About the Workshops

The Sufi workshops are a blending of practices. Often in workshops you focus on one or the other. For instance you go to a workshop only for yoga, only for dance, only for sitting meditation, only for drumming and so forth. What makes the workshops so unique is the way they are combined to create an atmosphere where time and space, concentration, action and repose are the constant elements. Each exercise complements the other, like ingredients in a good recipe. Every practice challenges and involves the senses in a different way. The mind, the body, the emotions, the creativity and the soul are active through concentration.  The result is a state of unification,  of being connected with the breath to the moment. Profound healing and positive change can occur using this method.

The Sufi workshops are often held over weekends or for 8 – 10 days or over the summer at a two month meditation retreat in New Mexico. 

People often ask why we hold workshops all weekend and not just a few hours. Over a few days of doing the workshop a profound shift can occur. The time, the place and the people lend to the workshop an opportunity to go inward and focus on being rather than doing, being rather than thinking. 

The music, the exercises, the slow soft gentle movements and chants draw you away from the tension caused by managing the world around you and into the realm where you can experience an inner clarity and peace that rejuvenates the whole being. Often this is a new experience for people and can affect them in a profound way. The timing supports not rushing but being in the moment, in the movement, in the music, in the positive flow of breathing, moving and stillness. 

It takes a while for the body to assimilate the new focus on being in the moment. It is like a new physical exercise where your muscles need to recover from being exercised. So to does the whole person need to assimilate the new experience of being deeply in the moment. 

As the workshops progress each exercise is designed to bring a deeper state of awareness and blend them to create a positive change. 

The Sufi consider the senses we have as vehicles to align the heart with the spirit. Nothing is off limits to the sufi to use to bring higher consciousness. for instance in dance, the dance becomes prayer, the movement becomes prayer. It becomes a pure concentration devoid of anything negative or false. 

“The spirit awakens when the soul enters happiness”

This saying describes the part joy, happiness, ease and pleasure have in awakening the spirit. To sufis, the ultimate pleasure in existence is the identification with the spirit.  To sufis the highest of all pleasure is contentment. to need for nothing more than what is in the moment. This experience of contentment is healing. Our aim in the sufi work is to transcend the limited world of desires and the ego and merge into the world of the spirit. And the spirit merges with the divine through the moment.