In this series, I’m going to be talking about Sufism a lot because this is very close to my heart. I’m a Dances of Universal Peace teacher and a Sufi student of various different Sufi teachers, and I just love the heart sense of Sufism. But so often, it becomes ungrounded.
As I work through this series, I’m going to be using electrical analogies because we are alive, right? Life itself is electricity. Our brains are electric— I don’t know how, inside all that mush, but somehow in there, electricity fires between neurons, and that seems to have something to do with our thinking.
So, we’re full of electricity.
One of the things that paramedics do if your heart stops is they shock you. With enough shocks, you can get the heart going again and get the person back alive. Electricity runs through us, and thoughts follow the way that electricity works as well.
If we’re ungrounded, then we’re constantly drifting off into forgetfulness, or into ecstasy, or drifting off into critical thinking and losing ourselves. That’s not our natural awake self. The awake self is grounded into the nothingness of being, which is a real thing, and I’m going to attempt to show you that.
Sufi practice can be grounded. Nondual practice can be grounded. Buddhist practice can be grounded. One thing that can ground us is realizing that we belong here. That’s the first thing that’s going to ground you. Once you ground into that reality, your whole sense of where you’re going as a spiritual person changes.
You’re coming home…and you’re actually sitting in your living room. Open your eyes, grounded.
Now, don’t get me wrong, we can still go off into vacations of ecstasy, and we can still sit down and get the work done that’s necessary to be done with our critical intelligence. But if we keep everything grounded in the reality of being, of who we are, then we open up avenues of being and living and relating that weren’t there before.
So, the grounded Sufi, the grounded is fully in this earth. Grounded while you pray, grounded while you dance, always knowing who you are. This is what we want. This is it. This is me. This is you.