Rumi's Four Essential Practices Read online

  Love always begins by loving and accepting yourself, and not at all surprisingly, this act of self-acceptance leads directly to the energies of the Beloved. Most of the time, we don’t let ourselves feel the full range of sensations that pass through our body. In fact, we hold back from feeling them by doing exactly what we do to resist the breath: we bring tension into the body and hold it still. To practice directing love to yourself, wouldn’t it make sense to start opening to the feeling of these bodily sensations and energies every time you breathe? The Beloved can be met and pursued in the deep energies of the body and in the breath that allows you to feel these energies.

  So one possible way you might practice a breath of love would be:

  As you breathe in, breathe into the felt awareness of your entire body. As you breathe out, feel your whole body exhaling.

  As you breathe in, let yourself feel every single cell in your body.

  As you breathe out, let yourself dissolve and merge into the outer world.

  Feel your gratitude for being alive, for having life given to you so freely each and every moment in the air you breathe. Gratitude toward the world is the natural feeling state of someone in love.

  And, finally, see if you can relax even further into the breath by allowing subtle movement to occur between each and every vertebra of the spine every time you inhale and exhale. As you breathe in, the spine lengthens effortlessly along its curves; as you breathe out, it rocks back down.

  Love can be found through the release of holding. Allowing the force of breath—each and every breath—to breathe through you however it wants to is to submit to love.

  The state of embodied grace, which Rumi says can be ours if we want it, is not some kind of condition that you evolve into and then rest in for the remainder of your life. It needs to be earned in each and every breath you take. This one . . . and then this one . . . and now this one . . . Bringing a practice of breath awareness into your life is Rumi’s second recommendation for drawing ecstasy closer.

  lovers o lovers

  wake up

  it’s time to leave this world!

  I can hear the sound of the exit drums

  with the ear of my soul

  here, right now,

  the caravan master

  sets the string of camels

  and asks his fee;

  why have you slept all this time

  o people of the caravan?

  the sounds of the bells

  on the necks of the camels

  are the call of departure

  come

  let’s travel to the land of soul and breath

  the land where we disappear

  bringing breath to life

  is the essence of every religion

  and the remedy for every illness

  let every breath you take

  cleanse the soul of its grief and pain

  so it can keep glowing brightly inside you

  when the lover breathes

  flames spread through the universe

  a single breath shatters this world of illusion

  into the tiniest particles

  the world becomes an ocean

  from beginning to end

  and then the ocean disappears into rapture

  at that moment the sky splits open

  an uproar fills the world and all time, space, and existence disappear

  before we ever met you

  we couldn’t really breathe

  because time had choked us

  from now on we’ll be slaves

  to the breath of love

  run away to god

  he’s the fountain of life

  find his blessing

  in every breath you take

  now is the time to be silent

  don’t even try to describe

  the water and pearl in his ocean

  if you really want to dive into that sea

  then hold your breath

  hold your breath

  everyone worships your love

  the universe is in your hand

  in one breath

  we become drunk in your temple

  in another breath

  we fall into your dreaminess

  open your chest

  to the early morning breeze

  so death can come back to life

  and these old tired bones

  can start feeling fresh again

  the breath of love calls out

  from the very center of existence:

  in every moment

  come back to life

  one kind of breath

  rises up in love

  one kind of breath

  falls down with joy

  one kind of breath

  embraces the beloved

  and one kind of breath

  makes gossip and starts wars

  beloved friend,

  you’re even finer

  than the breath that comes

  from early dawn’s breeze

  you’re such a breath

  that god said

  you could bring the dead

  back to life

  god actually said that about you!

  so blow your breath into me

  and inflate me like a bag

  I’ll float on top of the sea

  there’s not a single day

  that you don’t blow like that

  and if there ever was such a day

  not a single blade of grass would grow

  on the plains or in the valleys

  I’m not going to wait around

  for the sound of death’s trumpet

  to bring me back to life

  love gives me new life

  in every moment

  in every breath

  where is jesus

  whose breath is so holy and overflowing

  that even if he’d never been born

  he would still be revered?

