How The Ramadan Fast is Teaching Me To Take Things Slow
If there was a sound of one hand clapping, or the primal pulse, it would probably go, 'I am,' and maybe in time, 'I think therefore I am.' This bee-hum of 'I am' is certainly the bedrock of breath upon which we construct the thought-grid of this life. That's why Zikr, the central Islamic practice of meditation taught by my teacher Bawa Muhiayaddeen, starts with the fundamental 'I am' and answers the natural question embedded in it, "I am what?'
Zikr, as Bawa, taught it, is a two-stage process of de/re-construction. You breath out everything remaining within you through the left nostril on the out breath and say to or serenade yourself with, 'La illahah,' There is only God. That thought, or reminder, subordinates everything to the activity at hand. It is a kind of thunderclap, conch call or a commandment like Dad yelling, 'Shut up,' years and years ago. In this case, the sky empties or lightens from the peremptory friction (two clapping hands becoming one) of the command. Even the thought of God or Lola or the 10 chores facing you before day is done hide from sight or sound or incantation. Attenshun!
You immediately feel a reprieve from the constant onslaught of thought. You turn, or are tuned, to the reviewing stand (in this metaphoric case, a mountain) and begin to breathe back in through the right nostril, murmuring, 'Il allahu,' only God is Real. Both breaths are long, deep draughts of air, sucked in as if consciousness were a milkshake straw of concentration deep into your being. T'ai Chi, which I also practice, is a kind of moving Zikr.
Okay, that's the Zikr cycle. Bawa asked his students to practice it ten minutes a days. He promised it would make all the difference. I have only taken him at his word intermittently.
This Ramadan, however, when fasting is conjoined to the most important midterm elections of my lifetime, and my mind is constantly agitated, the Ramadan fast is wedded to a metabolic slowdown. As the fast and Zikr continue, I feel like I am trying to conduct my life at a Himalayan base camp. To maintain normal mental thrust and weave in and out of the constant rush-hour traffic-flow of thinking, I will have to abandon the mountain. And since I may be in the midst of delivering what I am sure is another Sermon on the Mount or the greatest acceptance speech ever given at a political convention, I may very well start to turn around and head back down to 'the world,' now reduced to an enticing, if not inviting, glow below.
Thankfully, I bump into the next breath of Zikr, and resume the trek. A trick ventriloquist's voice will often applaud this decision with something like, 'Jolly Good,' and add, 'Well, then, shall I tell the sherpas that it's onward as planned?'
To steady myself, as well as this metaphor, I try to listen to the soft crunching sound of footsteps in the snow, and the slightly louder syllables of 'La illaha il allahu.' But it isn't long before I transform my Himalayan heights into a book depository window where I take aim at the brazen skulls of our fearful leaders driving by in open-topped stretch Cadillac and become entangled in a demented fantasy that allows me to become a psycho-bodhisattva willing to sacrifice my soul to rid the world of evil's most effective current incarnations.
Suddenly, I snap to my true present circumstance, and resume Zikr accompaniment of breathing. 'You dropped your sun goggles,' a sherpa-like thought says, handing me either a ''La illaha' or an 'Il Allahu' to use for protection. 'Watch out. The glare can make you crazy.'
This morning on the mountain, when I once again professed shock at finding an elephant rifle in my back pack, I called for a time out from the never-ending sequels to lifelong anger. I made a pantomime of throwing my weapons into a ravine, said a bisman (bismallah irrachman irrahim) and vowed to frame the mountain in a peace from myself equal to the one it brought to me--when I let it.
Suddenly, I thought of Jonah Wilson, a Fellowship peer of my son Jesse who has been dropping in at the house these last few weeks to listen to Zikr tapes and practice meditation with me. I have begun to relish these meetings and have vowed to leave their continuation up to Jonah and never ever let them become an obligation to either of us like class or taking out the trash.
I began to compose a letter to Jonah and felt he was my son. In my mind, I imagined him away at college or out in LA like Jesse. He had written to ask me how did he get beyond the impacted separation of the 'I' using the primal 'I am,' a question I have been pondering ever since high school. I didn't have an immediate answer. I just knew, for the first time, that the 'I am' leads beyond the isolate self, and that Zikr was a key for us in pursuit of that beyond. 'Breathe out a little fuller and breathe in a little deeper,' I told Jonah and myself. The Ramadan fast has loosened and lessened your burdens. Let them go, and let the mountain give your more than you've ever taken in on the in-breath. It was then the following Robert Creeley poem, rediscovered last week at LAX while waiting for a plane to Philly, came to mind as brushstroked annotation of our shared Cartesian dilemma. This time, thankfully, it also served as first stirring of a solution:
SOME PLACE
I resolved it, I
found in my life a
center and secured it.
It is the house,
trees beyond, a term
of view encasing it.
The weather
reaches only as some
wind, a little
deadened sighing. And
if the life weren't?
when was something to
happen, had I secured
that--had I, had
I, insistent.
There is nothing I am,
nothing not. A place
between, I am. I am
more than thought, less
than thought. A house
with winds, but a distance
--something loose in the wind,
feeling weather as that life,
walks toward the lights he left.
--Robert Creeley, Words, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1967
I began to see within and without this quietude as a light and life, and like Creeley, began to walk toward them as something I left and found again. 'What are you thinking?" I imagined Jonah asking me. 'I am that I am,' I answered with solid sincerity. 'All this time the 'I am' was connected to Him, not ever to be thought of as separate. To say He is not is to simply remind yourself of the insubstantiality of all thought.'
