Retreats AND retreats

Recently, a male friend of mine told me how he had created the money for a trip to India so he could do a 40-day retreat with a prominent Sufi Pir.  I thought about it, off and on, for several days afterward, wondering why the whole idea kind of….puzzled me.  I felt a slight annoyance, too, probably because I have yet to make it to India, and wouldn’t mind going at all, although I doubt that I’d spend my time there doing forty days on retreat.  I believe in retreats, don’t get me wrong.  In fact, I too have been on retreat for about a year and a half now, a fact which surprises me.  It surprised me when I first felt drawn into my retreat, and it surprises me now.  I am a “certified retreat guide” in the Sufi Order International.  That means I am supposed to be capable of guiding people on silent retreats, intuitively.  It’s been awhile since I did so, but I felt reasonably prepared for my own long retreat, and I have had a wonderful long-distance guide to see me through it, largely via email.  I must insert a disclaimer here:  don’t try this at home, folks.  Well, unless you do.  Generally speaking, the retreat process is an extremely difficult one, and the retreatant ought to be ready for it.  It’s possible I may have been more prepared than some, having done many group and individual retreats, and guided some, as well.   There are “retreats” and retreats, of course.  I am not speaking of the “retreat” you take if you are an executive for a huge corporation and your “team” retires to the beach for a weekend of mind-games and rest, led by a psychologist.  I am speaking of the kinds of retreats taken by the dervishes, the yogis, the desert fathers, the monastics of the various esoteric schools.  I am speaking of drawing away from everything, becoming silent, and sitting for long hours every day, practicing intense and difficult meditation practices, eating little, speaking not at all, and working very, very hard.  In the Sufi Order, it is called an “alchemical” retreat, the concept based on the work of Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan, who staged the process around the phases of the classical medieval alchemical process.  The Sufis I know go on retreat as often as they’re able, and they do retreats of three, six, ten and sometimes even 40 days.  And I’m sure that a chance to go and be guided by someone who is steeped in the teachings of one of the traditional Sufi Orders in the East is particularly attractive.  The retreat process is a difficult, intensive, and even dangerous one, if the retreatant is not ready for it, and if there is not a guide.  Esoteric practice can strengthen the ego, not subjugate it, unless one knows what one is doing.  But back to my friend and his retreat in India.  Why, I wondered, does one have to go somewhere spiritually impressive (which India obviously is) and be guided by someone who is well-known?  Is the retreat better?  Are they more enlightened afterward?  Why would someone need this?

My own retreat has been quite a humble one:  having gone through six surgeries that left me debilitated and depressed, I was looking around, trying to figure out what I was supposed to do next, when I felt myself drawn, inexorably, into an intense meditative process.  I will admit, my back was to the wall at that time, I had come to the end of all my devices, and I wasn’t sure what to do with myself next.  Everything had changed.  I had changed.  I didn’t know who I was or why I was here.  I didn’t know why I was alive, and in all honesty, I didn’t even know if I wanted to be alive.  And I was pretty sure that none of my other remedies for this kind of state were going to work.  And this time, I wasn’t going to try to make myself feel better.  I was going to go for broke.  I suppose I decided to put this Sufi path of mine to the test.  If I could be healed and made whole, I knew of no other way that I wanted to do it.

I didn’t go to India.

I didn’t pay a lot of money to some notable spiritual teacher to guide me.

I didn’t go away to a well-known monastery or ashram.

I sat down in my rocking chair on my porch.  And I practiced.  And I practiced.  And I practiced.  For long hours every day.  I read holy books.  I corresponded with my guide via email.  I listened to incredible music.  I listened to the birds chirp and the trees rustle.  When my husband came home in the evening, we were together as usual, and when my daughter came home from college for the weekend, we were a family.

I ate carefully, but well.  I slept at night.  When I could.  I did not wear a robe or sleep on a cement floor, as I once did when I went on retreat in the French Alps and made a retreat in a shepherd’s hut.

It worked.  The Divine Being blessed me endlessly.  I am convinced that I could not possibly be any happier with the results than I would have been if I had traveled to India.  I cannot speak of these results here, but if someone reads this who knows…they WILL know, and that’s all I can say.  But perhaps I can say that the sky and the earth are meeting right inside here.

I really hope I get to India sooner or later.  I hope I get to a lot of places.  But God is right HERE. and given that this is the case, I am carrying all the rest anyway.

If you are a male, you may not like what I’m going to speak of now.  Unless, of course, you are a male who is in touch with his animus and has the ability to laugh at the absurdity of being human.  Just be warned . . . and “don’t shoot the messenger.”