  even though you can’t see him with your eyes

  you can still feel his breathing

  learn how to touch soul

  in every breath you take

  and watch yourself

  turn into the messiah

  when your soul is cleansed

  in every breath you take

  you’ll understand

  how to give birth to jesus

  every time you breathe

  there’s a new garden

  a new meadow in our soul

  there’s a new story

  a new legend in our ear

  in every breath we take

  you serve a different wine at your tavern

  it brings a different joy and pleasure

  to every particle of my body

  in this breath

  you bring death back to life

  in this breath

  you offer a brand new glass

  in this breath

  a bottle of wine’s coming toward me

  in this breath

  I drink a glass of eternity

  we’re engulfed by soul’s sea

  in every breath we take

  if that’s not so

  then why do these waves keep coming

  one after the other

  from the ocean of heart?

  the smell of the beloved

  is on my breath

  there are gardens

  meadows

  and jasmine

  your breath is food

  for the brides of the garden

  if that breath became dirt in my body

  I’d grow love’s roses

  from head to foot

  we may be human beings

  but we’re strangers to the breath

  we have to burn the self

  inside us to ashes

  only then

  will we know the breath

  the waters of immortality’s fountain

  can be found in the breath in your lungs

  we get drunk on every breath


  from the wine that has no origin

  this wine must be hundreds of years old!

  if I serve it in every breath

  in my strange condition of mind . . .

  I wonder what will happen to me

  a mansion in the sky

  can be yours with each breath

  yet all too often

  what you do instead

  is fall into dreams or doubt

  so offer wine every moment

  every breath

  and remember:

  every breath you take

  makes one of two choices:

  you either surrender to your soul

  or struggle with doubt

  if you’re really not aware

  that god is constantly hunting for you

  then pay close attention

  to every breath you take

  the helpless ney can’t make a sound

  without the breath of the one who blows it

  go to the cemetery

  see all those broken neys

  the breath of the ney players has ceased

  there’s no life

  no talk left

  their voices say silently

  we and I are all gone from us

  MOVING FREELY

  Ecstasy moves. It never stands still. It can be thought of as an ex-stasis, a leaving behind of whatever’s been holding us still and an emerging or coming out from the cocoon that stillness has woven. When we’re able to move freely and surrender to the larger forces of breath and feeling energies that want to pass through our body, palpable feelings and expressions of ecstasy naturally start materializing.

  But just as we breathe with only a fraction of the capacity available to our lungs, so do we mostly move through only a fraction of the range of motion available to our joints. Holding the body still can only occur in an environment that values control over ecstasy. The wheels of commerce often move through still bodies, and so, to make our way in the world, we often inhibit our breath, stifle our awareness of sensations, and resist the impulse to move. But when we get home at night, it’s time to let our hair down, turn the music up, and let the body awaken.

  The impulse to move is as old as life itself. Viewed under a microscope, the single cells of the most primitive life forms can be seen to swell, contract, gyrate, bulge, suck in, puff out, spin, and glide as they move along their way. Life moves. Life doesn’t want to stand still, and so, as the earliest humans surrendered to their primal impulse to move, the activity of dance began to emerge as one of the first ritualized forms of human behavior.

  Rumi may have started out an orthodox cleric, but he became an ecstatic dancer. Through his understanding of breath and fasting, and propelled by his explosive meeting and communion with Shams of Tabriz, strong energies of soul must have been awakened in his body. Like so many others before and since, Rumi discovered that the pressures of these strong feeling energies—which Sufis describe as the intense and awakened longing in the heart and soul for union with whatever they feel so achingly separate from—could be relieved and released through surrendering to the movements of the dance. Some people believe that Shams introduced Rumi to the dance during their retreat, while others have suggested that Rumi opened to it himself after Shams had left when, out of despair over the loss of his great friend, he began turning round and around a pillar and didn’t want to stop. Either way, the encounter with Shams was the catalyst that helped Rumi awaken dormant feeling energies and sensations, and a natural response to this kind of awakening is to start dancing. Musicians became Rumi’s highly valued friends, fueling the dance that kept his body in motion and freeing the poetic language in which he began to speak as he moved about town.

