now
We can explore what these mystics teach, but how do we apply it to our lives? You don’t have to meditate in a Himalayan cave to be human and sacred. It requires only a gentle, conscious shift in how we meet our daily moments:
Pause before the ping: In our modern world, our attention is harvested relentlessly. When the urge to check your phone, open a social media app, or respond instantly to a notification arises, take a deep breath before you act. In that micro-moment of silence, you pause the compulsive reaction, turning a mindless impulse into a sacred observation. In that pause, you are no longer the puppet of your habits; you are the witness simply watching the impulse arise and pass.
The mindful entry: Before a stressful meeting, a crowded room, or an emotionally charged situation, stand still for five seconds. Place your hand over your heart, feel your anxiety, and whisper internally, “I am well; I am at peace now.” This Vipassana-style grounding connects your anxious mind to the vast, silent core of your being, allowing your sacred witness and your vulnerable self to walk hand in hand, stronger together.
The morning stillness: I find that dedicating just five minutes upon waking to sit in complete Zen—asking nothing, thinking nothing, fixing nothing, just sitting in the stillness of the early dawn and observing the breath—sets an unshakable tone that carries through the most hectic afternoons. Alternatively, you can sit in Shambhavi—half-closed eyes with a soft, unfocused, slightly upward gaze on a tree outside your window or on a wall of your room—and feel your thoughts recede.
The paradox of stillness versus ambition
I first encountered this profound, unshakable stillness as a child, watching my maternal grandfather in his bustling, ancestral home in a small, holy town in North India. He was a doctor, not a scholar of the scriptures, nor a formal mystic. But he possessed an effortless inner sanctum. I remember sitting beside him as the household swirled in a vortex of familial arguments and the endless cacophony of a joint family in motion. He did not run from the noise to find a quiet room but simply sat in the center of it and closed his eyes. His breathing slowed, and the noise receded in the background.
But the modern world—whether the cityscapes of India or the glass-and-steel corporate towers of Washington, DC—conspires to relegate that sacred witness to the background of our lives. We are taught to compartmentalize our ambitions from our spiritual yearnings—as if they cannot coexist. We are taught that our vulnerabilities and anxieties are obstacles to God, rather than the raw material of God. We chase idealized perfection, forgetting that holiness is not the absence of our humanity—it is the willingness to walk openly, bare, and vulnerable in the sun that the divine created.
How to bring together the practical and the sacred: Lessons from the mystics
To understand how to bring about a well-balanced ‘practical awakening’ in our lives, we should step back and see how the mystics lived this exact paradox—absorbed in the divine while outwardly performing all the practical karma of the world they resided in. The first voice that echoes across time is that of Kabir, the poet-weaver saint of 15th-century India, who tells us that our soul is not fragile glass that will shatter; instead, it is an unbroken, immortal thread. When the loom of life pulls tight with stress, health anxieties, unfulfilled career aspirations, financial worries, or painful relationships, we live in survival mode, fearing the thread will snap under the weight of our daily mistakes. But Kabir assures us that this daily friction is not paving the way for destruction; it is the exact tension that is needed to weave faith in the divine into the tapestry of our existence. To stay human and sacred is to stop begging for the thread to go slack but to trust the holy stretch—believing that even the messiest and most challenging moments are simply part of the pattern of our lives, which we can change to some degree, using our resources of resilience, intelligence, timely action, and prayer.
The second ancient voice is Rumi—calling us away from our internal courtrooms and beckoning us towards a vast, moonlit field of unconditional love. He wrote, “Beyond ideas of doing right and wrongdoing, there’s a field—I’ll meet you there.” When we are betrayed by others or wounded by an egoistic nature, we tend to build a prison of guilt, anger, and judgment in our minds. Rumi asks us to drop the stories, to stop handing out verdicts and shrug out of the heavy robes of a judge and just step into that vast, open expanse of freedom. In that silence, the divine is not a taskmaster but an eternal, luminous witness, holding the space for our perfectly imperfect lives, without an ounce of condemnation or judgment.
Another mystical presence is Akka Mahadevi, a spiritual poetess and philosopher, who was one of the crucial torchbearers of the Bhakti Movement in 11th-century southern India. Always barefoot and adorned only by her long, wild hair, her devotion to Shiva had reached a holy pinnacle. Legend says that as Akka walked on hard and scorching earth, with her eyes turned inwards in Samadhi, the land gave up its barrenness, and flowers bloomed spontaneously under her feet, as if the Mother paid homage to her state of divine trance. This is the ultimate alchemy of our condition—when we stop hiding our rage, our messy longings, we cease to be barren. When we accept our vulnerabilities in total surrender and practice our true karma no matter the difficulties, the very ground of our Being begins to blossom spontaneously with grace from the Divine.
Completing this picture was the 14th-century German theologian and mystic, Meister Eckhart, who taught that simply expressing gratitude was a deeper spiritual tenet than practicing rituals and asceticism. He taught that if the only prayer you say in your lives is “thank you,” that will suffice. For Eckhart, gratitude was more than a sentiment—it was recognizing the divine in every mundane moment and acknowledging the good things the universe gives us and inviting more of it into our lives. If we thank the universe for our delicious chocolate ice cream on a hot afternoon, meeting friends after a long time, and the relationships we have in this world, we are practicing sacred awareness. We acknowledge that the holy is not confined to the place of worship but is present in the fabric of our lives through the bridge of gratitude.
Together these four voices create a living, breathing map—a gift from the ancient mystics for humanity. The thread stretches with nimble resilience without breaking, the self-limiting verdict drops before a field of silence, the inner being blossoms with flowers of Grace, and a simple ‘thank you’ becomes a two-word portal through which the sacred enters our lives. This is the way to hold the holy and the human at the same time.
Being ordinary and extraordinary at the same time—you are not too holy to be held:
It is crucial to understand what these sacred mystics are truly saying to us in our everyday lives. Kabir tells us the soul is an unbroken thread. It means the divine is already holding you—and you are strung together in the cosmic loom. You cannot snap the thread by being messy or angry. Rumi tells us to suspend all preconceived verdicts and allow the limitless field of silence and love to walk into our hearts.
Akka Mahadevi walked into the sun naked and bare, trusting that her Lord Shiva would hold her even without her armor. She didn’t wait to be perfect to be held by the divine—she was held because she was vulnerable.
Meister Eckhart adds the final part—gratitude is the constant acknowledgment of the sacred while being fully human. It does not deny your pain. It does not pretend everything is perfect. It simply chooses to see the holy thread even in the middle of the mess. When you say thank you for a single breath, for a small kindness, for the strength to get through the day, you are not ignoring your wounds. You are refusing to let them be the only story. You are holding the human and the sacred together in the most ordinary way possible.
The glacier that thundered down the valley did not ask for our permission to be sacred—its cataclysmic might was just another expression of the divine. And like Akka Mahadevi, when we finally stop shielding ourselves from our own emotional turmoil, the very ground of our being begins to respond. Where we once trudged in despair, we now walk with reverence—not on a trail of flowers to decorate our path, but with the profound realization that every step is already holy ground. The divine does not sit waiting for you at a pristine summit—it walks beside you in the valley, holding your hand through the debris, whispering that you are not too human to be held, and you are not too holy to weep.
You only have to stop running, breathe deeply enough to realize they were never, ever separate—and practice a small, sacred pause in your day to prove it to yourself. That is the unbroken thread. That is your sacred birthright.
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