Songs of One Breath is a weekly online space with Jilani Cordelia Prescott to explore the direct, joyful experience of mysticism through practice. Each Friday she shares chants, mantra, breath practices and body prayer drawn from a range of traditions, offered as grounding, comfort, and a pathway of the heart toward deeper connection and spiritual freedom. You are warmly invited to join live on Zoom (or via Facebook Live) at 2.30pm London time, and it is free. If you enjoy the class or the podcast, and would like to support Jilani’s work, donations are welcome via PayPal.
Thought draws the line of fate.– Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Commentary by Murshid Samuel L. Lewis (Sufi Ahmed Murad Chisti):
This is true not only in prayer but in all things. Every exhalation sends something out, and every inhalation draws something in. That which is expelled carries a message, as a flying dove going upward. As soon as another thought is received into the mind, it impedes the upward journey of that breath-message. When any act, thought, speech, or desire strikes the mind-mesh, it is propelled downward toward the earth plane and brings with it the results of a movement which is at the same time personal and individual, and also cosmic, in the sense that the whole sphere endeavors to keep its balance and sends back the compensatory vibrations to those sent out by us.
To overcome this action, Fikr is practiced in some form. In daily Fikr or Darood, when a thought is accompanied by a Divine Breath it can automatically arise through the meshes of the mental net and pass through Djabrut to the Arsh, the throne of God. That is to say, the automatic wish of the average person can rise no higher than the thought or will behind it, but for the spiritual person, the initiate, whose thought and desire are accompanied by Darood, these automatically rise above the mental world into the empyrean unless another thought deliberately interferes. Practice of concentration with Fikr perfects this process.