  Dance became, for Rumi, a form of physical prayer that helps to loosen the tight grip of the self and to experience the energies of ecstasy, and so he began inviting friends to come together as a group and perform a ceremony of dance and music that he called the sema. After his death, Rumi’s son Sultan Veled would preserve his father’s teachings by founding the Mevlevi Order, which continues to this day to perform sema and to train people in what has come to be known as the dance of the whirling dervish.

  We dance for many reasons—some personal, some social—but the dance’s ability to open the dancer to altered feeling and visionary states is as old as human life. We’re currently living at a time in which the power of the dance is experiencing an emergence on a scale that has never been seen before, and the simple explanation for this is that music has become so ubiquitous. Music has always been an instigator of the dance, but for the better part of recorded history, music was a sublime rarity. We’ve now learned how to literally record history, and the sounds of music are being transmitted everywhere. A good band in a groove catalyzes the dance like nothing else, and the music that’s being listened to the most around the planet has a sound and a beat that bodies want to move to. Over the past fifty years, improvisational dance, as a form of personal healing and spiritual practice, has exploded from the pioneering teaching of people like Bapak Subuh, Gabrielle Roth, and Emilie Conrad into the planetary rave movement, which has turned millions of people into ecstatic dancers. Liberate the dancer within has become a spiritual motto for increasingly large numbers of young people everywhere on the planet. Liberating the dancer within (and, yes, we all, every single one of us, have a dancer inside us wanting to move) is Rumi’s third essential practice for sparking ecstasy.

  Many of Rumi’s poems, read as invitations to simply surrender to the felt urgency to move, sound like teachings from the improvisational dance movement. How does one learn to dance? Just listen to the music, and let your body move. Still not sure? Look at how the branches on the trees move in a wind. They don’t try to do this step or that step. They just surrender to the breeze that moves them. Move like that, Rumi tells us. Move like the dust particles dancing in the light. Just surrender to the movement that wants to move you.

  Others of Rumi’s poems speak specifically of the highly ritualized practice of turning the body in circles—round and around, over and over again, with arms outstretched. While the formal rituals of turning have been preserved in the sema ceremony of the Mevlevi Order, the actions of whirling, turning, and spinning around are universal to everyone (and, the Sufis would say, to everything). Little children love to spin around, and they’re always filled with giddy joy when they do. Because turning can make you dizzy, you have to find a way to go beyond your mind, and this place beyond is ecstasy’s playground. While anybody can explore the turn on their own (the basic directions for turning couldn’t be simpler: stand with arms outstretched, the right palm facing up, the left palm facing down; keep your gaze fixed on the back of your left hand, and begin to turn to your left round and around in circles—and then surrender to whatever starts happening to you. . . .), people who feel particularly drawn to this unique form of ecstatic prayer may want to seek out teachers and communities for deeper guidance and training.

  Music, Rumi tells us, is food for lovers. Wherever music is, dance follows, and music is now everywhere. So let the poems that follow inspire you to bring a dance practice into your life. Turn the lights down. Turn your music system on, and play whatever music is drawing you right now. And then let your body start to move. Don’t force it to do this or that. Just let it start to awaken, and follow its lead. The ecstasy is in finding out how it wants to move you and where it wants to take you.

  if you’re smart

  and want to grow in soul

  you’ll give thanks to our king

  and keep dancing

  o sufis

  keep whirling and dancing

  for god’s sake

  go ecstatic!

  put the belt of rapture

  around your waists

  and start doing sema

  my beautiful moon is dancing

  venus plays the tambourine

  I salute the brave

  who proclaim their love

  th
rough dance and music

  you start out imitating

  end up terrified

  and then find hope

  start dancing with that hope

  in time you’ll break free

  from this world of illusion

  bats in the night sky

  love dancing with darkness

  birds that love the sun

  dance from dawn to dusk

  o fast-blowing morning breeze

  go and tell shams of tebriz:

  tell me who you are

  and come dance with me

  you’re so beautiful

  heart and soul fell in love

  and started dancing at your gathering

  when they heard the angel gabriel

  was coming down to earth

  all the particles of the land

  started dancing

  the sun of his face conquered the moon

  who was thrilled to be held in his arms

  and started dancing

  o my king

  you grow in love