MOVING FREELY

Ecstasy moves. It never stands still. It can be thought of as an ex-stasis, a leaving behind of whatever’s been holding us still and an emerging or coming out from the cocoon that stillness has woven. When we’re able to move freely and surrender to the larger forces of breath and feeling energies that want to pass through our body, palpable feelings and expressions of ecstasy naturally start materializing.

But just as we breathe with only a fraction of the capacity available to our lungs, so do we mostly move through only a fraction of the range of motion available to our joints. Holding the body still can only occur in an environment that values control over ecstasy. The wheels of commerce often move through still bodies, and so, to make our way in the world, we often inhibit our breath, stifle our awareness of sensations, and resist the impulse to move. But when we get home at night, it’s time to let our hair down, turn the music up, and let the body awaken.

The impulse to move is as old as life itself. Viewed under a microscope, the single cells of the most primitive life forms can be seen to swell, contract, gyrate, bulge, suck in, puff out, spin, and glide as they move along their way. Life moves. Life doesn’t want to stand still, and so, as the earliest humans surrendered to their primal impulse to move, the activity of dance began to emerge as one of the first ritualized forms of human behavior.

Rumi may have started out an orthodox cleric, but he became an ecstatic dancer. Through his understanding of breath and fasting, and propelled by his explosive meeting and communion with Shams of Tabriz, strong energies of soul must have been awakened in his body. Like so many others before and since, Rumi discovered that the pressures of these strong feeling energies—which Sufis describe as the intense and awakened longing in the heart and soul for union with whatever they feel so achingly separate from—could be relieved and released through surrendering to the movements of the dance. Some people believe that Shams introduced Rumi to the dance during their retreat, while others have suggested that Rumi opened to it himself after Shams had left when, out of despair over the loss of his great friend, he began turning round and around a pillar and didn’t want to stop. Either way, the encounter with Shams was the catalyst that helped Rumi awaken dormant feeling energies and sensations, and a natural response to this kind of awakening is to start dancing. Musicians became Rumi’s highly valued friends, fueling the dance that kept his body in motion and freeing the poetic language in which he began to speak as he moved about town.

Dance became, for Rumi, a form of physical prayer that helps to loosen the tight grip of the self and to experience the energies of ecstasy, and so he began inviting friends to come together as a group and perform a ceremony of dance and music that he called the sema. After his death, Rumi’s son Sultan Veled would preserve his father’s teachings by founding the Mevlevi Order, which continues to this day to perform sema and to train people in what has come to be known as the dance of the whirling dervish.

We dance for many reasons—some personal, some social—but the dance’s ability to open the dancer to altered feeling and visionary states is as old as human life. We’re currently living at a time in which the power of the dance is experiencing an emergence on a scale that has never been seen before, and the simple explanation for this is that music has become so ubiquitous. Music has always been an instigator of the dance, but for the better part of recorded history, music was a sublime rarity. We’ve now learned how to literally record history, and the sounds of music are being transmitted everywhere. A good band in a groove catalyzes the dance like nothing else, and the music that’s being listened to the most around the planet has a sound and a beat that bodies want to move to. Over the past fifty years, improvisational dance, as a form of personal healing and spiritual practice, has exploded from the pioneering teaching of people like Bapak Subuh, Gabrielle Roth, and Emilie Conrad into the planetary rave movement, which has turned millions of people into ecstatic dancers. Liberate the dancer within has become a spiritual motto for increasingly large numbers of young people everywhere on the planet. Liberating the dancer within (and, yes, we all, every single one of us, have a dancer inside us wanting to move) is Rumi’s third essential practice for sparking ecstasy.

Many of Rumi’s poems, read as invitations to simply surrender to the felt urgency to move, sound like teachings from the improvisational dance movement. How does one learn to dance? Just listen to the music, and let your body move. Still not sure? Look at how the branches on the trees move in a wind. They don’t try to do this step or that step. They just surrender to the breeze that moves them. Move like that, Rumi tells us. Move like the dust particles dancing in the light. Just surrender to the movement that wants to move you.

