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    Rumi's Four Essential Practices: Ecstatic Body, Awakened Soul
    Rumi's Four Essential Practices: Ecstatic Body, Awakened Soul
    Rumi's Four Essential Practices: Ecstatic Body, Awakened Soul
    Ebook93 pages57 minutes

    Rumi's Four Essential Practices: Ecstatic Body, Awakened Soul

    By Will Johnson

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    About this ebook

    Poems and commentary that open the door for a new generation to experience the ecstatic and embodied spiritual truths contained in Rumi’s poetry

    • Reveals how the four practices of eating lightly, breathing deeply, moving freely, and gazing intently can invoke the divinity within us all

    • Explains how these practices dissolve the self’s need for identity so that we may experience a state of transcendent ecstasy and union with the divine

    • Takes Rumi’s path to finding God from theoretical to embodied practices

    The great thirteenth-century Sufi mystic and poet Jalaluddin Rumi began his life as an orthodox Islamic believer but felt that to fully experience complete union with the divine he must abandon institutionalized religion and its prescribed forms of worship. Surrendering his will to his overriding urge for a much more immediate, intuitive, and compelling union with the divine, he found that by manipulating certain behavioral aspects of his physiology--eating lightly, breathing deeply, moving freely, and gazing raptly--he was capable of loosening the rigid confines of the self, thereby overriding its limitations and achieving a transcendent merging with his own divinity.

    His message is simple: if you wish to affect the spirit, you must first make changes in the way your body responds to the world. Through clearly written commentary interspersed with Rumi’s beautiful poems, this book details these four practices in a very precise way. As such, it is a sweet and open invitation to follow the examples set forth in order to embark upon one’s own path of inner illumination. The freshness of Rumi’s poetry dissolves the 700 years that separate his life from our own time, making his message as pertinent today as when he walked the streets of Konya, Anatolia (present-day Turkey), reciting his inspiring verse. This book allows us, through Rumi’s gentle guidance, to touch the face of God that resides deep within us all.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherInner Traditions
    Release dateJan 19, 2010
    ISBN9781594779183
    Rumi's Four Essential Practices: Ecstatic Body, Awakened Soul
    Author

    Will Johnson

    Will Johnson is the founder and director of the Institute for Embodiment Training, which combines Western somatic psychotherapy with Eastern meditation practices. He is the author of several books, including Breathing through the Whole Body, The Posture of Meditation, and The Spiritual Practices of Rumi. He lives in British Columbia.

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      Book preview

      Rumi's Four Essential Practices - Will Johnson

      Introduction

      A RELIGION OF INTOXICATED LOVE AND ECSTASY

      Religion is always born out of a moment of radical insight but then all too often devolves into a system of rules and beliefs that turns the original insight into an event to worship rather than an experience to re-create. Organized religion, says the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, is a defense against having the religious experience. The religious experience is everyone’s birthright, but paradoxically we brace ourselves against having this experience. We hold back on the inner forces and energies that, yielded to, give birth to the soul, and we often tragically refer to religious text and tradition to justify this denial.

      Jalaluddin Rumi—the great thirteenth-century Sufi poet, mystic, and originator of the dance of the whirling dervishes—began his life within the folds of orthodox religious tradition, but ultimately he had to go beyond the accepted practices and prescribed forms of prayer in order to have the religious experience for himself. To truly grow in soul, he found that two things were necessary: you have to surrender to love, and you have to dissolve the self that keeps that love contained:

      falling in love

      took me away from academia

      and reading the Koran so much

      just like that

      it made me crazy and insane

      I used to go to the mosque

      to throw myself on the prayer rug

      and cover myself in devotion

      but one day love entered the mosque

      and spoke to me:

      "o wise one,

      why do you stay stuck

      inside this house of worship?

      what you need to do is break free

      from the bondage of self"

      The path of embodied love, which takes you beyond your self, is a far more potent way of inviting the religious experience than is compliant participation in the ritualized behaviors of organized religion alone. Rumi urges us not just to remain sober scholars of God, but to become rowdy lovers of God. He urges us to surrender to the powerful feelings of ecstatic love, which live in the middle of each and every body, just waiting for permission to be expressed. He wants us to know that it’s okay to feel these energies and, even more, to surrender to them and be transformed by them—even if (especially if ) they start making us feel as though we’re getting spinny drunk and are losing our minds. In this state of intoxicated reverie, love takes over and shows us the way beyond our self.

      Rumi’s is a path for anyone who has ever felt the religious impulse but was never able to tame his or her energies to comfortably conform to the traditional religious model of composed tranquility. Rumi doesn’t want you to remain calm and tranquil. He wants you to come alive, explode open, and become over-the-top drunk on the divine energies that live inside you.

      Rumi’s transformation from an orthodox religious teacher into an ecstatic lover of God came about through his chance encounter with a wandering dervish named Shams of Tabriz. The two men met in the streets of Konya. Something altogether extraordinary must have transpired between them in that moment of meeting, because they immediately went off together into a retreat room from which they didn’t emerge for several months. When they did finally come back out into the world, they were in a highly illuminated state of sheer ecstatic wonderment. How could this have happened?!

      What actually occurred behind the closed door of their retreat room has been the subject of much debate, but a careful reading of the poetry that started pouring from Rumi’s mouth strongly suggests that they were exploring the spiritual exercises and practices presented in this book. It’s not enough simply to sit and talk about wanting to merge with the energies of God; one has to explore techniques and practices that allow this surrendered merging to actually occur.

      After his encounter with Shams, Rumi entered a period during which he began to speak in the language of poetry as he moved and danced through Konya’s streets, conversing with townspeople that he met along the way. He was always

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