The Healthy and Holy Body
as it walks through the Stations of the Way
This teaching from our holy sister Maryam was originally offered through the Sufi Center Minnesota earlier this year. Though the title and much of the content is about “healthy and holy bodies” the backdrop is a practical and insightful journey through the stations of the nafs, heart, and soul. Maryam is gifted with a style of teaching that brings the sacred knowledge down to earth, making it more accessible and eaiser to understand. Her full transcript is included along with the link to the zoom recording of the original teaching that is being shared here with the permission of Sufi Center Minnesota and Maryam Thea Elijah.
Bissmillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim
Sufi teachings about the nature of the body and our relationship to it are multi-faceted and multi-layered. This can be confusing, as at times the messages appear to be contradictory. In truth, the different aspects of the teachings address different stages, different circumstances, and the nature of a person’s witnessing. Together we will explore the stations of the body on the Sufi path.
I am speaking about the body in relation to both health and holiness. I’m speaking about it, because there is often a great deal of confusion about the nature of the body, the role of the body, and what it means to have a holy relationship with our body. That confusion is, not least, because different writings say very different things that can seem like flat out contradiction, when in effect, we are talking about stages of a journey… and at different stages of the journey, different things are true.
For example, there is the common phrase, “the body doesn’t lie.”
Many people have said that; many people have heard that. However, in what we call nafs al-amarrah, when the body is taken over by shaytanic impulses—there are times when the body lies.
The body lies when it is tainted—when it has been lied to, and fallen for it. For instance, to pick a really light example, when you keep eating those potato chips. Don’t tell me the body doesn’t lie, and you need these potato chips. No, your body has been lied to by a corporation that has done rigorous testing, as far as how to create a combination that will convince your body that you’ve got to have more of their product.
The body lies. A heroin addict, a smoker, an alcoholic who feels like she’s gotta have what her body is craving. Her body is lying, because it’s been lied to. And now it lies.
An extremely painful example is racism, where people have been brought up a certain way, and then they feel, in their bodies, an aversion to other people. Their body is lying, because it’s been lied to.
This is called “conditioning.” If we just trust our physical reactions, trust our body all of the time, we’re gonna get back what we were taught, and what we were taught might be a lie.
The journey of the nafs is the journey of exchanging lies for truth, and cleaning our body until it is the mirror of God.
Ah! I just said the word “nafs,” and it is important to clarify the relationship between the nafs and the body before going on. What is the nafs, and what is the relationship between the nafs, the body, and the spirit?
You can find this material in many places in Sidi’s books, but just for example, Spirits Path To Joy P.143
“Allah’s Messenger SAWS said, ‘Your bitterest enemy is your nafs between your two sides.’ The two sides are the body and the spirit. The nafs is an intermediate because it does not belong exclusively to the body or exclusively to the ruh, but it is configured by the breath and animates the body.”
The nafs has two sides, ruh and body, like a coin: heads or tails. The story of the spiritual journey as described by the 7 stations of the nafs (nafs al-ammarah, nafs al-lawwamah, nafs al-mulhammah, nafs al-mutma’innah, nafs ar-radiyah, nafs al-mardiyyah, nafs al-kamilah) is that the nafs is one thing—part ruh and part mudball—that can exist in different stages of the journey. At all times, the nafs is both spirit and body, but who’s in the driver’s seat? Heads or tails? Or, which way is the seesaw tipping?
This is important because it’s not just a matter of percentages. It’s more dynamic than that. The body’s corrupt addictive inclinations can degrade the spirit, as we see in nafs al-amarrah. Or, the spirit’s revelation can transform the body into a place where the truth can manifest.
From Secrets of the Heart P. 14
“The body is a vehicle for the heart and its provision in knowledge… A worshipper cannot reach Allah except by inhabiting the body and passing through the lower world… The heart gains its provision from this world and rides in the vehicle of the body to arrive in the other world. Although it cannot maintain that body forever, it must preserve it to the best of its ability in order to achieve its purpose, because the body can bring you your greatest fortune.”
