Feb 3
Imagine eating and eating and never digesting. Imagine being full, packed to the gills and never being able to assimilate, starving for nutrition, wallowing in gluttony run amok. Now imagine that this is not about food but about body taking in information and never having a chance to integrate this information. This not so hard to imagine because it is how we live. Read more
At the recent Kripalu Intensive, on the last day, Loretta read this stunningly beautiful poem to all of us. It captured our state but took us beyond as well. She has kindly let me share it here.
Under Shiva’s Gaze
Shiva graces our Dancing
As we enter the Great Temple of the Body.
There is a big idea is Sufism known as Nafs. Resistance to practice is entwined there. Nafs, in brief, are self-destruction. More gently put, they are the aspects of self that undermine core soul hungers of Self. They can show up as fear, doubt, or lack of self respect. Read more
Oct 21
“There is a sickness worse than the risk of death and that’s forgetting what should never be forgotten…” –Mary Oliver
I am working with a new chanting. New to me. Otherwise, old as time. Its not important that anyone know what the word is. It’s a Sufi chant. Sufi chanting is called zhikr — remembrance.
My new chant surprises me because the part that is meaning — its literal translation — doesn’t touch the fullness of the experience. This chant must be right for me since, as I do it, I cross a threshold into the place I never want to forget, a place where I feel completely human yet safe and real. Most ordinary days, human-ness is a long string of vigilance and fear. I’m familiar with all that, inured to it. I seek the place where, like my time as an infant, I was held by my mother or father and they were vigilant for me. I was safe in their arms. They watched out for the wolf and bear, the snake and illness. Those killers. ‘Being held’ is a sweet flavor of giving up into the Moment. Yet the Moment requires surrender, letting yourself be held.
On the surface, the Moment could be any sort of temperature or condition; it could be painful, or it could be luscious. That, however, is just its surface. There is the inside of the Moment. The inside of the Moment is far more than being held and carried. It has a secret wisdom. (Not so secret if you get there but untouchable to most who stand on the outside of the glass window in life.) The importance of spiritual seeking is to find and touch, every day and in as many moments as possible, the inside of the Moment — not forgetting what should never be forgotten.
The inside of the Moment is a lamp in the dark, a vista that is boundless, is newness, is inspired existence, is non-separateness, is freedom, is spaciousness. It is soft like rabbit fur, and a perfect embrace. It is communion, knowing, contentment, and the end of bottomless want. It is the end of fear.
Oct 14
In an earlier post I wrote about coming home from retreat and, with all that new juice, getting involved in lots of projects and using the energy lavishly though often unwisely. I remember those words as I return to NYC with recharged batteries, as if the New Mexico sun had charged my soul. I am aware that all the cleansing breaths I’ve taken on the mesa have been healing. The light has been healing. And my cells feel wonderful. Alive!
Back in NYC I focus on business. I sit in front of my computer and type away. I’m on the phone. I email. I organize Dancemeditation sessions and ‘run the store’. But as I do, I feel what I am doing. Inside my apartment, I inhale EMFs. As I walk along the street, I inhale heavy metals. With every breath comes poison.
NYC is a stimulant — caffeine or speed. It’s a great jolt, useful in creative tasks and for un-spooling complex ideas. The mesa is nourishment. Direct inspiration. I make the two sound very black and white. Who wouldn’t prefer the mesa? But the mesa has its rigors. Its austerity is a large part of its ability to heal, and that must be gotten used to. New York is materially cushy. Lots of water. Lots of electricity. Anything you could possibly want — for a price.
The power of NYC for me has always been its raw energy. If I can transform it with my practice I have a dynamic resource, but I have to transform it, not get lost in it, or follow its whims and tides which easily chew up a soul.
I feel almost as if I need to get all my business work done quickly before I lose my juice. But then I realize that the healing that took place on the mesa is changing how I am working. I breathe as I type. I tend toward balance. I don’t teeter on an edge. I am all here, and being all here is far less crazy, less volatile, less self- destructive than past ways I’ve lived in NYC. 
I stopped in at Grace Church on 10th and Broadway to listen to the noon organ concert. That was a nice break. The cool colored light. The smell of wooden pews and leather prayer books. Timelessness, to breathe and be bathed in music.
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?
Jul 7
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
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 20
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.
“Van Eyck (early 15th century) understood that realism [in painting] doesn’t require verisimilitude but only just enough visual cues to exploit the mind’s credulity.” ~ Peter Schjedahl, New Yorker mag 11/10 Perhaps realism, in a two-dimensional surface, is better served by visual cuing than for instance by the plethora of detail in a photograph, since cuing ‘suggests’. A cue makes room for consciousness to add associated non-visual information making the flat surface spring into three dimensionality. I look a Van Eyck’s painting and feel the temperature of the scene, and almost smell what it depicts. My being wants the total sensorial array and, if given a cue, will rescue bits of experience from memory, cobble these together, and so I may enter my own pastiche.
I often wonder, then, what a viewer adds to seeing three dimensional movement, and this brings me to the doorstep of Witness Dances — being watched and watching. I witness someone move and much of my effort goes to seeing what she is doing. But in recent times this has felt entirely forced, not so much a practice of visual focus and undivided attention but rather a blinder to ‘what is’. In my new phase I turn toward finding my breath as I watch others and let my attennae go to work gathering impressions. My mind spreads open, clears, the way a rumpled patch of water settles, and finally I see what I am looking at. But how can I know if it is reality? It is at the very least my reality. My view. I realize, for me, being seen in Witness Dancing is no issue. I am entirely comfortable in the role. All my growth has been during the aspect of witnessing. I had no idea when I began this practice, that this aspect would require such a long unfolding and challenge so much of what I understand in myself.
Linen Theme by The Theme Foundry
Copyright © 2012 Dervish Society of America. All rights reserved.
