Awakin Call Highlights: Lata Mani

A Feminist Historian Who Lost Everything — and Found What Cannot Be Lost

Who She Is

Lata Mani trained as a feminist historian and post-colonial scholar whose early work unsettled colonial narratives and interrogated how realities are constructed and authorized. In January 1993, a catastrophic accident on a California freeway — a truck hitting the car she was in — radically altered everything. Her last words before impact: "I hate God." What followed was one of the more quietly extraordinary spiritual and intellectual transformations of our time.

Thirty years on, while still navigating the accident's ongoing repercussions, her contributions have far outstripped her doctors' expectations. Her work moves fluidly across essay, poem, film, meditation, and children's literature — all carrying the same steady pulse: an invitation to retrain attention itself.

The Accident and What It Broke Open

The person in that car was a committed social justice activist, a doer, someone who believed effort was everything. She had just returned from India, where she had witnessed the destruction of the Babri Masjid and the riots in Mumbai — that was the conversation she was in mid-sentence about when the truck appeared in the rearview mirror. The collision didn't just injure a body. It dismantled a way of knowing.

What emerged in the aftermath was neither dramatic nor narrated in real time — her mind had gone very quiet, thoughts nearly absent, bodily control gone. But the silence wasn't empty:

"What I did experience was profound love, just love flooding our house, flooding my body, and holding me. And I recognized it as the divine mother — which was also very surprising because I had not been drawn in any way, shape, or form. To recognize something you'd never seen before — what is that? Who is recognizing who?"

She had been a lifelong secularist. She had never meditated. She hadn't sought this. Which was perhaps the point.

On God, Religion, and the Misrecognition

One of the call's most quietly devastating moments was her reflection on those last words before impact — I hate God:

"It was a misrecognition. What I was really saying was that I hate political ideologies that corralled religion in order to make certain political arguments. But that distinction was not clear to me. God cannot be imprisoned in religion. Religion seeks to corral God with its own limited understandings."

And then, directly: God is not a concept. God is an experience. There are infinite ways to access the sacred — without any conception of the divine. That is, she insisted, the glory of creation: for each nature, there is a path.

The Appointment with the Light

From Interleaves, her meditation on illness and grace: after eating — which was exhausting — she would make her way the 10 to 15 feet from kitchen table to bed and lie facing a window with an oleander bush outside. At that hour, light streamed in. She could see the motes dancing in the shaft, and then:

"It would just transform into a vibratory field that flooded my body and gave me moments of reprieve and release from the constant pain and discomfort."

She called it her appointment with the light. And in that appointment, she began to relearn the meaning of effort — not willpower or grinding through, but aligning with what is. Not resisting what is.

"If you could breathe into the pain, if you could open yourself to this wonder of the light streaming and lifting you — if after that was over you revert to regular body consciousness, you just remain grateful even if you are suffering. Gradually, gradually, gradually, you begin to relearn the meaning of effort as a dance between the intention to align, the determination not to allow story to get in the way, and to genuinely open yourself to the mystery of what is happening."

On Oneness, Separateness, and What It Actually Costs

Her framework for why human suffering so often becomes human-caused suffering is precise and unsparing. Drawing on both the Zen saying "off by a centimeter, off by a mile" and quantum principles of interconnection, she described what happens when we build philosophies on separateness:

"This idea that we can take action and control the consequences of our action in line with our intention — this is to live on a basis that is utterly erroneous. When we do that, we unleash consequences that even we have no idea what to do with. You can just read the headlines to see the veracity of what I'm saying."

On identity politics in particular, she was bracing: "Identity politics are ruining the world today. People are retreating into the claim that my identity is deeply meaningful and it is eternal — spoken with a confidence about identities they've only recently come to in a particular way."

Nature, she observed, operates on entirely different principles — non-hierarchical, poly-existent, everything in sacred relationship to everything else. Democratic is too thin a word for it. It is a grand symphony that calls every element to take its place.

Acceptance as Potency, Not Passivity

Pavi read this passage from Interleaves on acceptance:

"I remember being embarrassed by the invitation to accept life just as it presents itself. I remember thinking ruefully that only months before, I had marched under the banner 'No justice, no peace.' And yet now I seem to be discovering another equally potent truth: no just is, no peace."

This is the pivot at the heart of her work — acceptance not as resignation but as the very ground from which real action, real courage, and real freedom become possible. As Lata put it: "Are we ready to give up grief even after honoring it? Can we honor grief and give it up?" The witnessing stance — the spacious awareness that allows experience to pass through rather than calcify — is only possible when you have fully honored the seasons of your feeling. Freedom is a telos, she said. Something you arrive at.

From the Tantra Chronicles: The Body Knows

A note on the title first: tantra, as Lata uses it, has nothing to do with its popular Western misappropriation. She defines it as the principles of the universe — densely interconnected, inter-permeated, polyphonic, symphonic reality. The deep truth that nothing exists in isolation, that everything is in perpetual relationship with everything else, above and below, within and without. Tantra, in her understanding, is simply the name for that grand design.

The Tantra Chronicles — 43 wisdom teachings received by Lata and her partner Ruth Frankenberg during meditation, from figures including Shiva, Devī Amā, Jesus, and Mother Moon — were written to help course-correct the human collective. One teaching, from Devī Amā, spoke directly to the epistemological reversal the accident had forced on Lata:

"One must ask body to commune and speak. One must ask body to become an observer of mind — as opposed to asking mind to be an observer of body. Let me assure you that if asked, the body will speak. It will send messages, verbal as well as non-verbal, mental as well as physical. The body is far less conditioned than mind... Mind must be willing and gentle and generous enough to learn from body... Viscerality must be listened to."

The mind, the teaching clarifies, was the primary site of injury. The rest of you is free, clear, and ready to teach.

The Closing — Her Words

This passage, shared near the end of the call, bookended everything:

"Let the heart break into a thousand fragments. Though in truth, it is not the heart that splits open, but the armoring of grief around it. Let the crustacean of lifetimes of grief soften slowly till it falls away, almost slips away into the night like a guest whose work is done. Beloved mother, help me in each moment to find my resting place in the eye that sees all things and resists nothing. May I have the courage to simply be. Simply feel. Simply watch. Simply learn. Simply offer. Simply surrender. All yours. All yours. All yours."

Lata Mani had to leave the call early due to health constraints — a reminder, as Pavi noted, that her journey is not a completed arc. It is still unfolding, in the body, in real time.