Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.
For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.
My old friend Himayat Inayati used to say that Jesus meant that his “burden” is, literally, LIGHT. Yes, indeed. But I have had problems with faith throughout my life, which is common to children of hurt parents, and I tried to go it alone. I was fortunate in that I had already been taken pretty far up the ladder, but there was still that hurt inner child that was afraid of the surrender necessary to go all the way. And I suffered for it. My life’s teacher, Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan, said that there is a fundamental choice that must be made by people like me: I can either be pushed by the past or pulled by the future. Ah, but how to get away from that eternal SHOVE and live into the lovely, thrilling, gentle tug that takes us on into the eternal? It wasn’t easy for me, even though I already did have some capital in the bank.
Becoming very ill and disabled was a result, for me, of that ongoing push from the past, and it pushed me right up against….me. There was nowhere else to go.
For several months now, I have been studying the teachings of Inayat Khan weekly with a good friend, via Skype, and that has been a new beginning for me. It is really the Sufi practice of losing the false self first in the teacher, then in the Master, and eventually in God. Through these progressive attunements, one makes oneself open to the teaching and then, to the very being of the One it all comes from. A Light burden indeed! And doing this led me to a re-commitment to practice, and I began giving myself over to practice at least twice a day, going right back to the beginning when it was like doing calisthenics for the beginner: at first, you have to do them “just right,” and if you eventually trip up by not doing so, you have to go back and pick up where you left off.
It worked. The Sufis have a profound psychological and spiritual practice as outlined in the 99 Beautiful Names of God, in the Dhikr that is the remembrance of the way God (we) really is/are. There are various other practices with breath and light and sound, but these are the two central practices, and they work.
No, I have not levitated–yet.
Yet there are glimmers, in my own personal process of alchemy, that as I gradually give up my attachment to my temporal self, the one that jumpa up and down and clamors for this and that and feels oh, so hurt over this, and Grrrr! So Angry!!! over that, that this push from behind that I spoke of lessens, and I can slide gently onward into the pull that awaits.
The spiritual path is easiest if there is not something pulling one from behind; and that force is the life in the world, one’s friends, surroundings, acquaintances, and one’s foes. Remain, therefore, in the world as a traveler making a station on his way. Do all the good you can to serve and succor humanity, but escape attachment. By this in no way will you prove to be loveless. On the contrary, it is attachment which divides love, and love raised above attachment is like a rain from above nourishing all the plants upon the earth. ~~Inayat Khan
I sustained a great blow recently. I realized that I had to end my relationship with someone I love very much (and her child, therefore), but who has problems with living and had long been in the habit of targeting me with her pain and sorrow over herself. In a mistaken belief that I was somehow responsible for allowing this kind of treatment from this person, I had allowed myself to become so debilitated by her rage and misery that I was becoming more and more ill. I had tried, for many years, to realize this–had known it all along: that I was not helping her, nor was I helping myself in allowing myself to be scapegoated in this way, and I resolved–for about the 100th time–to end the relationship, at least in terms of our physical association. It seems to me that there are times when this is necessary in the closest of relationships, for both parties, but it was extremely painful for me. I thought I would die from the pain, in fact.
Pir Vilayat once said to a group of his students that if we really knew what love is–truly is–we would be annihilated in our understanding. I think life offers us the opportunity to learn about love, even to these heights, if we desire to. As my Murshid says above, “love raised above attachment is like a rain from above nourishing all the plants upon the earth.” It seems that there are times when to love in this way means giving up one’s personal needs for affiliation, for closeness, for friendship…and the result is that at least one more roadblock in the path of love is removed.
So: practice. Practice deeply, ceaselessly, with devotion and without ambition. It doesn’t matter what the practice is, what matters is to develop the soul-power, to grow the soul along with the body and the mind. The rest follows.
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