Beloved Family,
Hope this reaches you all in good health and spirit!
Those of us in the US especially feel the precarious and important moment in our history with the upcoming elections, the change to our Supreme Court, along with the light shining on racial, gender, religious and income inequality, and the clarion call to slow down the abuse to our environment. All this in the midst of a pandemic affecting the whole world.
I believe this implores us all to connect with our potential for contribution through a compassionate heart and an easeful swing of the breath amplified by steady daily practice.
HAPPY 124th BIRTHDAY Murshid Sam, born October 18, 1896. Dearest Murshid, we are so deeply grateful for the Umbrella of your Protection and Guidance to each of us, our Ruhaniat family and all sentient beings.
Recognizing the lack of physical affection many of us experience in the pandemic I suggest we practice wazifas from the Love Family this month.
And for our next text, I invite you all to an amazing history lesson of Hazrat Inayat Khan’s life and teaching in the words of Pir Zia Inayat Khan written as his Doctoral Dissertation. It starts a little slow by presenting the milieu of the time just before Inayat’s arrival to the West and from then on is an engaging and thorough detailed account. Hope you can make a commitment to read it through.
With all love and gratitude,
Shabda
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Wazifa Practice
Recite 101x
YA RA'UF ~ YA RAHIM
Ya Ra'uf 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 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 deep within.
To hear the pronunciation: Ya Ra'uf ~ Ya Rahim
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Text and Commentary to Study
This month we begin reading A HYBRID SUFI ORDER AT THE CROSSROADS OF MODERNITY: THE SUFI ORDER AND SUFI MOVEMENT OF PIR-O-MURSHID INAYAT KHAN, by Pir Zia Inayat-Khan
Read chapters 1- 3, pages 1-118
Click to download
Life and Times of Hazrat Inayat Kahn Part A
Life and Times of Hazrat Inayat Kahn Part B
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PHOTOS
Peregrine Falcon
Juvenile Green Heron
Red-Tailed Hawk
Northern Harrier
Northern Harrier in flight
Western Bluebird
Black-necked Stilts
Male Mallard
Ring-billed Gull
Brown Pelican
Coopers Hawk, a frequent visitor to our backyard
Juvenile Coopers Hawk also visiting our backyard
Northern Flicker in our green paradise