Others of Rumi’s poems speak specifically of the highly ritualized practice of turning the body in circles—round and around, over and over again, with arms outstretched. While the formal rituals of turning have been preserved in the sema ceremony of the Mevlevi Order, the actions of whirling, turning, and spinning around are universal to everyone (and, the Sufis would say, to everything). Little children love to spin around, and they’re always filled with giddy joy when they do. Because turning can make you dizzy, you have to find a way to go beyond your mind, and this place beyond is ecstasy’s playground. While anybody can explore the turn on their own (the basic directions for turning couldn’t be simpler: stand with arms outstretched, the right palm facing up, the left palm facing down; keep your gaze fixed on the back of your left hand, and begin to turn to your left round and around in circles—and then surrender to whatever starts happening to you. . . .), people who feel particularly drawn to this unique form of ecstatic prayer may want to seek out teachers and communities for deeper guidance and training.

Music, Rumi tells us, is food for lovers. Wherever music is, dance follows, and music is now everywhere. So let the poems that follow inspire you to bring a dance practice into your life. Turn the lights down. Turn your music system on, and play whatever music is drawing you right now. And then let your body start to move. Don’t force it to do this or that. Just let it start to awaken, and follow its lead. The ecstasy is in finding out how it wants to move you and where it wants to take you.

if you’re smart
and want to grow in soul
you’ll give thanks to our king
and keep dancing

o sufis
keep whirling and dancing

for god’s sake
go ecstatic!

put the belt of rapture
around your waists
and start doing sema

my beautiful moon is dancing
venus plays the tambourine

I salute the brave
who proclaim their love
through dance and music

you start out imitating
end up terrified
and then find hope

start dancing with that hope

in time you’ll break free
from this world of illusion

bats in the night sky
love dancing with darkness

birds that love the sun
dance from dawn to dusk

o fast-blowing morning breeze
go and tell shams of tebriz:
tell me who you are
and come dance with me

you’re so beautiful
heart and soul fell in love
and started dancing at your gathering

when they heard the angel gabriel
was coming down to earth
all the particles of the land
started dancing

the sun of his face conquered the moon
who was thrilled to be held in his arms
and started dancing

o my king
you grow in love
like a baby with its mother’s smile

so come
let yourself go
get in the dance

after seeing him
you came speeding
like a ball to his bat
you lost your head
you lost your feet
so you danced
without your head or feet

you’ve gotten so drunk
on the wine of being
you’ve got ecstasy
written all over you

ecstasy keeps calling
so get ready for the journey

start to dance

untie your hair
spread your scent around
put the souls of sufis to dancing

the sun, moon, and stars
keep turning around the sky;
we’re in the middle
turning around the center

your singing and playing
are so beautiful!
even the lowest notes
start turning the sufis of the sky

the spring breeze comes running
singing
making the world smile

it causes a commotion
among the young

every day a fairylike beauty
steps out from behind the curtain
and puts everyone in a circle to dance

the sufi dances to that beauty’s tune
and waves his soft cloak

but the man of reason
gets confused

his turban comes untied
and drags on the ground

the stirring sound of his voice
comes from deep inside
the oven of his heart

when he starts spreading melodies
my heart jumps from its seat

he put a rebab*3 on his lap
took the cap off his head
and set it on the ground

when I saw his head
begin to shake
my heart went right to him

heart spins
his silk thread
like a bobbin

it turns so fast
that the spinner of the thread
sometimes sees it
sometimes doesn’t

body is like dust and soil
soul is like the wind

soul kicks up the dust
and through the dance of particles
soul is revealed

so let’s say your soul
looks a lot like dust and soil
and another soul
meets you in that dust

the whole universe
will start to dance
particle by particle
to your tune

come
come and see
that you are the soul of sema

come
come and see
that you’re a walking cypress
in sema’s garden

come and see
that someone exactly like you
has never existed before
and never will again

come and see
that the eyes of sema
have never seen anyone like you before
and never will again

what should I do
if love seizes me?

start dancing of course!

sweep love into your arms
and press her to your chest

when particles of dust
are touched by the sun
they spread their arms and start whirling
to a music no one can hear

a sweet voice came
from the threshold of greatness
come
it says to soul

how could soul resist?

how could a fish out of water lie still
with the sound of the waves in its ears?

the fish wants to jump back into the sea

how could a sufi not enter the dance
like a particle of dust under eternal light?

a bright light
shines in the sky
coming from the dance of lovers

yet still there are those
who condemn dance and music
and don’t believe it’s right

one group turns around the sun
and falls into god’s favor

the other just keeps turning
around the cold harsh winter

when you hear the songs of birds
your wings begin to flutter

if you really want to fly
free your feet from the tar

look at these particles
in front of my window
they’re dancing so exquisitely in the air

these particles dance sema
like sufis in the sun’s light
but to what kind of music, beat, or instrument
nobody knows

the most important sema
is the one that goes on inside us

particles of our body are dancing
with hundreds of different rhythms and graces

those who’ve attained
open their arms and start dancing
at a place beyond truth or lies

they don’t get involved
with matters of the head
or the soul

someone once offered a dervish
a totally bodiless soul
but the dervish just whispered
back in his ear
no thanks

o my mind
I asked
where have you gone?

I turned into wine
he answered back
how can I behave
like a grape anymore?

burn your soul and put its ashes
on your eyes as a salve

blindness will disappear from the world

souls enter sema
and turn into honey bees

they swarm around the honey
that’s never been tasted

we’re moving and dancing
like a flag on your wind

I’m going to the place
where I disappear completely

the clouds cleared away from your face

the sky split apart into layers
and shone like moonlight
through all the windows

the light became stronger
it broke all the souls into pieces

souls started dancing
particle by particle
in front of the sun
flying around everywhere
saying
what will be will be

the dome of the sky keeps turning
but the skies of love whirl much faster

the whirling sky turns only for lovers
so get up and join in
let’s start turning!

ours is the path
of joy and pleasure
music and dance
not stillness
not denial

the only one who benefits
from a pearl dropped on the road
is the one who takes the journey

the one who doesn’t
turn around that pearl
will have nothing

spring has given
the call to prayer

get up and come to the garden!

listen for the voices
in the tulips and the mountain

learn how to dance
from the branches of the trees

love keeps changing inside us
into so many different shapes and forms

every moment
a different feeling
wants to pass through your heart
but your body’s become frozen
and turned into stone

until you understand
the patterns in your heart
you won’t really be able to move

an amazing dance is going on
from the bottom of the earth
to the top of the sky

once you’ve become a stream of particles
don’t go and become a mountain again

even the whirling sky
became jealous of our turning

because this is the real thing
the other’s just a shell

this is the real light
the other’s just a small fire

my friend
it’s time for sema
time to get up and jump

you’ve been asleep on a boat
for a thousand nights;
open your sail
and get up and jump

the heavy feeling in your head
made you sleep a long time
but they woke you up
so get up and jump

o flying thoughts
keep flying
keep jumping right through
this bewildered body!

come to your senses
the sufi is the child of the moment
forget about last year and next year and jump

it pays to be generous
when doing business with god
because love weighs more
than the whole steel yard
get up and jump!

get up and jump
like the waves of the sea
roaring with love
because pearls are being spread at their feet

if you’re feeling run-down
like straight, limp hair
parted in the middle
then jump up
like the springing curls in the hair of the beloved

for way too long
you’ve been lied to and bullied;
why don’t you jump right out
of this mean old world?

I get involved too much in making rhymes
so shhhhh. . .
let’s jump together
without any words this time

it doesn’t matter
how the branch moves

as long as it moves
it means there’s a breeze

o branch
don’t think you have to move
this way or that way
and don’t try to run away either

don’t you know
that the only guidance you’ll ever need
comes from the wind?

one particle says to another:
how long are we going to fly in the air?

only your beautiful hand knows

weather changes
in hundreds of ways
from dawn to dusk;
in every shape it takes
it whirls and dances for you

even if you can’t see the air moving
you can still watch the trees
and see the souls dancing around god

we’ve learned our melodies
from the revolving spheres

the song of the spheres
is what we sing with our voice
and play on our strings

as we’re all members
of the family of adam
we’ve all heard these melodies in paradise
and even though we’re now covered
in earth and water
we still have faint memories
of those songs of heaven

but while we’re covered up
in these earthly clothes
how can the tones of the dancing spheres reach us?
and so it is
that listening to music is lovers’ food
because it reminds them
of their union with god

even if your beloved turns into a fire
jump into it anyway and keep burning

burn up like a candle and melt

a divine dance appears in the soul and the body
at the time of peace and union

anyone can learn this dance

just listen to the music

without your blessing
no one
not even the embryo inside the womb
would move

it’s not just the movement
in the womb or in ecstasy

even the bones in the grave
dance with your radiance

we dance so much to the tunes of this world
come on friends
get ready for the dance in the other world

souls move around
with these rough coarse covers
once they throw off those heavy covers
then watch how they dance!

before we were born
we kept kicking and moving
in the darkness of the womb
just to express our heartfelt thanks

we are all sufis
who came dancing from the dervish convent
to give thanks for these blessings