I was speaking of my friend’s trip to India with a woman friend, and I asked her, “what is it that makes someone think they MUST go and seek God under the auspices of some famous and well-known person in a spiritually impressive place?”  She chuckled.  ”Well,” she said mischievously, “he’s a man.”  And yes, we laughed….wickedly.  So sue me.  Yet I do believe there is a bit of truth in the idea that it is the more asssertive, outward part of a person’s nature that causes them to need something outside to bring them to the place of finding that their heart’s desire was available right inside all along.

It’s very convenient.

<Gasho>

At the end of a crazy-moon night
the love of God rose.
I said, “It’s me, Lalla.”

The Beloved woke. We became That,
and the lake is crystal-clear.

Lalla Ded, c. 14th century

Al Ghaffar

There is a memorable hadith where a Bedouin says to the Prophet, “What if I do this really bad thing?  And the answer is, “Allah forgives.”  But what if I do it again and again and again?”  ”Allah continues to forgive.”  Then the Bedouin says, “Doesn’t Allah ever get tired of forgiving?”  And the Prophet Muhammad says, “No, but you might get tired of doing that same thing over and over again.”

 Physicians of the Heart (see below), p. 127.

Life Being Lived

And yet, though we strain

against the deadening grip

of daily necessity, I sense there is this mystery:

All life is being lived.

Who is living it, then?

Is it the things themselves,

or something waiting inside them,

like an unplanned melody in a flute?

Is it the winds blowing over the waters?

Is it the branches that signal to each other?

Is it flowers

interweaving their fragrances,

or streets, as they wind through time?  — Rilke

Recently I received, from a well-known academic and Muslim here in Chapel Hill, a blanket criticism of American Sufis, pointing out that “we” do not understand the true meaning of Sufism, but veil our understanding within the bias of  ”our” Western capitalistic world view.  He gave, as an example, Deepak Chopra who, he says, charges $5,000 for a weekend seminar.  The implication is that real Sufis are not materialistic, and do not practice the kind of engaged spirituality he believes is the correct way of life for a true Sufi.

Well.  Where do I start?

First of all, I wasn’t aware that Deepak Chopra bills himself as a Sufi.  Second, I was not aware that he is an American, but I will admit I do not know, because his words do not attract me, nor does his being.  Third, I object to blanket statements about any group, particularly from a noted academic who ought to be capable of more critical thinking.  Finally, I am not aware that the practice of Sufism means that one is “this” or “that” or holds a particular world view . . . and I find it astonishing that someone who is supposed to be an “expert” on such matters would make such an irresponsible statement.

As for me, I just sit on my porch and watch the birds and listen to the trees.  It seems to me that the trees know where they stand, and the birds refuse to favor one position over another, and thus they demonstrate, for me, the meaning of the word Allah.  I will say one thing about “we” American Sufis:  sometimes we can be rather naive and uninformed about the Islamic framework in which Sufism has become known to the Western world, but it seems to me that such constructs are really only the “basket that carries the flowers,” and I think the essence is available to us all, regardless of our station in life or our political views or our geographic location in space and time.  I was reminded, recently, by my new favorite book, Physicians of the Heart (see below) that the word Allah is derived from the Arabic verb waliha, which means to love passionately, intensely, totally:   “crazy love.”

That’s it.

The teacher who brought me up told stories about the rishis in the Himalayas, the Desert Fathers, the Yogis and the Madzubs, the Chassids, the contemplatives of all the varied ways to illumination  who refuse to “join the club (or the “old boys’ network”),” those ones who refuse to believe the lies, those ones who hold the world up in space, who keep it spinning, wobbling, staggering along because they say Allah . . . and leave “them” to their devices.  And Allah is a name that can be called in many, many ways . . .

Let us not forget:  in the Al and La of Allah are the words yes and no.  The rest is just excuses.

The highest good is like water.
Water gives life to the ten thousand things and does not strive.
It flows in places men reject and so is like the Tao.
In dwelling, be close to the land.
In meditation, go deep in the heart.
In dealing with others, be gentle and kind.
In speech, be true.
In ruling, be just.
In daily life, be competent.
In action, be aware of the time and the season.

No fight: No blame.  

Tao te Ching

American Dervish

As I was reading this book, I kept thinking about similar books of its kind, particularly THE CHOSEN, by Chaim Potok.  Another coming-of-age story about a young man living in a culture that would be unfamiliar to many of us of the “Leave it to Beaver” generation, and even the ones that come after, but the comparison ends there.  THE CHOSEN (and its successors) was a rich, dense, intelligent and extremely moving book that illustrated exquisitely the profundity of pain and joy in growing up in a very specific culture….and AMERICAN DERVISH…wasn’t.  A pretty good first book.  And an important book for mainstream post-911 Americans.  But not good enough to truly do service to its topic.