I will not lie. I felt a 'me' but, for once, it was as delicate and fragile and translucent as a moth's wing, "something loose in the wind, / feeling weather as that life, / walks toward the lights he left."
Jonah, when are you coming over next?
Zikr, as Bawa, taught it, is a two-stage process of de/re-construction. You breath out everything remaining within you through the left nostril on the out breath and say to or serenade yourself with, 'La illahah,' There is only God. That thought, or reminder, subordinates everything to the activity at hand. It is a kind of thunderclap, conch call or a commandment like Dad yelling, 'Shut up,' years and years ago. In this case, the sky empties or lightens from the peremptory friction (two clapping hands becoming one) of the command. Even the thought of God or Lola or the 10 chores facing you before day is done hide from sight or sound or incantation. Attenshun!
You immediately feel a reprieve from the constant onslaught of thought. You turn, or are tuned, to the reviewing stand (in this metaphoric case, a mountain) and begin to breathe back in through the right nostril, murmuring, 'Il allahu,' only God is Real. Both breaths are long, deep draughts of air, sucked in as if consciousness were a milkshake straw of concentration deep into your being. T'ai Chi, which I also practice, is a kind of moving Zikr.
Okay, that's the Zikr cycle. Bawa asked his students to practice it ten minutes a days. He promised it would make all the difference. I have only taken him at his word intermittently.
This Ramadan, however, when fasting is conjoined to the most important midterm elections of my lifetime, and my mind is constantly agitated, the Ramadan fast is wedded to a metabolic slowdown. As the fast and Zikr continue, I feel like I am trying to conduct my life at a Himalayan base camp. To maintain normal mental thrust and weave in and out of the constant rush-hour traffic-flow of thinking, I will have to abandon the mountain. And since I may be in the midst of delivering what I am sure is another Sermon on the Mount or the greatest acceptance speech ever given at a political convention, I may very well start to turn around and head back down to 'the world,' now reduced to an enticing, if not inviting, glow below.
Thankfully, I bump into the next breath of Zikr, and resume the trek. A trick ventriloquist's voice will often applaud this decision with something like, 'Jolly Good,' and add, 'Well, then, shall I tell the sherpas that it's onward as planned?'
To steady myself, as well as this metaphor, I try to listen to the soft crunching sound of footsteps in the snow, and the slightly louder syllables of 'La illaha il allahu.' But it isn't long before I transform my Himalayan heights into a book depository window where I take aim at the brazen skulls of our fearful leaders driving by in open-topped stretch Cadillac and become entangled in a demented fantasy that allows me to become a psycho-bodhisattva willing to sacrifice my soul to rid the world of evil's most effective current incarnations.
Suddenly, I snap to my true present circumstance, and resume Zikr accompaniment of breathing. 'You dropped your sun goggles,' a sherpa-like thought says, handing me either a ''La illaha' or an 'Il Allahu' to use for protection. 'Watch out. The glare can make you crazy.'
This morning on the mountain, when I once again professed shock at finding an elephant rifle in my back pack, I called for a time out from the never-ending sequels to lifelong anger. I made a pantomime of throwing my weapons into a ravine, said a bisman (bismallah irrachman irrahim) and vowed to frame the mountain in a peace from myself equal to the one it brought to me--when I let it.
Suddenly, I thought of Jonah Wilson, a Fellowship peer of my son Jesse who has been dropping in at the house these last few weeks to listen to Zikr tapes and practice meditation with me. I have begun to relish these meetings and have vowed to leave their continuation up to Jonah and never ever let them become an obligation to either of us like class or taking out the trash.
I began to compose a letter to Jonah and felt he was my son. In my mind, I imagined him away at college or out in LA like Jesse. He had written to ask me how did he get beyond the impacted separation of the 'I' using the primal 'I am,' a question I have been pondering ever since high school. I didn't have an immediate answer. I just knew, for the first time, that the 'I am' leads beyond the isolate self, and that Zikr was a key for us in pursuit of that beyond. 'Breathe out a little fuller and breathe in a little deeper,' I told Jonah and myself. The Ramadan fast has loosened and lessened your burdens. Let them go, and let the mountain give your more than you've ever taken in on the in-breath. It was then the following Robert Creeley poem, rediscovered last week at LAX while waiting for a plane to Philly, came to mind as brushstroked annotation of our shared Cartesian dilemma. This time, thankfully, it also served as first stirring of a solution:
SOME PLACE
I resolved it, I
found in my life a
center and secured it.
It is the house,
trees beyond, a term
of view encasing it.
The weather
reaches only as some
wind, a little
deadened sighing. And
if the life weren't?
when was something to
happen, had I secured
that--had I, had
I, insistent.
There is nothing I am,
nothing not. A place
between, I am. I am
more than thought, less
than thought. A house
with winds, but a distance
--something loose in the wind,
feeling weather as that life,
walks toward the lights he left.
--Robert Creeley, Words, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1967
I began to see within and without this quietude as a light and life, and like Creeley, began to walk toward them as something I left and found again. 'What are you thinking?" I imagined Jonah asking me. 'I am that I am,' I answered with solid sincerity. 'All this time the 'I am' was connected to Him, not ever to be thought of as separate. To say He is not is to simply remind yourself of the insubstantiality of all thought.'
I will not lie. I felt a 'me' but, for once, it was as delicate and fragile and translucent as a moth's wing, "something loose in the wind, / feeling weather as that life, / walks toward the lights he left."
Jonah, when are you coming over next?
posted by David Federman @ 7:12 AM
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