August 2018 Message

Beloved Family,

We make prayers for all the folks being affected by the California fires. Luckily the closest ones to us are about two hours drive and we have little or no smoke in the air. Every morning I have been singing the rain raga - Raga Mian Ki Mulhar

During these warm days I have been enjoying my morning practices sitting outside in our backyard paradise! And this morning a new bird I hadn’t seen before showed up ~ a Western Tanager! (see pic below)

We have also begun harvesting and canning some of the generosity of our vegetable garden.

Looking forward to the Santa Cruz Sufi Camp next weekend and then Ecuador in the beginning of September. And toward the end of the month I will be in Asheville.

Then we have our Mureeds Retreat by the ocean at the Marin Headlands in October.

For our next wazifa practice, I suggest we take up some of the wazifas from the love family. These can help us make friends with some of the closet doors we tend to keep shut and never open. Naturally it takes strength to tolerate the awareness of our own frailty but these love wazifas are great at opening the door and helping with the cleanup and transformation.

Enjoy the last part of the summer months.

Much love, Shabda

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Wazifa Practice - Recite 101x YA RA'UF ~ YA RAHIM

Ya Ra'uf (yaa ra-ʻOOF) is a quiet, gentle in-dwelling love that nevertheless actively penetrates to the deepest and most profound place. It goes right to the essence of being human, and it helps to heal the crucial problem of our narcissistic self-identification with our perceived deficiencies and shortcomings.

Ya Rahim (yaa ra-ḤEEM) is the inner element of divine love, which penetrates into the depth of all beings and all things.

Ya Raʼuf is an invocation of quiet, gentle, profound love. One of the ways to understand ar-Raʼuf is to compare it to ar-Rahim, with which it is close in meaning. Nine of the 11 times that ar-Raʼuf occurs in the Qurʼan, it is paired with ar-Rahim to describe Allah. These divine names are close in meaning, but the sound-code embedded in the Arabic language helps to distinguish them. The sound-code makes ar-Rahim omnipresent; it spreads into every particular thing without exception. It has a very immanent quality. The sound-code for ar-Raʼuf reveals it to be a kind of love that emphasizes a deep, deep penetration into the core of being, into essence.

So Ya Ra'uf touches the deepest wounds there are. It goes to the place within you where there are sensitive hurts and wounds that you have lived your whole life defending from being touched. But this simple love can reach it. It is so quiet that it can penetrate the armor. It is even subtler than what we generally understand by compassion. It is a gentle perfume.

Ya Rahim is an antidote for beings who feel abandoned by God and who badly need to feel the healing activity of divine love reaching them deeply within.

To hear the pronunciation: Ya Ra'uf ~ Ya Rahim

TEXT and COMMENTARY to STUDY

This month we will finish studying an original Sangatha by Murshid Samuel Lewis (Sufi Ahmed Murad Chisti), Fana-fi-Sheikh. Read and contemplate the last 50 (#101-150), pages 13-19. Click here to download the document.

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