Path of Yearning to Taste the Love P 21
“The human substance contains the secret of the soul of the spiritual world and the creative pictures of the world of the body because the body is not alienated. Its purpose is to reach beyond the world of the body and the strengths of its faculties to qualify for higher levels of divine knowledge because the body only calls it to the lower world. But its purpose is not only to embrace spiritualty—because the nafs does not yearn for spirituality except after spiritual practices or exercises due to its ignorance of it—but its purpose is to become a single presence which includes the sensory as well as meanings, the manifest as well as the hidden, the subtle as well as the gross, and the lofty as well as the low.”
So that’s where we are headed—but that is not how the journey begins. Let’s start at the beginning, in the first station, nafs al-amarrah. This the station of the body listening to the shaytan, with its inclination and incitements to evil. We come to the path with a body that lies, that has been listening to the father of lies, and in this station, we cannot follow our body’s inclinations as though that were truth.
Because our body is wanting things that are not necessarily good for us, or for anybody. Nafs al-amarrah is when your body is saying, “I want this, and I’ll have it, because it’s what I want.” There is no heart in the matter. There is no human kindness; there’s no consciousness except for “this is what my body wants. I’m gonna go get it,” even if it’s raping a child.
Pollution of the planet comes from here. The slave trade came from here. Date rape comes from here. When purely physical benefit is all we want, there is no room for the heart. The body is saying, “That’s gonna feel good,” and we’re just listening to that voice.
That body lies. That body is a dangerous body to listen to. When our body is in the station of the nafs al-amarrah, what we want is not just not good for us, it’s actually a pollutant that will further obscure our heart—that will actually make it more difficult to know Allah.
Every time we follow the inclinations of purely physical desire without heed to the spiritual context—just because we know it’s gonna feel good to take another toke or pour another drink—we are doing something that puts even more filth on the mirror of the heart, and makes it harder and harder for us to be able to hear the truth of the heart within our body. So it’s more than just not good. It’s dangerous. It’s pernicious. It’s dragging us down in a very significant way.
Thus when we are looking at the body in the station of the nafs al-amarrah, it’s appropriate to speak about the body and its claims with a good bit of fire and brimstone about it. These are the evils of the body. It’s horrendous, what people do to each other, and to children, when under the command of these desires.
In this station we need to accept that there may be some a harsh language, to separate us from our body’s inclinations and make it 100% clear: Don’t follow the leader; that’s not the leader. Your body is lying, and it will lead you astray.
This is exactly why it says that for nafs al-amarrah, its warid or light of arrival is the Sharia. When you don’t know better, follow the Sharia. Just obey. If the law says do it, do it. If the law says don’t do it, don’t do it. Because in this station, you do not yet have common sense in your body. There are patterns in the body that must be broken before the light of the ruh can be felt.
Spirit’s Path to Joy P 167
“So, my beloved, awaken from the forgetfulness that has destroyed you, put you in a lowly position, and demeaned you; turn toward what you absolutely need, and draw near through good action before you are taken to His presence in chains.”
This can be an important revelation at the beginning of spiritual path, “Whoa, my body can lead me astray,” and to be able to have that first realization of a little bit of a difference between me and my body, not to just follow every inclination and impulses. Ah, my body may be leading me astray.
Sidi says in Music of the Soul P 111, “You need to change and to clean everything, beginning with your body.”
This realization is what brings us into the nafs al-lawammah, the blameworthy or self reproaching nafs, which is the state when our body is still filled with pollution and craziness and lies—but we know it! We see our racism, we see our cravings, we see our aversions; we are aware that we are caught in conditioning, full of pictures, and easily triggered (in both “positive” and “negative” ways).
Spirit’s Path to Joy P 169
“Some of the traces of the commanding nafs remain, but in spite of this, it sees the truth as truth and falsehood as falsehood, and even though it knows that these qualities are blameworthy, it is not able to free itself from them.”
Note how much better this is than the nafs al-amarrah, where the nafs command to evil and we just go ahead and do it. Here in nafs al-lawammah, we may or may not go ahead and do it—but we know it’s pollution; we know it’s not healthy: “Oh, I wish I weren’t like this. Oh, I wish I hadn’t eaten that thing. Oh, I wish there wouldn’t be an advertisement for doughnuts where I have to see it every single day when I go to work.”
This is this is the station of struggle and discipline, where we are emphasizing the difference between who we really are—the heart that knows and yearns for the Love of God—and our body, with its lies. This is the station where Sidi exhorts us to take on physical disciplines like moderate fasting, or halwa where we stay up at night past when we’re comfortable.
