Aug 9
In this picture a Teacher gives a water blessing to a Seeker.
A teacher begins as a person outside the self. In Sufi, the Teacher moves from intuition and is guided. Over time, the Teacher forges an internal guidance in the Seeker. We all strive to internalize Trust in Divine Guidance, Trust in Intuition.
That is the meaning of water—Intuition and Divine Guidance.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
I had the deepest meditation after the first two hours of the Seattle workshop (slow movement, Hayy chant, rest, own process) that I’d had in weeks.
I was gone, gone. I could sit and be, eternally.
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.
Jul 2
Home from Summer Movement Monastery, I look back before completely moving forward. I ate like a horse (raw food and plenty of it), and now fit into all my thin clothes, move painlessly, & dream in vivid, Scriabin-esque, Baudelarian color.
Our studio was gargantuan, with a lofty sky view over the lyric Columbia County surroundings. Birds stopped to sing or chant in rhythm with us and the old wood floor was bouncy and soft as suede underfoot.
The Dancemeditation work was deep and steady. So many beautiful, precious dances floated around the room. Dancers with fans, veils, silky pants and skirts, lycra tights, loose hair, shaved heads, castanets, zils. Breathing, looking quietly out and in.
A few things that happened:
~ We started up a zil choir!
~ Kate Temple-West took us on a brilliant weed-walk introducing delicious, healing wild greens growing everywhere.
~ Kate Russel opened up the gorgeous vista of veil-painting with her quiet mystic energy and deft suggestions.
~ Karleen Koen read spiritual poetry for us in her smoky tones.
~ Laurienne Singer, faculty at LACC, brought us a new quiet, way to listen to our partner’s body.
~ The Store in the Mansion’s front parlor was a continuous hot-spot.
~ Nathalie Molina helped produce an evening presentation about Dancemeditation’s past & future.
~ Nisaa Christie & Liz Abbene made an amazing final feast the followed a dyamic performance evening that included Kryss Statho, Carol Henning, Alia Thabit and Core Alembic (Dunya, Nisaa & Kate Russel.)
~ We closed with a Ceremony of completions for several Teacher Certifications, and initiation of those entering the TT Cert program as well as those entering into Advanced levels of our work and into our practicing community.
Thank you to everyone for making it such a remarkable journey.
I look forward now to our next 2011 Movement Monastery in New Mexico, as well as the exciting purchase of a property to be a dedicated home for Dancemeditation.
This is an exciting and happy time.
Jun 7
Turning away, turning toward.
Whirl clockwise and you’re on your own.
Turn counterclockwise, against time, and you’re with the Sufis.
Sufis melt fragments into the sky sea,
rain them on a desert garden,
bloom them in the shape of every Other flower, forgetting the birthright fragrance.
Foreheads rest on a warm iron planetary hub
and toes wander near the nearing moon.
Upside down, you think.
Inside out. She said this time and time again.
The wet smoke and dry blood,
sprouts dancing backward into the seed.
When the Earth is oiled with her own feathers
and the sky tumbles here and there,
we can still write still poems
and watch them drift off in our bottle minds.
To the monastery!
To where cleaner lies think themselves,
& where, thinking gone walking,
we get at least one trustworthy breath.
And another.
– D. D. McPherson
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