To change anything takes practice. Addictions — they’re bad habits. Very bad. Beyond our reach, we say to ourselves. Beyond our will power. Breaking them takes more than wishful thinking, more than a few days of intentionality. If you’re hooked on addictive substances, you’re dug in deep; you need a 12-step or more. But if you’re in a self-destructive rut, retreat works.

One part of Summer Movement Monastery is training out of self-destructive habits.  The body needs time and repetition — more than once or twice. Two weeks of preparing and eating cleansing food isn’t only a yearly retreat clean-out; it’s a springboard to taking care of oneself by preparing and eating good food daily throughout the year. Two weeks gives our bodies enough time to retain the new experience, to develop a comfort with it, and a preference for it.

Amazing to think that many of us live on crap, dead food, predominantly cooked by slave labor of others, but we’re so busy, etc., blah-blah-blah. At Summer Movement Monastery, we get rid of blah-blah-blah for two weeks. We prepare and eat good food, envision how we will implement this at home, then prioritize this action.

We also practice Dancemeditation. Why didn’t I say this first? Because its more obvious. We know we are in session 7 hours a day, and we can imagine, or know from experience in other retreats, that we retain a craving, at least for a while, to do practice at home.

The most important thing about the 7 hours of Dancemeditation daily in retreat  is what I call the Operation. Our time in retreat makes a permanent spiritual change. After, we return to our world in a changed condition. Yes, it’s possible to forget that this happened, possible to bury the change under dark choices, but why? A Path has called us. All we have to do is open to it, spend time with the Guide and group, and then not forget. Retreat is a spiritual rip in time. We enter Timeless Time concerned with our spiritual evolution. Permanent change — the Operation — happens because our Deepest Being needs Communion with the Deep, All-Pervasive Subtle. We need what is beyond the daily world of cars and screens and din.

There is plenty of discourse about whether or not a Path should be socially useful. Should spirituality be politically active to be relevant? Are our choices to make a better world a result of how evolved we are? Is positive change possible, and can we even effect positive change without changing our condition? Or is the world a mirage and all that matters is the internal spiritual struggle? Does activism distract from spiritual path?

No matter how you consider your own role in the world, or the role of spiritual path in your life,  retreat is where the most accelerated growth happens. Looking at retreat from the most mundane perspective regardless of your philosophical stance, cultivating positive habits is, at the very least, good for you and  the world.

I had strong dreams which I can’t remember — part of their charm, but it was a relief to sleep deeply, to dream fully, to be in a world not nailed down. A world of odd intuition, paradox, pockets of clarity and pockets of dark fragments that weren’t frantic but simply unordered. Chaos. The word ‘chaos’ implies pandemonium but it can be quiet, floating, peculiar. Chaos may contain both potential and unraveling without knowing which is which. Chaos is the Is Not for a mind that favors categorization and definition; for a bodymind that lives in a cognitive netherworld, this Is Not is a balm, a boon, a peace, an Is Not Is-ness.

Not exactly Wujud, but clasping its edge. Wajad.

When I taste Is Not Is-ness — the pure place that has no white light, no angels — insanity departs, fear departs, bone-deep exhaustion departs. I drink happiness.
Without it, my life is slow death.

He writes:
“The native Arabic speaker would immediately recognize the w/j/d radical within the words wajd (ecstasy), wujud (existence), wajad (to find) and tawajud (making-ecstatic), and would immediately comprehend the arc using the underlying radical to place these meanings in relationship to one another and at times fuse them into a single term.
We immediately note the difference in metaphor between the Latinate term ecstasy (ek stasis) as in “standing outside of oneself” or “rapture” (from raptus), as “being taken”  or “seized up” out of oneself, and the Arabic term, wajd. Wajd combines the meaning of “intense feeling” with the notion of “finding.” Though we might translate the term as ecstasy or rapture, as Qushayri shows here explicitly and Junayd implies continually…the Sufis always kept in mind the term’s specific meanings of finding and intensity of feeling carried within the terms triconsonantal root w/j/d.”