In the station of al-lawamma (Spirit’s Path to Joy P 183), Sidi speaks about not eating the foods that you crave and “weaning yourself from excess and negligence” with all your different appetites, as a way of inventorying who’s in charge around here, my body or my ruh? What does my heart she say? Can I hear it, over the conditioned habits, reflexes and cravings of my body?
This is not as a way of saying “The body is bad, and I’m going to dissociate from it.” Because dissociation is not the same as cleaning. Whatever we have dissociated from is still there, like an invisible ball and chain. What we want to do is clean the falsehood out of our body, so that our body can become a mirror of our heart and soul and secret, praising God.
The station of the nafs al-lawamma is a kind of getting-to-know-ourselves phase in which we actually begin to start feeling out: which of my physical impulses are in alignment with my heart’s increasing awareness of Allah, and which are pulling me away from awareness of Allah?
So much of what is in our body, in this stage, is our conditioning. We are cleaning our conditioning, cleaning our body’s pictures, so that our heart can hear the Order of Allah, and follow it.
In the station of the nafs al-lawammah, in Spirit’s Path to Joy, Sidi talks three times about the body as a prison. This is a strong term. It’s a prison of conditioning and habit and intense entanglement with the sensory world, including all kinds of pleasures.
It’s not that there’s a problem with pleasure, per se. There is a problem with pleasure that makes us go, “Ooh, ooh…” to the point where we are not listening to our heart, and not listening for the Order anymore. We’re just, “Oh, I’m going to buy that necklace, because it’s so beautiful. I’m going to eat that piece of cake, it looks delicious.” But we haven’t actually checked in with our heart. What makes it a sin is when you jump for it, just because your body wants it. But you didn’t connect with your heart to find out, “Is this really what’s right for me, Allah?”
Our path is a path of alignment and attunement to Allah’s promptings. To call this kind of pleasure a “distraction” is a very mild and gentle term. Too often, distraction can become entanglement that keeps us from hearing the voice of Allah in our heart—in fact it keeps us from even wanting to stop and listen! Hence all the teachings about distrusting our pleasures, and distrusting our preferences, and creating some space around what we enjoy so that we are not on automatic, and we can check in.
Remember that hadith of the Prophet, SAWS, “Beware of what you love that is not good for you. Beware of what you hate, that may be what you need.”
That may perhaps sum up the second station of the nafs, the nafs al-lawammah. It’s a rigorous station. We are working our way out of the quicksand of conditioning. We are mostly full of lies and craziness, with just a little compass in there to guide us, as we bushwhack our way through what is called “breaking the body.”
In Spirit’s Path to Joy P 180 Sidi says that the station of the heart is toward the end of the second station nafs a-lawammah. In Music of the Soul, it is in the stations of the heart that Sidi says so much about “breaking your body.” Let’s talk about that, because it is very relevant and often misunderstood. Sidi says, “When I say break your body, I mean clean your body.” (MOS P 111)
Amina al-Jamal clarifies that when Sidi says “break your body,” he doesn’t just mean clean your body—or he would just say “clean your body.” When he says “break” instead of “clean,” he means “clean to the point where it is really and truly over, and there is no going back, so that the new creation can come.”
The task of the station of nafs al-lawammah is about breaking your body so that it doesn’t have a stranglehold on your ruh, so that the majority of the seesaw is tipped towards the ruh, and the true captain of your ship is your heart’s connection to Allah.
Now, it is in this station of the nafs al-lawammah that we have the discussion of the difference between the path of the righteous and the path of the ones brought near.
The righteous are the ones eating their vegetables because they know they should eat their vegetables, and they are getting all the right kind of exercise. They do all the right things in order to be healthy—and this is good; Allah blesses doing all the right things to clean the body and be healthy. This is health motivated by wanting to live in the garden, not the fire. We are eating right so that we feel good and look good—so that we don’t feel terrible and look terrible. The garden, not the fire.
In the long run, the path of the righteous remains in the 2nd station, because there is always something happening to knock our health off balance, and we work on coming back again and again, so as to be in the garden, not the fire.
