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Posts tagged ‘Retreat’

Sep 22

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Names in the Land

I sit on the deck bundled in a sweater after a late afternoon rain storm. Fans of sun rays burnish the land between the humps and banks of clouds. The mesas and canyons all have names, have had many names over time. I don’t know any of these yet. And most names aren’t contained in the hard edges of language, the sticky net of thoughts. The mesas approach and retreat in the play of light like a line of country dancers. Long shadows spill over the crest and slide down the slope into the shadowy floor.

My mind wanders, thinks about things but these dissolve; Ravenrock turns sticky thoughts slippery, hard to grip. I listen. My eyes rest on what surrounds me—bushy live oak, heavy-headed spikes of black gramma grass, bobbing juniper boughs. Breathing. Yes. My chest swells, grasps the top of the inhale for a beat, then gushes out. After, easy sliding breaths. The west wind pours over the crest. A prickly pear’s rosy fruit catches a shaft of low light, the pores from which each needle pierces out holding a glisten of rain. The fruit itself resembles an engorged, enflamed thumb. Wisps of cool, damp air ease out of the west. One cricket sings. One jay flits.

 

Sep 10

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I Need This Palace

Late night. The crickets sings. I don’t sleep. I wake, light a candle, and read beautiful Hafiz poems and Koran. My cabin is a cranium, the door a mouth, and the deck its tongue. I walk out of the head, through the mouth, onto the tongue, and fall into space as a song. Quiet settles in me. It grows too cold for the cricket. I close the window and lean toward the candle. Read more

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 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

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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 22

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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 5

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Difference in Waters

This morning, as I wash my silver tea spoon, I notice the difference between waters. I filled one plastic jug at my friend’s house in Glorieta. Their well-water is full of minerals. I rinse and rinse and still think the item, skin or spoons, is soapy. It is odd to drink this water straight-up; it feels beautiful and silky as it goes down, but filling, and after a while its minerals have a medicinal effect. Once boiled this goes away, so I use it for tea and washing.

Yesterday I filled five gallon jugs from my neighbor rancher’s well which reaches six hundred fifty feet down through rock to the mesa’s aquifer. This water is sweet, clean, fresh. I could drink and drink and drink…It washes over my fingers with ease and clarity. Both of these wells reach into the deep rock, both are in high terrain in an arid climate, neither are polluted or processed or altered, but the water lets me taste the different rocks.

The Road

The way up to my cabin is a steep switchback climb up a gravel-paved road to the mesa top, leading into seven miles of relatively level ground over a dirt and lime shelf road to my property, then along a rutted dirt drive that eventually leads to a windy, tight way through trees over immovable rocks and at last a walk down the rim rock ‘stairs’ to the cabin door. It is a journey in itself. The eight miles total takes me thirty minutes to traverse if nothing comes up, like rain that would turn parts of the road to sticky guacamole, or neighbors temporarily blocking the access as they do repairs or move livestock. That is where I start and end my time for the present.

May 20

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Spirituality in Dance Tele-interview

Lisa Michaels, VP of Sacred Dance Guild interviews Dunya May 19, 2011.
The Sacred Dance Guild and Natural Rhythms offers an exciting tele-interview series focused on exploring the many ways people express spirituality in dance, hosted by life long dancer and current SDG Vice-President Lisa Michaels.

DUNYA-Spiritual Dance Guild Inteview 5/19/11

Mar 26

Summer Retreat Approaches

As winter temperatures drag on here in the northeast (I am in NYC as I write), I find that I draw myself toward the Summer Movement Monastery through the rays of light that extend the early spring days. Summer has, for over 30 years, meant spiritual retreat time for me, a period where I let the world go, let it go and focus on spiritual intimacy.

I love the Sufi phrase ‘Intimate Conversation’. It refers to intimacy with God, communion with and into the refreshment of One. Before I came to this intimacy,  I was always separated, always lonely, and deeply sad in my heart. Every day in my practice I am grateful to the doors of Path that opened and spirited me away from that sadness. I am grateful to my teachers, who helped me learn how to open the doors again and again, and to the precious companionship of others who have practiced beside me.

Every spring I feel the great relief of knowing I will soon be letting go of the world for a while, letting go of it with spiritual friends. I feel joy and eagerness.
I will soon be in the arms of the Real Friend.

Al hamdu lillah.

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