-- By Tom Phillips
Saving the airfare to Istanbul, I went yesterday to a one-day workshop on Sufi whirling in midtown Manhattan, hoping to learn the best way to turn. In a large, airy, second-floor studio, about twenty New Yorkers showed up -- mostly young and female, plus a few young men and middle-aged women. Most had some dance training, and many were spiritual seekers. I was by far the oldest student, and at 77 the senior person in the room. The teacher was 73.
A dumpy, grandmotherly presence, she introduced herself casually by her Sufi name, Khadija -- also the name of the Prophet Mohammed's first wife. It didn't take long to recognize her as a quintessential New York intellectual, well-traveled and well-versed in several esoteric traditions, liberally seasoned with kosher salt. Look her up and you'll find she started out as a modern dancer in New York, then to San Francisco where she encountered Sam Lewis, the father of Sufi dancing in America. This sparked a pilgrimage, overland from Europe to India and back in search of true whirling -- which she found with the Mevlevi order of dervishes in Turkey. Forty years later, she runs an upstate retreat for devotees of whirling meditation and cleansing diets, and returns periodically to Turkey to teach.
She's also been a Zen student for decades, with Sasaki Roshi of Los Angeles. But turning is better meditation, she told us. Sitting on a cushion one can look like a little Buddha, all the while obsessing about work, sex, or lunch. But whirling requires utter mindfulness. Think lunch for a half a second and you're in danger of falling.
We whirled in three sessions, each lesson about an hour long. Walking to the place in the morning, my joints were aching, and as she gave her first instructions I wondered if this wasn't a terrible mistake. But I kept on keeping on. Walking out, I felt stronger, more balanced, the aches and pains replaced by a pleasant general fatigue.
I learned that my home-made whirling technique was wrong only from the shoulders up. I'd been looking out over the fingers of my trailing hand -- the correct way is to look left, over your leading shoulder. You want to see where you're going, and "arrive ahead of yourself." But it's not like spotting, where you look for a single point. In whirling the gaze is inward, on the "center of the center of the center" of the self.
Our group was remarkable, said Khadija. We danced in a circle and it stayed that way -- even those like me who stumbled were careful to keep the same distance between ourselves and our neighbors. She'd never seen a group of beginners do that. Even the dervishes have trouble with it.
In the breaks between dancing and meditating, she read poems by the 13th-century Sufi mystic Rumi. She then explained every line, often referring to Einstein's theory of relativity, which she learned from her first husband, a professor of physics. Hers is a blend of Zen and Islamic theology: There is nothing but God, our individual existence is an illusion, the goal of whirling is to refine the self down to nothing.
Questions she handled like batting practice. I asked how she reconciles the idea that all is grace, all is light, all is God, with the idea of karma -- specifically, bad karma. Bad karma, she said, is just how you interpret things. If the world ends tonight, that's bad karma, but so what?
She also explained that the psoas muscle, used by human beings to stand on two legs, is used by cows only for copulation. The cow's psoas stays so tender that it becomes -- filet mignon.
The dancer-seekers ate it up, many sprawled on the floor or curled in the fetal position. Khadija and I, septuagenarians, sat in chairs. As elder statesman, I received the standard New York treatment -- this guy is compost. Khadija didn't bother to learn my name, focusing her individual attention on the next generation.
And that's how I spent Father's Day.
At 5:30, my eldest son Luke met me in the spiritual bookshop downstairs, and we went for a home-cooked dinner of tacos and rhubarb pie, cooked up by my lovely wife Debra. From 5:30 until I fell asleep at 9, one thought kept flashing in my mind: "If I can do this, I can do anything."
-- Copyright 2019 by Tom Phillips
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| Dervishes |
A dumpy, grandmotherly presence, she introduced herself casually by her Sufi name, Khadija -- also the name of the Prophet Mohammed's first wife. It didn't take long to recognize her as a quintessential New York intellectual, well-traveled and well-versed in several esoteric traditions, liberally seasoned with kosher salt. Look her up and you'll find she started out as a modern dancer in New York, then to San Francisco where she encountered Sam Lewis, the father of Sufi dancing in America. This sparked a pilgrimage, overland from Europe to India and back in search of true whirling -- which she found with the Mevlevi order of dervishes in Turkey. Forty years later, she runs an upstate retreat for devotees of whirling meditation and cleansing diets, and returns periodically to Turkey to teach.
She's also been a Zen student for decades, with Sasaki Roshi of Los Angeles. But turning is better meditation, she told us. Sitting on a cushion one can look like a little Buddha, all the while obsessing about work, sex, or lunch. But whirling requires utter mindfulness. Think lunch for a half a second and you're in danger of falling.
We whirled in three sessions, each lesson about an hour long. Walking to the place in the morning, my joints were aching, and as she gave her first instructions I wondered if this wasn't a terrible mistake. But I kept on keeping on. Walking out, I felt stronger, more balanced, the aches and pains replaced by a pleasant general fatigue.
I learned that my home-made whirling technique was wrong only from the shoulders up. I'd been looking out over the fingers of my trailing hand -- the correct way is to look left, over your leading shoulder. You want to see where you're going, and "arrive ahead of yourself." But it's not like spotting, where you look for a single point. In whirling the gaze is inward, on the "center of the center of the center" of the self.
Our group was remarkable, said Khadija. We danced in a circle and it stayed that way -- even those like me who stumbled were careful to keep the same distance between ourselves and our neighbors. She'd never seen a group of beginners do that. Even the dervishes have trouble with it.
In the breaks between dancing and meditating, she read poems by the 13th-century Sufi mystic Rumi. She then explained every line, often referring to Einstein's theory of relativity, which she learned from her first husband, a professor of physics. Hers is a blend of Zen and Islamic theology: There is nothing but God, our individual existence is an illusion, the goal of whirling is to refine the self down to nothing.
Questions she handled like batting practice. I asked how she reconciles the idea that all is grace, all is light, all is God, with the idea of karma -- specifically, bad karma. Bad karma, she said, is just how you interpret things. If the world ends tonight, that's bad karma, but so what?
She also explained that the psoas muscle, used by human beings to stand on two legs, is used by cows only for copulation. The cow's psoas stays so tender that it becomes -- filet mignon.
The dancer-seekers ate it up, many sprawled on the floor or curled in the fetal position. Khadija and I, septuagenarians, sat in chairs. As elder statesman, I received the standard New York treatment -- this guy is compost. Khadija didn't bother to learn my name, focusing her individual attention on the next generation.
And that's how I spent Father's Day.
At 5:30, my eldest son Luke met me in the spiritual bookshop downstairs, and we went for a home-cooked dinner of tacos and rhubarb pie, cooked up by my lovely wife Debra. From 5:30 until I fell asleep at 9, one thought kept flashing in my mind: "If I can do this, I can do anything."
-- Copyright 2019 by Tom Phillips
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