My name is Mahdiah Jacobs Kahn and I am a Shafayat in the Sufi Healing Order. I also serve as a Senior Teacher in the Sufi Order where I teach classes and workshops and guide spiritual practices for initiates. I am a retreat guide and lead both group and individual retreats for healing and transformation.

I am a psychotherapist in Private practice in Mill Valley, California and have been practicing for 34 years. I was graduated from the New York University Graduate School of Social Work in 1966 and did one year of my internship at Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital in New York. I am a survivor of both a near death experience and breast cancer. The former was my spiritual opening and the latter a major transformer of both my consciousness and my life.

I am used to teaching classes in real time and people responding and sharing their experiences with the teachings and practices. The subject for this month is an enormous one and part of how we focus on it will be determined by your responses. So please share your experiences, thoughts and questions.

Let's begin with the Sufi invocation:

Toward the One, the Perfection of Love, Harmony and Beauty; the Only Being, united with all the Illuminated Souls who form the embodiment of the Master, The Spirit of Guidance.

Practice

Take a moment to become present to yourself. Sense your body and feel if there is anyplace that hurts. If there is, be present to that pain and see what happens when you sit with it. If there are places that you can not feel, focus on them and see what happens when you become present to your numbness. Now take a moment to see what emotions you are feeling. If there is an absence of feeling stay present with it and see where it takes you. Next, check your thoughts. Is you mind clear or do you need to sit quietly for a while to slow down your thinking? Now focus on your heart. First in the left breast until you feel the pulse in there and then gently direct your breath to that pulse and imagine that you are blowing on that pulse in order to strengthen it. When you have a good strong pulse going let go and be present in that breast to see what is going on. Do the same on the right side and then in the center of your chest. Next focus on your sense of connection or lack of it to yourself and others. What are your relationships with others like at this time? Do you feel connected to life? to your particular life? What is the state of your spirit? Do you feel a connection to God and to Life? This is a practice that will take awhile. When it is finished reflect on how present you feel now in all five of your bodies. The physical, mental, moral ( which has to do with connection to others), emotional and spiritual. Illness can occur in any one or all of these bodies. Illness functions as a stop sign and often forces us to stop what we are doing and to pay attention to ourselves. Sometimes it means spending a week in bed to get over a flu or cold. Sometimes, it disrupts our lives for months or years. Serious or life threatening illness changes the way we see life and live it. Hazrat Inayat Khan defines initiation as a step in a new direction - one that is unknown.

In this respect, serious illness is an initiation into a new way of Being and Living.

Hazrat Inayat Khan defines illness in several ways but under all of them he says " Every illness apparently has a peculiar reason, but in reality all illnesses come from one reason, or cause, or condition, which is absence of life, the lack of life. Life is health: its absence if illness, which culminates in what we call death.".

The five bodies are from the teachings of Hazrat Inayat Khan and are in the Education volume as well as in the Healing volume. Some of you have been doing this practice for awhile and it was new to others. I asked people to do the practice before reading the teaching so that you would be as present as possible. Ramana, I hope that your flu is better but you were able to illustrate an important point which is that when we become ill, we are unable to go about our lives in the usual way. It is a time when we stop because we have no choice. Hayra, thank you for sharing your recent difficulties. One of the functions of a depression is that it forces us to turn inward and if we don't it gets worse and eventually stops us. So illness offers us an opportunity, often an unwelcome one to look inside and to take stock of our lives. My experience is that we try not to stay with the illness but begin to look outside ourselves for cures. In order for an illness to become an opening, we need to be present to it and to explore what it is trying to teach us about our bodies, feelings, relationships, minds and souls. It is in being present that we are able to know where there is life and where there is the absence of life. I hope that you will continue to do this practice and take it a step further. Jalil mentioned that he is not always able to differentiate among the bodies. While they are all connected and essentially one, I find that the more we are able to differentiate among them, the clearer we become. The Buddhists define enlightenment as clarity and emptiness. I sometimes find that my initial experience of my body is of clarity and space and that if I remain present to it I sometimes find pain at deeper layers, sometimes my bones hurt and then they begin to become softer and have more movement. I have been doing this practice for many years and have found it invaluable in time of illness.

Hazrat Inayat Khan tells us that there is an enormous power in presence. In being present to your five bodies you may have noticed in one or another of your bodies, your attention begins to drift off. Knowing where you cut off your awareness of presence can help you know where you stand in your own way. We all do this at one time or another. Some of the common ways that obscure awareness that I have noticed in myself and others are through getting stuck in ideas, in feelings or in states of consciousness. Pir Vilayat has talked about a period of being hooked on Samadhi.

Several of you who wrote responses to the last class indicated that your experience changes every time you do this practice. That is my experience as well. If we stay present things move. If we fight against presence things stagnate. Where there is movement, there is life and where there is no movement there is no life and therefore illness.

Murshid says that there are many causes of illness and that the underlying cause of all illness is a lack of life.

I would now like to explore the various causes that he teaches us about as I believe that they can help us in our journey to transformation.

