The Holy Dance

Photo courtesy of Nail Kesova Dede, Mevlevi Sheikh

Dance only where you mortify yourself and when you tear away the cotton from the sore of lust.

Holy men dance and wheel on the spiritual battlefield: they dance in their own blood.

When they are freed from the dominion of self, they clap a hand; when they escape from their own imperfection, they make a dance.

From within them musicians strike the tambourine; at their ecstasy the seas burst into foam.

You see it not, but for their ears the leaves too on the boughs are clapping hands.

You do not perceive the clapping of the leaves: one must have the spiritual ear, not this ear of the body.

Close the ear of the head to jesting and lying, that you may see the resplendent city of the soul.

Mathnawi Book 3, vv. 95-101

(from the words of Hazreti Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi)

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The Soul’s Serenity

In the name of God the most Compassionate, the most Merciful

The soul’s serenity is a wonderful experience. It is always available to us. A precious gift that unfolds in splendour and beauty the more we enter into its nature.

The soul’s serenity is a light that shines out from within and decorates and illuminates every aspect of your life’s journey.

Enter into the soul’s serenity. Seek it within the stillness of yourself in quiet contemplation. Seek it but seek nothing – just allow yourself to be quietly guided into its healing depth. Seek only by awareness and intention, not by striving or straining. You dissolve, and you are filled.

The soul’s serenity is a place in which secrets and insights are revealed, where guidance is found and expressed within the heart. Knowing this is a profound comfort in all the vicissitudes of life. Through the soul’s serenity, you can begin to understand the journey of life in a different way, that rearranges priorities, judgements and reactions. From this still point within, you can begin to understand that life and its challenges, efforts, joys and disappointment is not what you always perceived it to be. That these are, like Rumi said, waves of froth upon the deep sea of your real being.

You are here to discover the soul’s serenity and to understand your life’s purpose and progress from that standpoint.

Your life is not really composed of the significant events of which you think it consists. Rather, it is from the standpoint of the soul’s serenity by which your life is really weighed and measured.

In muraqaba, we review life’s experience from this standpoint, that of the soul’s serenity. We see the spiritual importance of our behaviour and experiences. The other events and experiences and emotional topsy-turvy are as that froth, ephemeral and of no real substance.

In the depth of our being, in the depth of the ocean of the soul’s serenity, we perceive the real currents of our life and how it moves and shapes us in our spiritual process.

To enter into the soul’s serenity, one need only quieten the mind and allow the heart to be at the centre of our perceiving. In the quietness and stillness of the heart, opened and in awareness, we calmly review and observe and begin to settle in the soul’s serenity. From this, we see the really significant moments, lessons and journeying that our soul is undertaking as the process of spiritual unfoldment occurs.

We chart our course through access to this guidance and insight at the centre of our consciousness, in the serenity of soul-consciousness, the soul’s serenity. Intend it, relax and be still, and learn to enter into it. It will occur without effort, easily, naturally. The soul is you, the serenity of the soul is your innate birthright.

 Alhamdullillah wa shukrulillah – Praise be to God and thanks be to God

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