From our very first days on the Sufi path, what intrigued us was the quality of human beings we met — their humanity, their capacity for friendship, service and love. Sufism is not about aiming for extraordinary mystical or supernatural experiences; it is about the transformation of character and the realization of spiritual maturity. If [...]
Shaikh Kabir Helminski talks about Sufi Zikr (remembrance) as a way of life, a recording from a One Through Love webcast earlier this year.
When the words of Rumi enter your heart, something softens, breaks, and is subtly reborn. That he wrote the words seven hundred years ago in a medieval Persian world that bears little resemblance to ours makes their uncanny resonance to us today just that much more remarkable. Here is a treasury of daily wisdom from this most beloved of all the Sufi masters—both his prose and his ecstatic poetry—that you can use to start every day for a year, or that you can dip into for inspiration any time you need to break through the granite of your heart.
We often attempt to deepen in a Reality that may seem fragile, distant or not there at all. Experiences of devotion come easily within certain external frameworks, like holy places in Turkey, the Mevlevi Tradition’s homeland. The challenge is to sustain some of that orientation every day.
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To embody patience is, at the least, to show no haste in matters that require time. This requires a presence that is fully in the moment and, simultaneously, outside of time. Only in this way can we give each thing its proper time. But the mental awareness alone is not sufficient to induce a holy patience. Something else is required—a sense of the Divine Presence.
Imagine yourself standing with millions of other human beings at Arafat, stripped-down to bare essentials, wearing a simple sheet of white cloth, all distinctions of wealth, position, and national identity erased. All you have is the sum of your life's thoughts, feelings, and deeds, the net result of your relationships, your loves and hates—all these things that have shaped your soul, what you are. The people on Hajj are experiencing that today. We all will experience it one day, on the day of conscious recognition.