Circumambulation 4: Turn, Turn, Turn.

-- By Tom Phillips

Dervishes   

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.

In a Spin (Circumambulation #2)

-- By Tom Phillips

A few years back, just starting out on the Road to Dotage, I wrote about the benefits of walking around in circles -- the spiritual practice of circumambulation. That essay described walking around various holy sites in India, and later circumambulating an elephant sculpture in New Jersey. As one's dotage advances, the circles get smaller. And so it is that this year I have ended up in the most minimal of all circular paths -- turning on a dime, AKA whirling.

I had only whirled once before -- in the 1970s, at the ashram of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh in Poona, India -- where a friend and I were visiting out of curiosity.

My most ecstatic time was in the whirling class, where we learned the basic technique of the Sufi Dervishes. Contrary to all my previous learning and experience, I found if you keep one foot in the same place and your eyes on a level plane, it’s possible to spin around indefinitely. We beginners did it with one foot planted and the other pushing around in a circle, as if we were riding a scooter on a dime. We held one arm straight and looked out over the fingertips. I felt no dizziness at all. The world, trees, buildings, clouds and sky, just rolled around over and over again like the walls of a whirlpool. The picture was not blurred at all, just moved faster and faster, round and round.

This experience was so deep and inexplicable that I never tried it again after we left the ashram, and to this day don’t know if I could repeat it. It seemed like a magical window, opening on an area of truth that could not be set down in words...  (from "A Beginner's Life.")