I will be teaching at the Sacred Arts Community Camp from Friday 26th May to Saturday 3rd June, 2023.
Something to offer all ages, this family camp in the Chiltern Hills will nurture and inspire you.
* Camping in circles around a fire * Community * Friendship * Dancing * Singing * * Creativity * Meditaion * Yoga * Tai-Chi * Storytelling * Sports & Games * Nature * * Activities for children & teens * Acustic music * Cafe * Shop * Alcohol & Drug free *
I met the Dances through the camps, and Sacred Arts Camp has been an important part of my life since it first came into being. It’s the community where my children have been held as they grew from birth to adulthood, and where I have been held in my own growth and development over these many years.
I now lead Dances in many far-flung places, most recently having spent a month in Morocco supporting the Dances in new circles there, but it’s always such a joy to be back at SAC, and I look forward to dancing with you in the field.
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.
As we approach the festivals of Passover and Easter, which both fall during the holy month of Ramadan this year, I’m reflecting on all the powerful and beautiful potential for peace and justice which could be our focus at this time, if we choose. Let us remember our similarities more than our differences.
The following prayer, authored by Christian, Jewish and Muslim clergy was used in many places in inter-religious worships around the time of the Gulf War in 1991:
Eternal God, Goddess, Source, Creator of the universe, there is no God but You. Great and wonderful are Your works, wondrous are your ways. Thank You for the many splendoured variety of Your creation. Thank You for the many ways we affirm Your presence and purpose, and the freedom to do so. Forgive our violation of Your creation. Forgive our violence toward each other. We stand in awe and gratitude for Your persistent love for each and all of Your children: Christian, Jew, Muslim, as well as those with other faiths.Grant to all and our leaders attributes of the strong; mutual respect in words and deed, restraint in the exercise of power, and the will for peace with justice, for all. Eternal God, Goddess, Source, Creator of the universe, there is no God but You. Amen.
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.
Our soul is blessed with the impression of the glory of God whenever our lips praise God.– Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Commentary by Murshid Samuel L. Lewis (Sufi Ahmed Murad Chisti):
This praise is the one thing which surely pierces the mind-mesh. In the first place, the praise we give to God is the one praise for which we cannot possibly expect return; this lack of expectancy of return shows unselfishness, and unselfishness is the one thing that blesses the soul.
I will be taking a group to Morocco again from 4-11 February 2023, with my beloved Sufi guide Muiz Brinkerhoff. We’ll be visiting the beautiful new eco-lodge, La Maison Anglaise, in Taroudant. I was lucky enough to be one of their first visitors when they opened, just before the pandemic, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s comfortable and beautiful, as well as innovative and inspiring. Bookings are going well, but there are still spaces, and flights are very reasonable at this point. You can read more by following this link: https://cecu.co.uk/br230204/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Aad Guray Nameh Jugaad Guray Nameh Sat Guray Nameh Siri Guru Devay Nameh I bow to the Primal Guru I bow to the Guru woven throughout time I bow to the True Guru I bow to the Great Guru hidden within
Meditation from ‘A Book of Self Re-Education’ by Raden Ayou Jodjana
Om Mani Peme Hung – To be the Jewel in the Lotus Flower unfolding in the Heart of All, To be the Jewel in the Lotus Flower unfolding is the highest call!
TEAR DOWN THIS HOUSE Rumi as translated by Coleman Barks
A hundred thousand new houses can be built from the transparent yellow carnelian* buried beneath and the only way to get to that is to do the work of demolishing and then digging under the foundation.
With that value in hand, all the new construction will be done without effort. And anyway, sooner or later this house will fall on its own. The jewel treasure will be uncovered, but it won’t be yours then.
The buried wealth is your pay for doing the demolition, the pick and the shovel work. If you wait and just let it happen, you’ll bite your hand and say, “I didn’t do as I knew I should have.”
This is a rented house. You don’t own the deed. You have a lease, and you’ve set up a little shop, where you barely make a living sewing patches on torn clothing.
Yet only a few feet underneath are two veins, pure red and bright gold carnelian. Take the pickaxe and pry the foundation. You’ve got to quit this seamstress work.
What does the patch-sewing mean you ask? Eating and drinking. The heavy cloak of the body is always getting torn. You patch it with food and other restless ego satisfactions.
Rip up one board from the shop floor and look into the basement. You’ll see two glints in the dirt.
*carnelian- a pale to deep red or reddish brown variety of quartz with distinctive crystals arranged in slender fibers in parallel bands used in jewelry, a mystical stone.
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.
