Practice
Two Suggested Daily Ziraat Practices
Elemental Purification Breaths From the Sufi tradition as originally taught by Pir-o-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan. The Sacred Manuscript of Nature A suggested daily Ziraat practice is to find time every day to be in the Holy Book of na…
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Ziraat is our Antidote to Falsehood
By Ata’allah Bill Meacham Deceit pervades our world today. That’s worrisome, but our practices and especially our community can help us discern truth amidst the miasma of falsehood that surrounds us. Case in point: so-called artificial …
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Walking Practice
By Mana'ar Johnson To fly abroad like active bees, Among the hedges and the trees, To cull the dew that lies On ev’ry blade, From ev’ry blossom; till we lade Our minds, as they their thighs. What a fine metaphor! Just as th…
Read moreHealing Breaths Attuned to the Living Elements
By Ananda Cronin This is a practice to embody HIK’s Elemental Breaths as a modality for Healing. As Murshid Sam says, “One can spiritualize any breath by placing a name of God upon it.” Video: Healing Breaths Attuned to the Living Eleme…
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The Spiritual Dimensions of Local Wildlife Tracking
By Richard McMurtry The alarm rings in the darkness of the early morning. I hesitate a moment, then slide out of bed realizing that failure to do so will result in my being late. And then I will need to track down the trackers, rather tha…
Read moreMeditating With Trees to Unveil Truth
By Chanda Shannon Gorres In the small Midwestern town where I grew up, the human population was 98% white. The lawns around the houses were 98% impeccably mowed grass, with a flower or two here and there. Surrounding the town were 98% cor…
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Guidance From The Garden - Patient Love
By Maboud Charles Swierkosz Throughout the winter season I sit outside in the early morning hours under the portal and engage in practices of prayer, breath, elemental centering within the body and the world around me. Being outside in th…
Read moreEarth Art Meditations
By PamAllah Dussault How lovely is a walk in the woods….. with the wind river sound through the tree tops, the shades of color and textures and scents along the way. Being embraced by the quiet, rooted nature of the tree people. An…
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Nature Devotion Practice
By Mirabai WolfWillow It started with a wonder. It always starts with wonder. I wonder what would happen if I befriended some aspect of nature, took it into my consciousness and followed it daily through four seasons to see what it would …
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Everyday Acts of Practical Reverence
By Betty Lou Chaika www.earthsanctuaries.net In Braiding Sweetgrass , Robin Wall Kimmerer says, “One of our responsibilities as human people is to find ways to enter into reciprocity with the more-than-human world. We can do it through g…
Read moreDeep Ecology
by Aatoon Nina Massey Prayer to Mother Earth Breathe in your light, Breathe out love for you. Let me walk in rhythm With your heartbeat, Great Mother. I walk by this tree At the top of my favorite hill A long path I w…
Read morePath of Gardening
The Path of Gardening in the Alchemy of the Heart: Clearing, Weeding, Composting the Unwanted (Turning Poison into Medicine), Watering (Bestowing the Blessing), and Harvesting: Path of Gardening
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The 2019 Spring Renewal Retreat at Jamanee Gunya
by Arjuna ‘Towards the one, united with all!’ Murshid SAM used to say quite often ‘One of the purposes of the Sufi Message is to restore not the “ancient” but the eternal mysteries.’ Perhaps one aspect of the Ziraat work will be to resu…
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Mother’s Day Ceremony
By Hakima Betty Lou Chaika For her Mother’s Day Ziraat Retreat in Ashville, NC, Darvesha asked me to make an ending ritual as a seal on our intentions to reciprocate with Earth, and as an empowerment for the participants to go forth to ce…
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Reflections on the Bulwalwanga Ran Festival!
By Arjuna Welcome to our inaugural Bulwalwanga Ran Festival! ‘Bulwalwanga Ran’ in Dhurga language of the Yuin Nation of the South Coast of NSW means ‘we are strong you all.’ Our festival is about celebrating indigenous and other world w…
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Going Home/Green Burial
By Bodhi Be Going home is a phrase I often hear at the bedside of the dying. While I understand the sentiments, these words have deep implications. Do they mean that this is not our home, here on Earth? Does it follow the transcendent vie…
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An Earth-Based Ceremony in Ireland
by Hakima Betty Lou Chaika A DUP dance, a memorial sculpture, Native Americans, Irish people, Ancestors, Nature-Spirit, and a humble ceremony. How do these all come together? Here's the story: Two of our beloved Dances of Universal Peac…
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Murshida Vera Corda on Ziraat
Ziraat is an inter-faced message. The outer fabric weaves a too brief outline with harvesting the fruits of the earth. The interfacing is the cultivating of the soul by individual workers under Allah's all-seeing eye. Ziraat enables the ini…
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Ziraat and Bayat by Saadi Neil Douglas Klotz
A Note about our Current Transition In the Sufi world, various types of ‘taking hand’ have taken place over the centuries. In the Hazrat Inayat Khan family, we sometimes group all of these together under the word ‘initiation,’ but this ca…
Read moreA Ziraat Experience, Perspective and Dream by Saraswati (Andrea Burke)
"There is one Holy Book, the sacred manuscript of nature, the only scripture which can enlighten the reader." Hazrat Inayat Khan Experience In the early 90s I learned about the Ziraat concentration from Vakil Forest Shomer at a retreat …
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Walking Your Talk with Ziraat by Saladin Frank Pelfrey
WALKING YOUR TALK WITH ZIRAAT In Thy nature I feel Thy presence (HIK) Hazrat Inayat Khan wrote these words as a meditation. This meditation is just one of many in a small book called Nature Meditations. The meditations are used in conjunc…
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The Wisdom of the Cross-Quarters by Ata’Allah Bill Meacham
The ancients were more in touch with the rhythms of nature than we in modern industrialized societies are today. They didn't know as much as we do about the details—we get better predictions and control from chemistry and physics than they …
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