This path is one that stresses balance and Hazrat Inayat Khan tells us that we need to maintain a balance between activity and repose to maintain a certain rhythm. If this rhythm is not maintained then the breath is not secure either. A lack of balance is a major cause of illness.

Meditate on the balance in your life. Is there a balance between activity and repose? When was the last time you took a day off and did nothing or meditated? When was your last retreat? do you listen to you body when it says rest or stop or do you keep pushing?

He also tells us that illness is always caused by " the withdrawal of the soul to a certain extent from the body , or by the incapacity of the body to a certain extent to hold the light of the soul.". Many of us on the spiritual path ignore our bodies until they force us to pay attention to them. It is a disharmony between the body and soul that causes illness.

Meditate on the relationship between your soul and your body. Are you present in both or in just one? Are they in Harmony?

We can also become identified with our illness and hold onto it by dwelling on it and then defining who we are by it, e.g. I am a cancer survivor or I am an alcoholic. Who we are is not an illness but a Being that has contracted an illness. If we define ourselves by an illness we take on a false identity and strengthen the nafs.

Meditate on who you really are and how you define yourself. Are you identified with an illness? Be present with that identity if it is there. See what happens when you are present to it. I do some work for a cancer organization. Most of the women are breast cancer survivors. Some of them introduce themselves as survivors and cancer has become an identity instead of a disease.

Fear can also cause illness. The more we are afraid of getting an illness, the more we are held to the illness. This is particularly tricky with chronic illnesses. Meditate on whether or not you carry fear and what is it you are fearful of. In serious illnesses the fear is often of reoccurrence of the illness or of death. Inquire into your fear. Fear is powerful glue. If you are in touch with your fear see how it impacts your mind and your body. Then watch what it does to your breath.

The causes of illness are myriad and I don't want to overload people.

Practice

Look at whether or not your various bodies are in harmony with one another or if you are more present in on or another of them.

In the first class I stated that Murshid says that underlying all of the various causes of illness there is one cause - the lack of life. In Sanskrit the word for life "in its physical form , as perceived throughout the physical spheres", is prana. "This life is given by food or medicine - or the body is prepared by a certain food or medicine to be able to breathe in this life itself, in order that it may be in better health, that it may experience perfect health. It is also the word for breath. Murshid goes on to tell us that " this prana, which means breath-the central breath- attracts from space all of the different elements which are there, as herbs, plants, flowers, and fruits all attract from space the same element which they represent. The breath attracts all these elements. " All mystics have taught breath as a basic part of spiritual practice. they have taught " breath as the basis of spiritual evolution, and the source of all healing was the science of breath.".

All illness comes from a lack of life and disease is attracted by the breath.

So, now I am going to ask you to become present to your breath. Relax your muscles and begin to pay attention - be present to your breath. Are you breathing more through one nostril than another. This will let you know whether or not your breath is more receptive (the left nostril) or active (the right nostril). Pay attention to what happens when you watch your breath. Does your breath go into your belly or does it stop at the chest or the solar plexus. I have found that abuse survivors often hold their breath or have their breath cut off at the solar plexus. Don't do anything or change anything, just watch. When you are fully present to your breath be present in your body and allow your breath to fill your entire body. Sense your organs and direct your breath to any part of your body that seems sluggish or lifeless. when you finish the practice see how your body feels and then be present to your mind. Is it different than when you started.

We do many breathing practices but consciousness of the breath is basic to all of them. I have had pneumonia a number of times. I did the purification breaths during one bout of it and I healed from it twice as fast. It could have been a number of other things but I think it was the breath. Murshid says that "Psychologists will some day come to realize that for all illnesses and disorders of the mind the way of breathing is also the best remedy." It is the breath that infuses and changes consciousness.

This class is about illness as a transformative experience. Murshid tells us that initiation is moving in a new direction, one which is unknown.

"Sometimes this initiation comes after great illness, pain or suffering. It comes as an opening up of the horizon, it comes as a flash of light, and in a moment the seems transformed. It is not the world that has changed; it is that the person has become tuned to a different pitch. He begins to think differently, see and act differently; his whole condition begins to change. One might say that from that moment he begins to live. "

I had a near death experience many years ago and it was my spiritual opening. I had breast cancer five years ago and it transformed me. I have heard cancer patients express gratitude to the cancer that taught them how to live. I feel deep gratitude to this illness. It took me a long time to get to this place and God and I had many angry dialogues along the way. My experience was that being present to all of it opened the doors to the best and the worst-to a total experience of both the human and the Divine. I would not choose illness as a transformative agent just as I would not choose an accident as a transformative agent. However, in life we don't always choose how we do it.

All we can do is surrender to what is and use it to expand, grow and ultimately to become more loving and compassionate. I spent a year meditating on the phrase "Bless all that we receive in thankfulness." It took a long time for me to embrace that fully. I'm not always grateful for what God sends while it is happening but God has never led me astray.

I would appreciate hearing from you about your experiences with the practices and with your own illness as a vehicle for transformation. I think we all learn from sharing our human condition.