Short Reflections 7 - And The Fire Goes Out

The picture is of Irina Tweedie, who had a Sufi Teacher in India. She wrote a memoir of the experience called Daughter of Fire, and there is an abridged version called Chasm of Fire.

Moving to Australia sacrificed pretty much everything: my relationship with a partner, my family whom are in the US, any financial independence as my savings were gone and my skills useless when I arrived (my first degree was in Arabic...). I was 25 at the time, and in so many ways it was like starting over. At the time I didn't care - I was so desperate to stop suffering, and my heart and mind were so completely committed to that end, that it felt like being on fire.

So I practiced with my new teacher Linda...a lot. At the time she had retreats every month, and I went to all of them. I sat formally at least a couple hours a day. A family from meditation ended up taking me in and offered me a place to stay - room and board for $80 a week. I slept on a sofa bed with a piece of plywood underneath, and worked under the table in a little cafe. I biked to work because I couldn't afford a car. I MacGyvered my way into visa after visa with immigration.

The love that drove me seemed to make all else fall into place. If I was a couple hundred short for a retreat, someone would offer me a bit of work. If I needed more time off for yet another retreat, my work just let me have it (turns out the owners were Buddhists and thought it was good karma to let me go!)

Gradually though, that fire in me began to dwindle. It wasn't that I loved meditation or sitting less. It was that the person who was on fire was being consumed by it. No flame without fuel.

The Sufi tradition talks about the differences in spiritual practice between the Ecstatic, and the Sober. Early in my life I'd always loved the ecstatic, and felt this was the true path; basically I didn't understand what the sober ones were saying. And whether or not I liked it, one day after a year and a bit, that exasperating fire of love and longing went out.

It felt like a great loss: I'd thought I'd given everything I could to this process, only to feel abandoned by it. I was ashamed that I wasn't able to feel what I used to, and thought I had failed somehow but I couldn't understand why. To look at your life as come to naught...it was devastating...I still remember feeling like all had turned to ash.

For awhile I struggled to reclaim the certitude of that love and burning, but honestly couldn't. In essence, I sought to hold on to what I thought the spiritual life was, what I had known. But the clarity of my teacher slowly showed me there was more, and deeper, less ecstatic, simpler. With the passing of the ecstatic came another kind of love: a whisper, a gentle flame.

Looking back now I can see I was passing from one stage to the next; a major piece of who I thought I was falling away, and that took time to integrate and make sense. Linda was always telling me to be patient. I'm still working on that one.