Rumi's Four Essential Practices: Ecstatic Body, Awakened Soul - Couverture souple

Johnson, Will

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1594773106 ISBN 13 : 9781594773105

Editeur : Inner Traditions, 2010

Synopsis

Poems and commentary that open the door for a new generation to experience the ecstatic and embodied spiritual truths contained in Rumi’s poetry

• Reveals how the four practices of eating lightly, breathing deeply, moving freely, and gazing intently can invoke the divinity within us all

• Explains how these practices dissolve the self’s need for identity so that we may experience a state of transcendent ecstasy and union with the divine

• Takes Rumi’s path to finding God from theoretical to embodied practices

The great thirteenth-century Sufi mystic and poet Jalaluddin Rumi began his life as an orthodox Islamic believer but felt that to fully experience complete union with the divine he must abandon institutionalized religion and its prescribed forms of worship. Surrendering his will to his overriding urge for a much more immediate, intuitive, and compelling union with the divine, he found that by manipulating certain behavioral aspects of his physiology--eating lightly, breathing deeply, moving freely, and gazing raptly--he was capable of loosening the rigid confines of the self, thereby overriding its limitations and achieving a transcendent merging with his own divinity.

His message is simple: if you wish to affect the spirit, you must first make changes in the way your body responds to the world. Through clearly written commentary interspersed with Rumi’s beautiful poems, this book details these four practices in a very precise way. As such, it is a sweet and open invitation to follow the examples set forth in order to embark upon one’s own path of inner illumination. The freshness of Rumi’s poetry dissolves the 700 years that separate his life from our own time, making his message as pertinent today as when he walked the streets of Konya, Anatolia (present-day Turkey), reciting his inspiring verse. This book allows us, through Rumi’s gentle guidance, to touch the face of God that resides deep within us all.

A propos du livre

À propos de l?auteur

Will Johnson is the founder and director of the Institute for Embodiment Training, which combines Western somatic psychotherapy with Eastern meditation practices. He is the author of several books, including Breathing through the Whole Body, The Posture of Meditation, and The Spiritual Practices of Rumi. He lives in Canada.

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

Chapter 3

MOVING FREELY

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 through the gaze 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 we 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 one day after Shams had left when, out of despair over the loss of his great friend, he began turning around 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 visceral awakening is to start dancing. Musicians became highly valued friends, fueling the dance that kept the 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 you loosen the tight grip of self and experience the energies of ecstasy, and so he began summoning 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 through founding the Mevlevi Order, which continues to this day to perform sema and train people in what has come to be known 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. Currently we’re 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.

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 Emily Conrad into the planetary rave movement that has turned millions of people into ecstatic dancers. Many of Rumi’s poems, in their invitation simply to 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, around 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 yourself, beyond your mind, and this place beyond is ecstasy’s playground. While anybody can explore the turn on their own (the basic directions 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 then . . . begin to turn to your left around and around in circles and 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 where it wants to take you.


untie your hair
spread your scent around
put the souls of sufis to dancing
the sun, moon, and stars
keep turning around the sky;
we’re in the middle
turning around the center
your singing and playing
are so beautiful!
even the lowest notes
start turning the sufis of the sky
the spring breeze comes running
singing
making the world smile
it causes a commotion
among the young

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Inner Traditions
• Date d'édition: 2010
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1594773106
• ISBN 13: 9781594773105
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 160
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible