In The Eyes of the Desert Sands: A Sufi Takes Flight

Ruminant With A View

by Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

Note: These are the last of my Yoga Columns Series to be re-run. I’ll be back at my laptop, and on my Yoga mat, in Teaneck, next week.

TEANECK New Jersey—(Weekly Hubris)—10/31/11—It snowed last night in New Jersey.

Not here in Teaneck. Farther south, if we’re to believe the weatherfolks. Snowed so much the stuff had to be ploughed. We’re talking June 16th here.

In Greenville, SC, yesterday, it was close to 90 degrees, and my husband and I were wrapping up six days in the state that gave birth to my maternal grandmother, and her maternal grandmother, etc., etc. (Abalena Boleman’s maiden name was the ubiquitous “Smith” so, as I’ve written elsewhere, I’m related to approximately 68 percent of all South Carolinians, white, Black and all combinations thereof. Lots of Smiths in Carolina.)

Getting to sunny South Carolina from (not yet) snowy New Jersey was a near thing last Monday, though. Dean and I sat, at Newark, in the terminal and on the tarmac (in first one small jet; then another), for six hours before we were cleared for take-off. The name of our carrier was, purportedly, Continental: Air Cuisinart would have been more apt. Right after lift-off, two seconds into our “flight” (wrong noun, entirely), I knew we were in trouble.

We experienced flying-through-thunderstorms turbulence; clear-air turbulence; and flying-in-a-grey-out turbulence. Not even the pilots could bring themselves to speak to us till we landed (or fell onto our wheels), and then it was just to issue a string of laconic (even for pilots) apologies from the cockpit. Grown women were throwing up in the WC.

When I got to terra firma, I felt like an escapee from GitMo: but I’d been water-boarded without benefit of water.

Now, the last few years of my life have been decidedly odd ones, given my culture of origin (all those Southern-Baptist Smiths, for one thing). My current life trajectory (or “course of study in this middle-aged incarnation”), began with a year spent working towards my Third Degree in Reiki (hands-on healing), an arcane pursuit by most standards. But, from there, I got stranger still, spending five years dotting the many I’s and crossing the myriad t’s of Iyengar-Style Yoga.

And a traditional Reiki mastership, followed by the most anal-compulsive of all of Yoga’s “genres” has led, naturally, to something even more bizarre than snow in June: Sufism.

My sleep specialist, a saintly, Western MD who’s been studying the interface between Stage Four sleep disorders and Depression (my own two noirest of bêtes ), recently advised me to take up some
entirely new pursuit. Reiki, Yoga, penning non-fiction, managing a Big Band? Apparently, all of the above, undertaken at once, do not suffice for her.

So, I said, “I have , actually, been considering taking up whirling. . .”

“Whirling?”

“Yes, as in Dervishes,” I elucidated. “Whirling Dervishes.”

My doctor blanched.

But, really, I have been considering it, though I’ve had no luck, yet, locating a living, breathing local group of Sufis, with a sane, central, still vertical Sufi teacher in its midst (Sufis: a bit thin on the ground hereabouts).

I could head for the Swat Valley, or Eastern Turkey, or some regions of Afghanistan, perhaps, but I think the Sufis there might well look askance at a 57-year-old American woman not given to wearing much head-hair, let alone a scarf, or shoes. And then, there’s the language barrier.

But I have been reading everything by or about Sufis I can unearth (I’ve just about bled www.abebooks.com dry in the process).

Idries Shah, I’ve found to be the most accessible of the admittedly-Sufi writers (not counting the poet Rumi, as translated by my long-ago college poetry professor, Coleman Barks), but Shah is no longer on the planet; nor is his brother, who took up his sibling’s work. Ouspensky’s gone, too.

It doesn’t help, either, that the Sufis aren’t at all interested in attracting converts, acolytes, disciples or cheerleaders. They’re something akin to the Quakers in this regard. They’re seemingly as rare, secretive and solitary as the Blue-Spotted Snipe and, if I ever managed to run one to earth, he, or she, would probably deny being a Sufi at all.

So, why bother with them?

Because, the moment I began reading about their philosophy—their “take” on Creation, the Creator, creativity, where we are, what we’re here for—it all struck a big, resounding chord in me. The Sufis believe all religions are, in fact, one and the same, and they teach using somewhat outlandish and, on the face of them, pretty lighthearted parables, poems, anecdotes, tales and stories. “The Blind Men & The Elephant”? A Sufi teaching parable. Think about it.

Discursive words, per se and however, in any language, don’t go very far towards “wrangling” Sufis or Sufism. And they’re mutable critters. Swat Valley Sufis of the Middle Ages are not going to resemble
Washington State Sufis of 2009, if such creatures exist: different (but still Sufi) strokes for different (but still Sufi) folks.

Here, for example, is the last Sufi parable I read before boarding my Air Cuisinart flight to South Carolina (“The Tale of the Sands,” as recorded in The Sufis , by Idries Shah, 1964):

“A bubbling stream reached a desert, and found that it could not cross it. The water was disappearing into the fine sand, faster and faster. The Stream said aloud, ‘My destiny is to cross this desert, but I can see no way.’

This is the situation of the disciple who needs a master, but who cannot trust one, the pathetic human situation.

The voice of the Desert answered, in the hidden tongue of nature, saying, ‘The Wind crosses the desert, and so can you.’

‘But, whenever I try, I am absorbed into the sand; and even if I dash myself at the desert, I can only go a little distance.’

‘The Wind does not dash itself against the desert sand.’

‘But the Wind can fly, and I cannot.’

‘You are thinking in the wrong way; trying to fly by yourself is absurd. Allow the Wind to carry you over the sand.’

‘But how can that happen?’

‘Allow yourself to be absorbed by the Wind.’

The Stream protested that it did not want to lose its individuality in that way. If it did, it might not exist again.

This, said the Sand, was a form of logic, but it did not refer to reality at all. When the Wind absorbed moisture, it carried it over the desert, and then let it fall again like rain. The rain again became a river.

But how, asked the Stream, could it know that this was true?

‘It is so, and you must believe it, or you will simply be sucked down by the sands to form, after several million years, a quagmire.’

‘But if that is so, will I be the same river that I am today?’

‘You cannot in any case remain the same stream that you are today. The choice is not open to you; it only seems to be open. The Wind will carry your essence, the finer part of you. When you become a river again at the mountains beyond the sands, men may call you by a different name; but you yourself, essentially, will know that you are the same. Today you call yourself such and such a river only because you do not know which part of it is even now your essence.’

So the Stream crossed the desert by raising itself into the arms of the welcoming Wind, which gathered it slowly and carefully upward, and then let it down with gentle firmness, atop the mountains of a far-off land.”

Patanjali, Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed? One and the same Sufi stream . . . and all Sons of God, by any name.

And so, when we hit that first vicious pocket of turbulence over Newark, and it continued, unabated, for just under two hours, I took my husband’s (clammy) hand in mine—and Dean is no white-knuckled
flier—and I began to speak with God, out the airplane window as it were. Calmly. As one sentient being to another. Without fear.

I didn’t ask for anything, though I was pretty certain our little German jet was going down. The cumulus clouds, filled with lightning, all around and about us, were hissing, in French, “I speet on your little German jets, Earthlings!” I wasn’t fazed. For the first time in my life, “up against it,” I wasn’t bargaining or groveling. I knew, somehow, that there is a God, and that people building jets, and people flying in jets, and people going down and surviving crashes, and people going down
and not surviving crashes (seemingly) were all . . . OK. Not OK in a way I can/could/will ever be able to articulate. But OK, nevertheless. OK in the eyes of the desert sands.

My long-suffering shrink, whom I still see once a year, in SC, just for the hell of it, and whom I did, in fact, see the day after our Continental flight limped into GSP, said something to the effect that I
had suddenly come to terms with mortality, chaos, random acts of destruction . . . and decided against employing my usual responses. We actually spoke (meta-communication-wise) for over an hour about what went through my mind on that flight (and I got billed for it—very un-Sufi, Dr. Richards!), but I couldn’t repeat the gist of our conversation to save my soul.

Something the Sufis would expect: on the line between life and death, between time as we know it and time as we don’t yet know it, words get drowned out by the stream-laden Wind.

But the Wind’s roar is peaceful.

As things stand now, I have no idea if I’ll ever realize my dream of whirling with Dervishes—or whether I’ll remain unafraid-of-flying for the duration of the flight.

One thing is certain. The Stream is now much less fretful about being swept up by the rainclouds to be spirited across the Sands.

Home-Alone (Iyengar) Yoga

Ruminant With A View

by Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

 

TEANECK New Jersey—(Weekly Hubris)—10/31/11—After a decade of balancing (gracefully if insanely), like a half-century-old angel on the head of a pin, practicing and then joyously teaching Yoga, my spine broke, between its 4^th and 5^th lumbar vertebrae, I underwent spinal fusion surgery, and came out on the other side of that experience . . . a stranger in my own achey-breaky flesh.

The pain in my lower back (where titanium pins, apparently, are cutting into the muscle, itself sliced through and through to insert the cage and bone and metal that now support, yea, verily, comprise my spine), is relentless: a new and demanding companion, sleeping and waking.

And now, on the four-inch heels of that pain, comes mononucleosis, an old, old friend, when spring is finally upon the land, and I had (only just) returned to Yoga class.

Shit does happen, Gentle Reader. And more shit happens when one is old.

Still, a decade ago, having practiced “generic” Yoga since the early 1980s, I gave myself over to one teacher of verrrry non-generic Yoga, a man I will never meet, but whose words have guided me through every asana, every thought, every breath on my Yoga mat, since I discovered his work. B.K.S. Iyengar: a man himself well acquainted with adversity, illness and sorrow.

He’s seen it all—starvation, privation, degradation, disillusionment, shattering injury, and loss—and he is the world’s greatest living Yogi. Still. At 93.

“In my life,” writes Guruji Iyengar, in Light on Life, “I count among my greatest blessings my early ill health, poverty, lack of education, and the harshness of my guru. Without these deprivations, I might never have held on so faithfully to yoga. When everything else is stripped away, the essential is revealed [italics mine].”

Well, pretty much everything, within my body, has been stripped away, as I write. But, like the limbless knight of “Monty Python & The Holy Grail,” I’m still hopping on my stumps, apparently. I come from stubborn stock.

My mother, another Elizabeth, who died in 1972 of Stage IV colon cancer, said something in the last months of her life that will always stay with me, blow me away, and inspire me (in times like this). Dying, and pretty damned horribly, she thanked her Creator for her cancer, without which she said she would never have learned certain, to-her-essential lessons.

Oy!

With teachers like Beth and B.K.S., how can I let a mere broken back and, Pshaw!, case of mono stop me?

Well, until this morning, easily, apparently: I’ve been lying in bed on a heating pad, full of Advil and angst, mightily pissed off at the world.

Today, however, something shifted for me, I washed down one of my innumerable Yoga mats with Lysol, got out my props (chair, blocks, belt, bolster—I’d need all of them) and did approximately six asana (before retreating to my heating pad).

Halleluiah: a home practice!

In point of fact, because it involves sitting in an evil, “Western” chair—and sitting, in and of itself, is THE anti-asana nonpareil)—I can only type what I’m writing to you here in short bursts. So, this column is not so much a column, as a congeries of paragraphs.

And my home Yoga practice, even on this first day, lasted about 10 minutes.

A congeries of precisely five asana.

Still, I did it. I did about half of one of Iyengar’s suggested sequences of asana especially designed for fatigue: Viparita Karani, Supta Baddha Konasana, Supta Virasana (a bitch, today!), Adho Mukha Svanasana, and “Chair” Sarvangasana. Then, I gave up the ghost for a while.

I’ve been doing Iyengar Yoga for so many years, in classrooms—where I unabashedly love the shared energy, the great gift of being-in-asana with other human beings, and, when I’m the student, the being taught even more, the being corrected—that, to roll out my mat at home, alone, especially in my weakened, pitiful and whiney current state is just especially hard.

But, and here’s the kicker, if one does not establish (or, in my own case, re-start) a home practice, one does not, in essence, do Yoga. That’s me, Elizabeth, speaking. Not Iyengar. But it’s something I’ve come to believe fully.

Like meditation, like prayer, it’s the Yoga one does in private, the deep, daily work with no one but God in attendance, that moves the body towards the spirit.

B.K.S. Iyengar has written so many divinely inspiring books. I think I have them all here in my Yoga library. They’re broken-spined and underlined: Light on Yoga, Light on Pranayama, Light on Life, Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, The Tree of Yoga, etc., etc., as well as the “Iyengar spin-off books,” written, with Guruji’s approval and participation, by certain advanced students.

The book I use, at home, and in teaching beginners, is Silva, Mira and Shyam Mehta’s Yoga: The Iyengar Way, because it is portable, beautifully organized, has lots of clear, instructive photographs, and includes four full “Courses” of asana, plus “Remedial Programs,” which cover the gamut of what I can do, at home, or on the road, without a rope wall or an advanced Iyengar teacher.

After all these years, my body knows many, many of the necessary “moves.” I’ve absorbed, in my cells, “the teaching.” But only practice, practice, practice can, might, restore flexibility and health, now.

I’m a year—a long year—away from the spiritual athlete I was on 19 May 2010, but I still believe I can work my way back to an approximation, a rough, rough approximation, of what Mr. Iyengar embodies for me, still, at age 93.

The man is 93, and still makes almost all of us look like kindergartners on the mat.

On Page 1 of Light on Yoga, Iyengar quotes from the Bhagavad Gita, one of mankind’s holiest texts. He writes: “Sri Krishna explains to Arjuna the meaning of Yoga as a deliverance from contact with pain and sorrow. It is said: ‘When his mind, intellect and self (ahamkara) are under control, freed from restless desire, so that they rest in the spirit within, a man becomes a Yukta—one in communion with God. A lamp does not flicker in a place where no winds blow; so it is with a yogi, who controls his mind, intellect and self, being absorbed in the spirit within him. When the restlessness of the mind, intellect and self is stilled through the practice of Yoga, the yogi by the grace of the Spirit within himself finds fulfillment . . . . There is nothing higher than this. He who has achieved it, shall not be moved by the greatest sorrow. This is the real meaning of Yoga—a deliverance from contact with pain and sorrow.’”

Amen.

And, if you’ve spent years and years and years assuming asana and pranayama, you know Iyengar’s practice can accomplish all these things.

The trick is, simply, to do, to do, to do, and do yet again . . . to return to the mat, alone and, perhaps, in pain, weakness and illness; to remember who you truly are (and could be, God willing, again).

And now, I’m getting the hell out of this chair!