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
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
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