I am drawn to the definition of wajd—ecstasy—the term used widely now for movement experience. Any sort of movement goes quickly into a wordlessness, followed by an easy quelling of thought, and the ensuing state can deliver us to a state of being loosely termed ‘ecstasy’ because we so commonly identify with our thoughts, or at any rate, use thought forms to identity ourselves. Movement takes us away from that identity.
I love the emphasis here on the idea of ‘finding and intense feeling.’ This characterizes my experience in Dancemeditation. Certainly, in practice, my sense of personal identity softens and, when I am graced, dissolves, but this happens through a sense of ‘going in’ rather than stepping or flying out. I feel more embodied. More present. What dissolves is not the body but the sense of ego identity. Body becomes a sort of feeler—a place, a space, a shape of energy. The ‘my-ness’ is what sifts out of this frame. So it is not that I leave, but that ‘I’ leaves. Wajd and wujud together is this experience.

About wujud Sells continues:
“In addition to intense experience and finding, the lexical field of wajd also includes “existence” (wujud)…The Sufi notion of existence is experiential. To exist is not simply to have being or phenomenal reality. On the contrary…many [Sufis] saw existence as achieved only insofar as one’s ego-self, one’s normal identity and center of being, is annihilated. Existence occurs in the ecstasy and in the discovery  that occurs through “passing away.” The full lexical field of w/j/d—ecstasy, finding, existence—corresponds as closely as any Sufi term to what is currently called the mystical experience…
Tawajud [making ecstatic]…can take on several senses: attempting to so something, affecting to do something, doing something in a studious, deliberate manner. One who makes ecstatic is attempting to achieve ecstasy through his own initiative or, more negatively, affecting ecstasy…
The states occur during the process of a life devotion and are, in some sense, the consequence of acts of devotion and practices of contemplation. On the other hand, the Sufis emphasized continually the fact that states are bestowed freely, come spontaneously, and are not earned or gained through any particular effort.”

Finding comes from reaching, but if we reach too much or too hard, we force it happen—tawajud. Instead, we it is better to do our practice without forcing,with attention, with trust and patience, and without expectation of a result. Big quiet work.

Moving from one to another rests on understanding oneself. In Dancemeditation this means time spent with, and in, the body. We are our bodies. Within a movement practice, we see, feel, and discover who and what we really are. As Qushayri’s stages suggest, we are more than the ‘self’ we can cognitively grasp, more than we can intuitively grasp. We are picked from Nothingness, grasped into being-ness, beyond our understanding.

1. Shu ‘a u’l basira — Awareness of Your Being
This concerns spiritual knowledge and information, aslo doctrinal and theoretical knowledge. This is where we learn through words — reading, talking, analysis. Accessing the cognitive to penetrate the mysteries of our Path.

2. Ayn al basira — Awareness of Your Non-Being
Opening of the spiritual heart’s ‘eye’. (Ayn means eye.) In this stage, the heart opens and the ego diminishes. Intuitions flows, we begin to be less involved in the illusion of control, and we acquire trust.

3. Haqq al basira — Awareness in Truth, beyond Being and Non-Being
Truth, Certainty in the Divine Eternal, the end & goal of the Path. This is fana, or dissolution of the small self into Unity.

Sufi Master, Maneri, has said of subtlety. “Being the most subtle, the Divine must permeate all, for the greater the subtlety, the greater the quality of permeation.”

We can enter the perception of subtlety by treading along the path of breath into deep interior meditative states where the Ego-self ceases to dominate, and where “I”-ness fades. When our ‘story’ — riddled with competitive-ness, arrogance, complaining, resentment, grasping, envy, self-criticism, rage, and other destructive qualities — still binds our awareness, subtlety will not appear. Subtlety is delicate, a wild creature that skirts danger.

Yet subtlety is powerful. It can sweep us away from our repetitive, redundant small self into our Essence.

Subtlety cannot be muscled into being, yet without a sincere invitation, it will not appear. The door to subtlety is sincerity. The door is willingness. Only the heart of one’s heart can offer a sincere invitation.

Breathing must, of course, be awake, not mechanical. And beyond that, as we breathe, we must let the heart of our heart offer a sincere invitation. We must be willing to give up what we think we are, willing to be lost in intimacy.