Musicians, whirlers and mystic movers from Iran, Pakistan, Moldavia, Iraq, England, Germany, Holland, Italy, India, France, and — with me — the USA presented (which meant performing or teaching, thus very little talk except the wonderful storyteller) beginning at 10am and finishing with a zhikr late in the evening. The day was punctuated with two beautiful meals.

The festival took place in an enormous hall on 30 or 40 large Persian carpets with brocade cushions for sitting and an absolutely state-of-the-art amplification system (this was heaven for me!) The sensitive instruments and beautiful voices,  both the resonant and intimate speaking voices as well as singing — needed to be amplified for the 200 to 300 hundred people that filled the hall.

The morning was devoted to music including Ustad Mahmud Sabri of the famed Sabri brothers (who arrived predictably late and pushed the whole program into strange timing; not that I really noticed. The day seem to have its own place in time). After lunch, a Gurdjieff movement session was followed by the lovely Sanjana Band (Bombay/ Amsterdam.) By the time I took the stage to introduce Dancemeditation as Sufism, perform, then teach, the hall was packed. The performance felt remote to me; the mood of the room was heavy, though my dancing was freer and lighter than usual. But performance softened us, allowing us to grow accustomed to one another.

Then the class began…Hundreds of people breathed, stretched, shook, danced, the energy building and building until we were all rhythmically swinging our heads up and down in unison and shouting ‘hayy’ ‘hayy’ ‘hayy’.  We leaned into the work, pushed it forward, swallowed it, and burst into flame. No holding back. No judging. Only the joy of shared ecstasy. I danced at the foot of an enormous wave, then it crashed around me and filled me. This meeting of illuminating hearts in a place beyond the ordinary remade me. When we all open out hearts together, offering them freely to one another and to the Eternal Divine, we receive far more than we ever give.

We finished with a long beautiful singing and moving ‘Allah’, something I’ve been reluctant to teach in America during the Bush era. In Holland, now, it was perfect. No fear of Allah there. It felt delicious. The sounds washed through my subtle inner chambers while my fascia slid through the heat of motion. When I looked out, I saw a sea of limbs, faces, hair, swaying, open mouths, closed eyes.

The day continued on with great happiness. I curled up at the edge of the carpets and watched, sometimes closing my eyes and drifting to sleep while music and voices in many languages wove around me. Having that much energy washing through me seemed to tire me in one way and fulfill me completely in another.

To be continued…

I was at Kripalu, teaching, the past five days. Five hours of focused moving each day, plus tramping speedily down the very long halls to get to the excellent food before the meal hour ended. (At home my food is a the end of a very short walk from one room to another.) This year the Kripalu work was shockingly intense. The group who attended went through the whole gamut of transformation. Amazing. Strangers coming to the fun bellydance party and being willing to stumble, for most part, uncomplainingly, into the maelstrom of Sufism.

I watched one young woman have a heart opening. Not a nice blossoming under the breastbone. Not that. But the scary kind, where your identity dissolves and energy charges all through you so you think perhaps you are having a heart attack, or will explode, or maybe are some kind of weird sick that you should go to the hospital about even though you know it is isn’t really that…She was shaking for a day and a half. And when she could put words to it said she could see the inner lives of everyone. She could see too much. This is what saints and prophets from centuries past mean when they say that Truth and Enlightenment are not for the unprepared. It is extraordinary to see it all, but then the window closes. It is like getting home from the Grand Canyon––you remember the images as photographs, but your breath is back in your lungs. I was happy I could reassure her, as I lead us all out of the intensity, that she would have normal days soon again.

I remembered my early time in Sufism and am surprised at how normal I feel now. I used to hang in thin strips all over the ceiling and walls––Straw Woman after the monkeys were done––and now I’m fine, conducting the ceremony, and actually enjoying my own experience of the deepening inner quietude, of fana. I feel about this as though I have been ascending a steep slope and, stopping for a breath, turn to look out to see that I’m miles up. Base camp is a tiny speck. How did I get this high? I still feel, in the center of my climb, as if I’ve just started out, but I’m far from the beginning. I adjust to thinning air, the vast view. Its a long way down; I might not have time to descend again, might have to cross to an adjacent country, or live with mountain goats.

I danced every day. It didn’t hurt. It healed me, healed my body discombobulated by a long sojourn in the Injury Land. I danced back into self-harmony. All the little crannies yawned, stretched their stiff edges, saying ‘come in, come in’. Then last night, leading the Boogie in NYC (this was a delightful honor!), I was jumping and hopping; I was almost entirely back. I wonder, as years in dance pass, if the return will be so, or if the last injury is it: if I might never find my way out of the pit of aging. But there I was, my spine completely mobile, and my legs swirling and striding and bounding. My legs reacquainting. My legs grabbing the ground rather than mincing. (I had a great dance with Stuart and Marjie!)

I just have to put in right here this line from Mary Oliver, which is my credo:
“I am sensual in order to be spiritual.” I guess Mary Oliver is my guru now.

Can’t stay. Gotta go. Got to eat, to sleep, get away, get more, get noticed, be alone. It’s a speed world, and I often feel that my identity has shaken down into shorthand, a self-understanding so hastily scrawled it is hard to decipher what my self originally meant. I’m a dotted line rather than any one long tone.

Meditation practice (mine, of course, is Dancemeditation) is impulse management. It’s what I do. Can I stay in the meditation room, in my meditation, inside my experience, tolerating discomfort? Can I stop running on impulse? If yes, I get a lot. I wake up. I un-break and bitty fragments flow into one long tone. Staying in the room is my metaphor for not giving in to impulse, getting up and running away has given me a billion views of my delusional self. I’m over the idea that I can control my world or others; that I can escape from illness, old age, and irrelevance; that I can avoid suffering. (Being immortal and immune are such casual yet universally cherished fallacies.)

As a teacher of extended retreats, I observe how the effort of staying in the room accumulates. Day after day, we all lift the weight of the self up and down, pumping through what isn’t true. This dredges up anxiety, and we stay there, feeling it, letting it sort itself out, letting it pass away. It is as strenuous for me as teacher as it ever was as student. My job of keeping everybody at work means I have to be there too. Sometimes I want to run away early, or act out against my students; I feel my stamina ebbing, internal struggle getting the better of me.

But there is one strong difference between my struggle and what I see in some others. I observe when a person’s heart is fisted. Waking hasn’t yet planted its blossom under the breastbone, and their meditation work remains a loose collection of serenities and mini-epiphanies, soothing but temporary and a bit feckless. Sometimes they smile through the session, other times they bolt up and huff off.

I’m in a different place. It happened like this: like everyone else, I stayed in the room, often unwillingly, but curious and obedient, and grew more tolerant of my self. This led to being better at tolerating others. Over time, the world grew roomier. (For all you Sufis, Rumi-er.) Life became more comfortable, then more wonderful. It was magic, really. Then one day something distinct happened. An entirely calm decision to wake arrived in my heart. My heart turned unquestioningly toward the entire process, choosing to stay in the meditation room, in the meditation, inside true experience. There was nowhere else my heart wanted to be.

I was like that for a long time before I ever began to teach, though teaching has further forced my hand, making me arrive before everyone, tolerate more than I thought I ever could, then stay beyond the end, folding up the mats, shutting off the lights. Adnan Sarhan, Sufi Master, said remarked, “If I could find something better to do than teaching, I’d do it.” It was such an unsentimental statement. He took the role of Sufi Master as a preference. He actually liked it. And I have certainly weighed those words against my own choices since. I’m glad I stayed in the room through the time it took for my heart to un-fist.