Sufi Whirling

17 Jul Sufi Whirling

I practiced whirling when I lived in India. Every day at noon, the erotic, evocative music would enliven the meditation hall where the regulars and the beginners like me would gather. There was no formal instruction, and no one cared about doing it the “right” way – it was more important in that ashram to find your own way with things.

I began hesitantly because I’d always suffered from motion sickness in cars and on merry-go-rounds. As I began, I first learned not to eat before practice and soon discovered that the thought “I’m nauseous” preceded the feeling of being so. And that thought “I’m nauseous” was merely thinking, and I didn’t need to attend to it. I also saw that the thought, “Oh, no, I’m going to fall” would cause me to lose my balance, and that I would not lose my balance if I did not have that thought. In fact, as I progressed, I learned not to think at all.

One night when there was a special whirling event with live musicians, the whirling took over. It happened by itself – I was no longer doing. In the center of the whirling I sunk into an exquisite silent center around which I revolved. I felt myself to be the nucleus in the atom, and I saw (long before I heard the man articulate it in the class video) that everything in the universe is whirling which is whirling around something else, and that we as participants were replicating the divine order of things. A great surrender was necessary, a surrender to the movement, a quiet stillness, an ecstatic joy.

The somatic principles that came to bear were that of balance, grounding, interoception, exteroception, and proprioception. Balance had to be maintained by careful awareness and lack of thought. One had to learn how to ground one’s feet while spinning, and how to place them to facilitate the flowing movement. The exteroception was intensely enjoyable: listening to the music, seeing the other people whirling, feeling their presence. The awareness of where the body was in space, or proprioception, was essential so as not to whirl into someone else’s orbit. And the interoception of the joy inside grew and grew.

During the readings for class, I experienced ontological shock when I realized how malignantly sexist the Sufi religion is. I had assumed, with little knowledge other than reading a few Rumi poems, that the Sufis were egalitarian and in awe of sexual love. I was both glad and sad to be set right in this regard. I was surprised that the author did not make much of the trance states that are induced by Sufi practices and was intrigued by Eliade’s explanation.

© 2024 Catherine Auman

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