Skip to content

Aug 7

Summer Mysticism: Three Ways of Doing This

In retreat trainings, relief is always there. For everyone. Improved health is always there, spiritual growth is always there. For everyone. Beyond this basic healing, there is a range of benefit for participants and this has to do with individual propensity and intention. I see three general types show up at retreats—Passengers, Voyeurs, and Seekers. Passengers need contact with those embraced by Path, and will find healing. Voyeurs show up for drama, highs, or escapes; that can only go on for a short while before the process burns them out. There is a lot of ego there, and a tough road ahead.

Seekers find their hearts opening to the Path—that great gift feeling of ‘coming home’. These people are fortunate. They have inner certitude about their experience. Soon, however, they need to choose to gratefully, responsibly cultivate evolution. What does this look like? Arrive with good intention, participate with respect and fullness, then take care of yourself after trainings. Personal practice gives the transforming self time and sanctuary.
In striving for this, we grow to understand the embrace of Path.

Aug 6

Summer Myticism: Sufi Transmission

Making the choice to remove the personal practice requirement prompted me to ask myself about my role as the Teacher of this work. If I’m not a spiritual mom or a police-person, who am I? My role is to cultivate and grow the transmission of Path I received from my Teacher, then transmit and ‘open’ the students working with me. The student’s role is to receive and cultivate the Path I transmit to her.

What is transmission in our Sufi Way? Transmission is like an infusion of electricity into one’s circuits. In Sufi, during training periods the Teacher prepares students for this infusion, modulates the energy as it pours out and through, then closes and soothes afterward. We all transform during this process. After training periods, the student must care for the lights ignited within. She must care for her emerging self. Personal practice fans the spark or flame the Teacher has ignited.

Aug 4

Summer Mysticism: Returning to the World After Retreat

Post-retreat there is a tendency to go home and blow it. Blow all the money! As one friend says, “It’s easy to piss away all the energy built up in retreat, overworking, over committing, letting it leach away.” It is extremely unwise to squander the work done in training periods because this is dangerous to body and being. In retreat we fill our circuits and forge new tendrils, then these need to ‘set’. They need to cohere. If, after a training period, the we forget about or actively destroy the energy by not caring for our health, eating badly, getting into tumultuous relationships in work or life, then we not only undermine health and mental stability. We also damage spiritual capacity. We damage spiritual potential. We burn our circuits. You can do this a few times, but after a while the body being wears out. It’s like, How many times can your break your ankle in the same spot before it hardens?

I have lifted the requirement of daily practice from those in Intensive Training, but I still recommend daily practice—daily ‘remembrance’, as the Sufis call it. Remembrance of our Truth.  I don’t want to police it, not because I’m lazy; I just think it isn’t serving the people who train with me. It puts the struggle for one’s Path outside the self, keeping the self from ‘growing up’, spiritually-speaking. Each of us has to recognize our resistance, our choices. We need to reflect on them and weigh them. No one can put you on your own center. If you want it—inner peace, authenticity, perception, solidity—you have to strive for it. Struggle for it. A child’s little legs must work. It’s best if I step aside there. Go head—have your own intimate self-dialogue about that.

Our questions: What is important to me? Where does real happiness come from? When do I feel most whole? If spiritual path is where we live in Truth, then a regular return to the Doorway is one of the most crucial stages of growth. Retreat training and personal practice open that Doorway. Over the years, I’ve personally come to rely on a brief but focused daily practice, thus my recommendation. I hope for us all that the heart will cry for it and land us in a quiet room, with closed eyes, breathing, moving, feeling the world beyond thought. I hope the practice calls us to it. Wouldn’t that be wonderful…But if not, well, what are you going to do about it?

Aug 3

Summer Mysticism: How The Words Started

This summer at Movement Monastery in New Mexico, I began speaking about the Sufi Path. This comes after years of not saying anything. I taught almost wordlessly. This summer, the need to speak about the Path came gushing through me. I felt like the statue of an angel, perpetually open-mouthed, a song flowing through emanating from Somewhere Else. I also realized that after 25 years, I have a great deal of knowledge, both theoretical and experiential.

At Monastery, I would wake in the morning and sit in a little garden at Synergia Ranch drinking my tea and writing. These formed the scaffold of talks with which I closed the morning session. I am slowly transcribing these and putting them on the blog. I think they will help some of us. I include here additional reflections I did not speak about at retreat.

Dancemeditation is like an atom. The inner core is Sufi Mysticism. Around that core orbits a layer of Somatics, and around these two orbits the outermost layer, Art. Though all three are vital realms of exploration, this year Sufism sent me straight into the Mystical Heart. We went into the energy—strong and deep. Oddly, talking about the Path was important. It balanced the time spent in the wordless, thought-free states.