I happen to be that rarity, an American Sufi.  I am well aware that the very concept is ridiculous to most of the more traditional, Eastern Sufis and/or Muslims, but I claim my heritage nonetheless, after some forty years of study with an authentic Sufi teacher.  I read through a number of the reviews on Amazon, and it is interesting to me that very few of the readers zero in on this very important aspect of the writer’s illustration of Islam, Sufism:  generally thought to be an outgrowth of Islam, typically understood as something like Islamic mysticism.  In my experience, it is much more than that, but my purpose here is not to argue these issues, it is to point out that the author tried very hard to wade through his conditioning as a Muslim–or not–at the hands of his family and community, his heritage and his life as an American boy….and in some way, found in his aunt’s understanding of Sufism, a deep answer to his pain, an answer he still didn’t entirely understand, even at the end of his story; or at least, the character didn’t.  Given the few referrals to the Sufis in the book, it is certainly easy to miss this nuance, but for me, it is the only thing that eventually causes the book to make as much sense as it does.  Unfortunately, the author’s seeming lack of understanding–or his failure to subtly lead the reader to his possibly real understanding–fails.  Most of the book is so gritty and so tragic and so painful and fraught with such melodrama that the culmination of the story left me, at least, thinking that the author himself didn’t “get it.”

But who are these people the author writes about?  With the possible exception of Mina, and perhaps the boy’s mother and father, the other characters seem rather one-dimensional.  I found myself adding to them with my own imagination, trying to flesh-out the incomplete illustrations of them.  The most frustrating one was Nathan, and it occurs to me that perhaps the reader doesn’t really come to understand someone like Nathan–a Jewish American, the child of Holocaust survivors–simply because such people were truly foreign to his world.  He could only see what was in front of him, it would seem.

Ultimately, though, the frustrating thing about this book was the unanswered questions, the biggest of which was supposedly answered by Mina before her death, explained by some “Sufi-speak” that might make sense to someone like me, and that in this context was supposed to explain her understanding of why she remained in a simply dreadful, violent relationship that nearly killed her and probably damaged her children irreparably because of her refusal to take action, a refusal that made no sense for a woman of her intelligence, a woman who had already been through so much trauma, a woman who was as strong as she was said to be.  It seemed to me that the author was attempting a sort of Zen-like “figure it out for yourself” culmination, the answer to a life’s koan. . . but in my opinion, it was a cop-out at best, and at worst shows the author’s misunderstanding of the philosophy his story hinges on.

In his epilogue, the author announces that out of the whole experience, “I finally discovered myself not only as a man, but as an American.”  The final scene, which takes place after this pronouncement, offers no explanation of either, as it takes place at the Cafe Algiers in Harvard Square, about as un-American a setting as there could possibly be within these borders.  Yet another unanswered question.  One isn’t allowed to see much evidence of either his growth as a man OR an American.

Perhaps what I am struggling to say, here, is that this writer doesn’t yet understand his own subject. I do appreciate his willingness to let me see what it is like to grow up in a very different culture from my own, although having come from the “Bible Belt” of the American South, I find fewer differences than I do similarities.  And having studied Sufism for so many years, experientially and academically both, it is tempting to say that I have a better understanding of both than he does.  But after all, I’m possibly twice his age, and if I were to attempt to describe Christianity and/or Pentacostalism to you, I would probably be just about as inept, because what he’s describing, here, and what I would be describing, is not a religion, but the painful and horrific impressions that are forced on children in the name of that religion through the so-called “scriptures” that evolve to reinforce those misinterpretations.

All in all,  I hope Akhtar keeps writing:  perhaps he will grow into his perceptions, so that he can articulate them fully.

Physicians of the Heart

Heal my soul by the all-sufficient power that comes from the glance of Thy Messiah. –Inayat Khan

Wali Ali Meyer and friends have written a book for the ages:  Physicians of the Heart:  a Sufi View of the Ninety-Nine Names of Allah.  Awhile back I wrote a post here on the psychological effects of the Divine Names (http://eklutna.wordpress.com/2011/08/16/the-beautiful-names/), but this wonderful and HUGE book blows that out of the water, and also shows that I am not alone in my perception that the ultimate healing is, as my beloved Pir Vilayat would say, when “God creates and recreates God’s own self in and through us, in the measure that we reverse our vantage point and grasp the divine operation in us.”  A tall order to those of us who have emerged from the “quick fix” generation, still needing to be fixed and still feeling the pain of that.  I myself certainly have been and still am an example of that way of doing things, but I have learned, and so can anyone who is ready to acquiesce to the reality, as Al Hallaj says, that  ”I have been invited to the divine banquet and the divine host has offered me to drink of the wine, the poison, that is His beverage. How can I refuse?  It is the beverage that gives eternal life.”  Not quite the same as sitting in the office of some sympathetic person who just keeps saying “you’re okay.”  How okay do we want to be? This is why Inayat Khan said that “the message is a call to awakening for those who are meant to awaken, and a lullabye for those who are still meant to sleep.”  In my case, I found that I could not transcend my personal suffering without that ultimate Cure, and in the end nothing else was worthwhile.

