/May Message 2026
Beloved Family, A week after returning from Türkiye and Tunisia I travelled to Portland for the Annual Ruhaniat Jamiat Aam. In 1973 Wali Ali, Shirin and I traveled to Portland as one of the first places the then San Francisco Bay area-centric Ruhaniat made its first outreach. I was touched that many of the attendees at the Jamiat Aam were mureeds from that early time and it shows that Portland is likely the oldest Ruhaniat community after the Bay area. |
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| It was beautifully organized by the local team at a lovely retreat center, with over 101 attendees. My teaching colleagues were Munira Reed and Amina Meyer, with special guest Yasmin Spiegel - all pictured below. |
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| I was especially moved by the beautiful, tall and very old trees that filled almost every Portland neighborhood and the powerful and vast Colombia River. |
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I invite you all to join Murshid(a)s Halima and Abraham and myself at the June 24-28 Lama Foundation Sufi Sesshin. July will be the 52nd Mendocino Sufi Camp and September is the 30th Anniversary Southwest Sufi Community retreat! October 23-26 takes me to teach for the first time in Japan, with the Retreatbeing held at a 600 year old Zen Monastery! It continues to be stunning to me that even though our very existence with Mother Earth is at a critical juncture, we as human beings continue to fight each other, creating more and more suffering without addressing the most pressing shared needs of our entire human family and our Mother. For that I will continue to recite Amaan daily even though our group can move on to our next wazifa practice. For our next wazifa I suggest we recite a wazifa pair for strength. I make it a habit to recite strength wazifas every day since I feel that without strength nothing can happen. Let's recite YA QAWIYY -u- YA AZIZ. YA QAWIYY invokes the innate Strength before the notion of being the doer, before the notion of I arises, so it is helpful in unseating the ego, pride and self thought. YA AZIZ, invokes a strength that arises out of the experience of the innate preciousness of Being, so it helps overcome lack of self-worth. Much love, Shabda |
Wazifa Practice Recite 101x YA QAWIYY -u- YA AZIZ 53. Ya Qawiyy (yaa QA-weeyy) Al-Qawiyy is overpowering strength. Its omnipotent power persists through all the possible permutations of temporal being. Al-Qawiyy is the strength to overcome the impulse of self-expression. It is the strength to not use the power that we feel is ready to burst forth from within us. Realizing al-Qawiyy allows us to overcome the feeling of always being the doer, or active controlling agent, in every situation. A physical form of the root means to completely empty out one’s house. Al-Qawiyy’s power is strong enough to overcome the superego, the lusts, and the desires. Al-Qawiyy is in command of the commanding self, a self that is very primitive and adamant. It disarms the commanding self so that human beings can see that all personal power is the result of the real power that is coming from the divine source. In addition, recitation of Ya Qawiyy is an antidote for those who feel that they have to be in control. Control issues in the personality often stem from fear of death, and al-Qawiyy can be experienced as a pathway for conquering the fear of death. 8. Ya 'Aziz (yaa 'a-ZEEZ) Al-'Aziz is a kind of divine strength or power that is beyond the dualism of praise and blame. It is the strength that naturally flows from intrinsic, essential worth. The power of al-'Aziz is sweet, and it actually carries an inner meaning of sweetness. It also means precious and rare, like a baby eagle among birds. The strength of al-'Aziz is the power of God itself. It is the true worth, utmost dignity, and strength that manifests directly from God, without an intermediary. It can be contemplated in the incredible precious value of the human soul. Invocation of Ya 'Aziz brings freedom without limitations and is a remedy for our experience of being powerless and under great restraint due to restrictions that maybe real or imagined. Repetition of Ya 'Aziz is also an important remedy for the common human experience of feeling undervalued and worthless. Al-'Aziz is the marriage of strength and self-worth. To hear the pronunciation: Ya Qawiyy ~ Ya Aziz |
Text and Commentary to Study This month we finish studying the Sangatha Cosmic Language of Pir-o-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan with commentary by Murshid Samuel Lewis. Read and contemplate Chapter 14 on Inspiration, pages 125 - 131. Click below to download |
BIRDS IN WASHINGTON AND OREGON NEAR THE JAMIAT AAM |
LOCAL BIRDS |