Jul 7

6 Comments

Moths

I peer into the angel votive glass as I’m about to blow out the candle and see a graveyard. Ten or fifteen moths are embedded in soft wax while others fragment in the pyre. So this is the Angel of Fire. She has appeared so innocent all these weeks, the flame flickering in her belly. Now moths cast into her. They cannot resist. What an absurdity—to be created to adore something so lethal! Their bodies make the candle spit feverishly and when it hardens, their dark carcasses form oblique dark accents in the pale wax. I resonate with sacrificial ground, the litter of moths, but also with the fire which consumes in steady relaxation.

The cabin’s thin wooden walls and open windows are connected to what is beyond—I am half outside all the time. My psyche is finally beginning to trust this but neither quickly nor easily. My cramped shape of self, molded by the confines and habits of my NYC apartment, have had me living cut and bound, my body’s long silvery threads severed, coiled, knotted. Limbs, skin, and tight skull now learn to unkink, expand, and rest in the vast space beyond the rim. I am often in a feverish body, my core threatening to burn through the skin and bones, to sear the bed and ignite the sheets. I am recovering. I am recovering from a long serious illness—my life caught in amber, my lifer so patterned it was immovable, breathless, still. A fever burns off an illness.

In the space and air and time, the amber cracks. It takes huge energy to live through this. I feel guilt for my lassitude, guilt for my pleasure; I fear my pointlessness. And I am fortunate to be some kind of moth.

Jun 26

1 Comment

Talking is Wind

Many birds today. And the ravens!

Talking. It’s wind. Air moves in shapes and temperatures. I am mostly involved in expressing meaning and oblivious to the shaping by my tongue teeth, lips, and throat of little gusts of air into rounded, clipped, or coiled forms. Talking all comes down to breath. Gale, zephyr, breeze, wail. As I talked with a friend, I had a perception of my words as being buffoon-like, the wheeze of antique bicycle horn, or a guttering candle end. Part of me was present in my words while another part witnessed my conversation in abstraction, as sounds devoid of discernible content, and right there, in middle of throat motions and noises, I felt relaxation. Has the pressure to express meaning co-opted my breath?

Thought, perception, and reflection are beautiful. Talking is beautiful. Like everything, it is most beautiful when it is relaxed, not driven, compressed, or glued together in Frankenstein shapes. I love when a true perception forms itself in within me, rolls along my tongue, catches a flow of exhale, and, if it needs to, eddies gently out. I also love when my thoughts aren’t driven to emerge but instead, roam free and breathless through the my neurotransmitter corridors, becoming this and that, popping up, dying away, cobbling into new contraptions.

Could breath come and go, the throat open, sounds come out, and not mean anything? Is meaning so essential? Must every bodily squirt come to something?

Jun 22

1 Comment

Rain Reaches Down

As I chatted with Ric on the phone on the mesa top, a huge rain cloud, a gray whale of a cloud ambled ever-so-slowly toward me. Please come here! Finally it neared. The rain came, not so much falling as stretching languidly down from the mothership belly misty, wispy, glistening tendrils, trailing this patter over the parched land.
And then came a rainbow—a perfect 180º arc spanning the road to the cabin. A fortunate omen.
I write this now by candlelight in the middle of night. The flame dances as it consumes a sacrificial moth, immolated by her dreams.

Jun 20

2 Comments

Waking

This morning, the Bower is all comfort. I feel inertial.

As I woke, I lay in bed, cool, smoke-tinged air, round as a cotton ball, pushed in the window. I savored being under the covers. The sheets softness matched the silky air. The trees seemed to clean the air that has been carrying smoke from the uncontained Carson Forrest, AZ fires west as far as Ohio. I curled under the covers and waited for the impulse of rising to fill my legs and spine and arms. The time of waiting, which isn’t really waiting but my body’s gathering together into a gesture or act of rising, was delicious.

I wasn’t aware of going toward rising. I was aware of floating away from sleep, from the night. My ears and eyes drifted over their domains, sipping sounds, sipping snippets of view, bird shadow, gilded pine needles. My nose weighed the ratio of smoke to pine scent. A little inner engine assessed and organized these fragments, feeding them to my flesh until I curled into a ball or spilled onto my belly to modulate my core temperature or to nudge my skin to lap the sheet, an awareness coming after-the-fact, ‘Ahhhhhh, that feels good.” The accumulation of these bits, like the building of sensorial friction, revved my little engine into action, and I sat up. No effort. No thought tractor-ed down my nerve branches, pushing sluggish muscles through a brain fog.

There I sat, empty, not standing or lying down or changing in any way. Time ticked by. My fine-pointed awareness faded as the wave of morning routine washed in—make the bed, get the tea going. The day of thoughts, plans, actions began.

And then I arrived with my tea tray in the Bower. It is all comfort. I feel inertial.