Many of us American Sufis, I think, grasped the essence of Sufism, but took a longer time to understand the framework and the context of that framework.  This is only partly to be found in traditional Islam, although the teachers I have had have stressed this more and less, depending on what they saw as the need of their time.  Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, for instance, was directed to take the Message of spiritual unity from his native India to the West in 1910 by his teacher, and he came to a world that didn’t understand his music and its deeper meaning at all, and he had to learn the words that would convey the essence of his teaching to a world that was only just beginning to get ready for it; and therefore he placed his message within the context of his own spiritual upbringing, but he focused on conveying the Message of spiritual liberty to his audiences, and while he taught the traditional practices to his students, he gave them in a fairly traditional, classic methodology, and in the simplest and most practical form.  His successor and my lifelong teacher, Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan, was a poet and a visionary. He inherited us, the hippie generation, the “tune in, turn on and drop out” generation, and we were ready for his visionary grasp of that essence, which he framed in the poetry engendered by his visions.  Others of his close followers stressed different aspects of the Message:  ”Sufi Sam,” the one who was designated by God, he said, to be “teacher to the hippies,” to some extent superceded the intellectual framework by teaching his followers a direct musical transmission of the essence of the message, in the form of  Sacred Dance.  It was in that context that I first met Wali Ali, at a time when we were all united in our spiritual work, and it was Sam’s “kids” who brought me up in my early years as a Sufi, even though my teacher was Pir Vilayat.  But it didn’t matter, and it doesn’t matter:  it is all the same teaching, and as Murshid S.A.M. (Sufi Ahmed Murad) said, “Sufism can’t be taught; it has to be caught.”  And so we have done our best to field those ecstatic flies that have come at us through the years.  And we have grown, and the teaching has grown, as has the “unity without uniformity” that Murshid taught.

S.A.M. once said “my secret is controlled schizophrenia.”  As for me, my life is an endless digression.  I return to Physicians of the Heart, wherein is a most marvelous explication of the Divine Names, both in terms of their origins, pronunciations, and a deeply lyrical interweaving of the spiritual and the psychological, and the psychology of the spirit.  Wali Ali takes the reader far beyond the surface understandings of the divine qualities:  when I first began to learn them, I learned that al Jamil, for instance, was about Beauty, and al Majid  as about majesty, and al Haqq meant truth, and on and on. . .  yet one finds, if one gives oneself deeply to recitation of these names, that each is in itself a dhikr, an open door to an aspect of the Divine Being that precludes one’s personal wishes and projections, and aids in remembrance of one’s divine heritage, in that the practitioner must symbolically die to the quality that is being invoked in order that one might come to individual understanding through the Divine understanding as compared to one’s personal constructs.  Each is different, the 99 and then some, and each invokes the proliferation of the flowering of God’s unfoldment in the person, in an alchemical process of awakening. . . but it is not the person who awakes, it is God, whatever God is.  In his book Wali Ali invokes this precious, fragrant flowering of divinity in humanity through the divine qualities.  He explicates the deeper meanings of the Names, he tells stories and weaves webs of possibilities and potentials.  He takes the student into the deepest heart of each, yet conversely demonstrates their efficacy in daily life.  Through the many years of work he and his colleagues have done with students, he shows how the Names heal and awaken both psyche and spirit.

In my own inner work, I have been astounded, again and again, with how each name becomes a sort of homeopathic remedy, in that if the right one at the right time is prescribed, and to the extent to which I am able to surrender to its reality, the places where I am wounded are healed, in the areas where I am stuck become unstuck, and even more:  I am afforded the opportunity to become the instrument of the Divine Voice, if I am dedicated enough to put aside my ideas and surrender to the true reality of the Name I invoke.  And it all goes back to the casual suggestion of the Prophet, peace be upon Him, that the disciple ought to recite the Names in order to know God’s qualities.  A simple instruction which became a Divine Science.

When you feel full of worth and value, because you have identified your self with the eternal reality of the soul, strength arises spontaneously from within.  It is something to be cherished and it gives you the courage to be, the strength and dignity to protect the divine quality within, and to honor it throughout your life.  When you let down your ego defenses, you are able to see that you don’t personally have the power to do what needs to be done in order to heal the wound of being disconnected from God.  The dawning of this light of self-value comes when you truly surrender the healing into God’s hands.  (Wali Ali Meyer, et al., p. 15)