Photo info and credit:
I met Mohammed last night. He’s one heck of a cool dude. I highly recommend listening to the Koran recited via song in Arabic. Doing it in Arabic allows for a pure transmission without getting caught up in language that is not only translated from the original but also spoken to a different people at a different time in history. The energy doesn’t lie and it’s incredibly beautiful. I’m linking to it below. The entire 11 hour recitation. Enjoy. Be healed. Be loved by a master who has been largely denied in the west.
Islam has the greatest ecstatic mystics and the darkest shadow expressions both…this to me indicates it’s power as a vehicle…it strikes me as an all or nothing trip into oneness if deeply submitted to…and in it’s potential potency lies both it’s amazing beauty and scary madness. This is life…reflected in a world religion.
Whether the chanting of the Koran and these Sufi songs strike a chord in you today depends on timing and resonance, of course. I’m a life long religious studies student (degree from UC Berkeley) but it took me this long to really connect with Islam. I’ve studied Rumi, the Sufi poet, with Andrew Harvey, a famous Rumi scholar, but that’s just the ecstatic part of the picture. Really embracing the whole is what Mohammad seemed to transmit…and it was so wonderful to fully merge with his spirit through the recitation of the Koran in Arabic. I did have a wonderful teacher in college who was a Sufi who told us the story of Mohammad…it always stayed with me…that Mohammed was, in fact, deeply respectful of women unlike the stereotyped (and often accurately) manifestations of Islam today. Mohammed’s wife was 15 years older than him and a sort of profound mentor to him…no one talks about that!! I knew then that Islam was good, because I could feel the lovely energy of my teacher as he shared his own experience of the teachings. Still, I’d not ever immersed myself in it until now a good 30 years later. So glad to finally have been initiated.
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Sufism is the mystical branch of Islam. I found these sufi songs really wonderful as well:
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MORE ON:
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Even if the whole world were gripped by sadness
He would not be sad who holds love firm in hand.
And if love makes him dance, even a little,
There are worlds and worlds within that little land.
Zahid Iqbal Painting – karachi pakistan 2011
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Again, below I share random musings from the last few weeks with links to the archives for further consideration or contemplation.
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If you’re paying attention to the drama, samsara is the best object of meditation there is…
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“Open yourself to the Tao
then trust your natural responses
and everything will fall into place” – Tao Te Ching
(that certainly has been my experience!)
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it’s not healthy to “drown out the negativity” that is called suppression and repression — that’s what we’ve been doing for centuries and that’s why we see what is happening happening. We cannot deny the deep sickness in our culture and then be shocked when there are repercussions. We need to embrace the pain of all our members and love us all. **The most vulnerable have special needs** We all know this in our hearts. Let us hold the pain from all sides…let us feel it and then let us act to transform it.
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it’s good to feel it…deeply…that’s the only way we can deeply respond and help to transform it. if we don’t really feel it we cannot truly respond… and then, we white people, have to remember that what we, perhaps, are only now truly deeply feeling is deep in the cells of our black brothers and sisters and they’ve been holding it for centuries and been told it’s not really real. FEEL it, feel it, feel it. Feel it and act accordingly. How do we love in the face of these feelings? Let us find the way.
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Ha! A beautiful young cashier at the dollar store just seriously made my day. I went to the register to buy some rolling papers (not for tobacco, but for a little mugwort that has been a wonderful healing ally lately. I usually just benefit from smugding with her but got a strong draw to try a puff or two of her) …
This young woman CARDED me!! I looked at her incredulous and said, SERIOUSLY? and she shrugged, a bit sheepishly, and said, yeah, I have to. I asked how old do you think I am? She shrugged again and said, 30? (they have to card anyone that looks 30 or younger) … anyway…it made my day because twice now I’ve been offered a senior discount at another store. What it showed me is the power of morphing energy. I can appear to be someone either 30 or 55 and that is some heavy powerful juju to carry. I’ve been healing at unprecedented rates and this was a deep validation that I am ready. I am HER.
and then again:
It happened again. I got carded. This time at the door of a brewery where Paul was watching a soccer game. (this is while also, in the last two months being offered the senior discount at a grocery store!) WTF? I’m now two for two. (looking 30 or under — that’s when they card you — or 55 or older — age of the senior discount!) I’m very much amused.
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No one “get’s away” with anything ever. Even if it seems that way. There is a record of every thing done in all of time in this moment now. Energy never disappears it only morphs and shifts. We are all held in the arms of the universe and the laws of nature are inherently ethical and right and true. Understand all this and then know that what we are in essence cannot die and then there is no reason to fear anything ever. Be liberated.
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From a little over a year ago…a lovely miraculous moment documented…I have more and more of these sorts of things happening in my life the more I heal:
I was out in the yard. I had a pyrex glass sauce pan in my hand. I’d just emptied the contents of it into the compost heap. I was very very tired. I’m always fatigued still as I recover from the brain injury, but on top of it today, I’m also just two days out of having the stomach flu. I’m exhausted. As I went up the stairs to the house I was on the third step and reached for the handle of the screen door and somehow lost my footing. There is no hand rail on the steps and so the only place to go was down off the third step onto the ground below. I was going to simply fall over and off and land on my side and seriously hurt myself…well, that’s what should have happened, anyway. Instead something, someone, some superwoman took over my body and it moved with incredible deft and precise athletic precision…like a cat, suddenly I found myself on the ground, safely on both feet, with the glass saucepan still in my hand. !!! OMG…that was awesome. And I use awesome in the literal sense of the word. There is within me a superwoman and I met her today.
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I’ve spent pretty much the whole day in bed today. Sometime my healing process still demands total submission to my body/nervous system/brain’s needs. My cells are extremely active doing their thing with great intelligence, I trust…I feel all the activity while I lay inert in bed, letting it happen. There is a sense of data and info being downloaded too as the process works itself out.
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*it is potentially dangerous to come off medications without careful planning. Please be sure to be well educated before undertaking any sort of discontinuation of medications. If your MD agrees to help you do so, do not assume they know how to do it well even if they claim to have experience. They are generally not trained in discontinuation and may not know how to recognize withdrawal issues. A lot of withdrawal issues are misdiagnosed to be psychiatric problems. This is why it’s good to educate oneself and find a doctor who is willing to learn with you as your partner in care. Really all doctors should always be willing to do this as we are all individuals and need to be treated as such. See: Psychiatric drug withdrawal and protracted withdrawal syndrome round-up
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