Jun 17

2 Comments

Letters: Letter to Mom & Dad

Dear Mom and Dad (though I know it’s you, Dad, who wrote me),

I didn’t realize, until I got your letter, which I fetched from my PO box yesterday morning, how wonderful it would be to get a letter, a real physical piece of paper with all the inconvenience of pushing a pencil across its face dragging thoughts and then posting it, in my hand. It was much closer to sitting in the the living room with you chatting over morning tea and coffee, something I love so much. Though I’ve been anticipating its arrival from our phone conversations, a letter in the abstract, that is, news of a letter coming, is nothing to a letter arriving, a letter in the hand being worth more, far more, than two, or ten, in the promise. I can read it again and again…

I carted it around as I did errands in Las Vegas. I brought it up to the mesa, to the cabin and still I saved it until late in the evening when the bustle of the day (why is a day still a bustle when, because of electric light, we could bustle around the clock, but still the the day feels more bustle-y), when the bustle of the day subsided and I could savor it by candlelight. Dad, you have always been and continue to be, such a wonderful writer! I read your letter with such pleasure. I can’t remember the last time we corresponded. Ten years ago? Twenty? Too long.

Yesterday the sky was pure drama—sweeping clouds, shafts of light, long grayish wisps of rain striping to the ground or hanging tantalizingly above like jellyfish tentacles not quite touching down. After dark, lightening on the eastern horizon, in a band of clouds above the land and beneath the star canopy, danced in silence until midnight. As an artist, I feel amused and defeated by such effortless natural opulence. Today we—the animals and I—are enveloped in a muted haze, slightly moist and cool.  A tiny bushtit flits and sings. The scratch of my pen sounds loud, a sharp contrast to the past ten days of continuous wind howl.

This afternoon I will work on a temporary water collection set-up—a tarp suspended to funnel water into the 60 gallon barrel with a screened manhole cover top I purchased yesterday. I want to empty the water out of the drum that Don left here since there is no way to peer into that container to see the state of that water. (It smells not quite right…What might be decomposing in there?) There isn’t much left in that storage anyway. I can put its contents into a covered bucket to wash up after dirty projects, then use the drum to transport water in the pick-up from the neighbor’s well and gravity-feed it by hose into the newly-purchased barrel. All this is a kind of puzzle to solve. Water is so heavy! With a 60 gallon water cache life will seem more secure and certainly cleaner.

Thank you again for the wonderful letter.
Love,
Dianne

Jun 15

3 Comments

Tangled Web

It seems odd to plant myself so far from the reach of continuous internet in order to limit my interaction with it. An extreme remedy. Couldn’t I have just stayed in NYC and been more disciplined? No. The web bored its way into my core and I needed this draconian measure. The web is a tangled web, an entangling web, very sticky, and we are food for the spider. I sit in the mesa cabin and feel how much time I have. What did I do before my hours online? My daily task is to find my way back to being alive rather than electrified.

Electrified…The sunlight (by way of solar panels) that fills my computer and my Makita cordless drill feels gentler and warmer than the grid. It feels wider. It comes from sky, rather than that pumping, oil-sucking grid. Or the nuclear powered grid. Or the grim coal-powered grid. Power slamming it through the grrrrrrrrrrrrrrid! Does the sun transform my instruments, making them more benevolent? I feel more congenial toward them and, of course, they are not connected to the internet. My web connection is a slower-than-dial-up stream crammed into the tiny iPhone, a situation which quickly starves the great maw that has eaten so much of my life force.

I wander aimlessly, accustoming myself to the drive-less-ness of this place. The daily chores are few and take time—washing dishes, washing my skin. I devise little projects that will endlessly unfold, but it doesn’t matter if they get done. I discover my emptiness. Like a dirty hump of winter ice that persists through the final dregs of spring, my meaning melts ever-so-slowly. Ambitions and identity seem faintly obscene, an insult to this land which is very grand, and plans appear to be nervousness—fear of having no plan, fear of being here, of being. This is not an altogether happy experience. One moment I feel liberated and the next, lost.

One story: I am Out West, being Georgia O’Keefe or Thoreau, relating my tale to an audience captivated by apartments and cars. Because this was my predicament, and I am not the only one, I fancy that my story is a ray of hope, or at least a fun romp. On a bad day, I feel weary of the child in my heart performing for an ‘A’, but cannot stop the small self from playing out her story lines. Just to survive I have to grip onto small self, chanting “this is who I am.” Meanwhile, the mesa crashes its wind into me, storms my ears with its opera, drowning out my inner cacophony. My story doesn’t have to be small self. Here is what is solid: the day, the night, the wind, the task, actions, sitting, observing all as it is, not as imagination, not as illusion, not someone else’s story, not even my story, though my breathing is always emerging, mixing with the wind opera, so that bit of me at least is real. We imagine we are so much but we are so little. But it is enough.

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →