A Sufi Reminder for Anxious Jews
For a number of years now, I have been an occasional guest at a Sufi community based here in New York City. It is led by a radiant woman, Sheykha Fariha Fatima, and her disciples come together (through Zoom these days) to recite over and over again the names of God, to connect in to the Source of love and compassion through repetitive voice and movement. The Arabic is close enough to the Hebrew for me to understand the meaning: La illaha ill’allah – There is only God. There is only God. Jewish sages might use different words (Perhaps Eyn od milvado – there is nothing but God) but mystics recognize the kindred spirit in one another.
I am thinking about this because there is something extremely grounding and stabilizing about using words as the basis of meditation and many of us are yearning for a little extra grounding and stability these days. Like many mindfulness teachers, I love RAIN, the acronym initially developed by Michele McDonald, as a way of sitting with difficult emotions like anxiety and grief. There are different versions of RAIN, but the one I use begins with Recognizing what emotion is present. Then I can Allow it to be present, not to push or explain it away. The next step is to Investigate it. This is the step that often trips up beginners who investigate the story that explains the emotion. But Investigate means explore the experience of the emotion. What is it like? Where do I feel it in the body? And finally, Non-Identification, which means that I remind myself that this emotion is just a human experience that happens to be coming up in me right now and doesn’t mean anything in particular about who I am in the world.
This practice is an extremely fruitful one – particularly when the mind and body can access some stability. But what if they can’t?
This is when the use of words or phrases can be so helpful. Sometimes the skillful thing to do is to move towards proactively creating a sense of groundedness. This can be as simple as counting the breath (one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four) or labeling the breath (inbreath, outbreath, inbreath, outbreath). The repetition creates a rhythm, a heartbeat, a lullaby that can help a distraught mind find a little ease.
But what is beautiful about the Sufi practice is that the repetition of words is not just about soothing. It is about seeding the heart with the remembrance of God. In fact, the name of the chanting ritual is dhikr, which shares a root with the Hebrew zachar – remember. Remember, the chant tells us, this is all God, all of it! You can relax a little. You are actually not the one in control.
Perhaps the closest we have to this in the Jewish tradition is Ein Keloheinu, the repetitive declaration that there is none like our God, that can be found at the end of morning service. I learned recently that it was originally used as a chant, recited over and over again, to create a different state of consciousness. Instead of the hearty tune in 4/4 time, sung in a rush to get to kiddush, it was an intentionally focused practice of deeply remembering God’s pervasive presence through all things.
It goes without saying (but I’ll say it anyway) that I am not proposing a “spiritual bypass,” of blissing out on God as a way of avoiding the difficulties we are experiencing. But in my experience, both are true: the anxiety and the pervasive Presence, the grief and the Source of love and compassion. When the anxiety and grief prevent me from connecting to this aspect of reality, I have tools to help me remember. And that is a blessing for dark times.