The path of the ones brought near is the path of the ones who will leave the second station eventually and progress inshallah through the higher stations. Those on the path of the ones brought near are doing this cleaning of the body not for the sake of avoiding the fire of illness nor for the sake of living in the garden of health, but for the sake of clearing all the static in the body—all the pictures and lies—so as to be able to hear Allah and know Allah, unimpeded, unencumbered, and undistracted.
When the seesaw of the nafs has tipped towards the ruh, that’s when we move to the nafs al-mulhammah, the third station of the nafs, the inspired nafs. In the nafs al-mulhammah, we certainly have not fully cleaned our body. It’s not broken completely. We still want those potato chips on certain days, but not most of the time. We still lapse sometimes, and binge on something that our body wants, even as we know that this is not actually what will take us closer to our heart’s desire, our union with our Beloved.
But we’re mostly pretty good. We’re better than not, and often we’re pretty cool, and start to feel like, “I’ve got this.” Now we are at the point where, at least most of the time, when our body is telling us something, it’s right. We start having clear guidance through our body intuitions that lead us exactly where we need to go. The body no longer lies—mostly.
It’s quite beautiful when we see this in martial artists, in certain athletes, even in my housemate who is in recovery from a junky diet, who has finally gotten to the point where he actually loves the taste of vegetables. It’s so beautiful. He has now detoxed enough that he really likes kale. It’s such a beautiful moment. His body can be trusted to lead him like a true compass towards health.
Sidi calls it a dangerous station, because it is a bit euphoric to feel that freedom from the prison of our old unhealthy inclinations. Now we have this greater integrity; our heart is, by and large, running the show. We are, by and large, a servant of Allah.
Our pleasure is a very different kind of pleasure. It feels wholesome and even holy. We start to relax into that, and we start to trust it. We may start “just knowing” through our body, and being able to navigate by it. It’s such a good feeling, with such good results, that here’s why it’s dangerous:
We start getting used to trusting our navigation. We may not be on guard anymore for the fact that we still have conditioning. We still have temptations. We still have unhealed wounds, such that we get triggered, possibly without even knowing that we are triggered, because we buffer it more smoothly now. When this happens, we may believe that our inclinations are actually guidance rather than prejudice.
When we are feeling this good, we don’t realize it when we are very gently and persuasively triggered, based on pictures and lies still tarnishing the mirror of our body—and so we can end up in delusion.
This is all those stories of the inspired ones who reached great heights, but then who were corrupted, or deluded, or have a downfall because they did not continue to wage holy war on their conditioning, keep cleaning their pictures, heal the wounds, and really look at their areas of temptation in the world of the body.
So that’s the body of nafs al-mulhammah, where you are genuinely inspired, you genuinely have a much more clean compass—but don’t get arrogant; don’t feel too secure.
In order to understand the body in relations to the transition from the 3rd to the 4th station, we need to look more closely at the issue of sensory reality and its entanglements. Let’s backtrack for a moment, for an overview of our relationship to sensory reality in the different stations:
In the first station, the nafs al-Amarrah, nothing but the outer sensory world is real. For most people, what helps us transition from the 1st to the 2nd station with regard to the senses and the realities beyond the senses is being in nature. We can feel with our heart that the tree is more than just a material tree; that the river is more than just H2O with momentum. Out in nature we often receive the first awakenings to heart-centered perception. This makes sense, because it is said that nature is Allah’s first holy book; when we are out in nature, we are reading the ayat of Allah. There are sounds and sights and fragrances, but there is something more. There are messages coming to us from the inner senses.
In the 2nd station, Spirit’s Path To Joy P 183
“Know that the heart has a side facing the world, which is under the governance of the five senses, and it does not know anything of this world except through these senses. The heart also has a side facing the unseen hidden world, which is the world of the malakut. Whenever you turn towards the seen world with your five senses, you turn away from the unseen world, and whenever you cut off your five senses, you turn toward the unseen world. In the beginning, you cannot be turned to both sides at the same time. Whenever you turn toward one side, the other becomes absent, and there is a big difference between the two worlds.”
In the 2nd station we are learning not to stop with the outside picture, which is the body saying, “This tastes good—give me more!” and instead turn to hear with the inner ear of the heart for Allah’s decree, which may be saying, “That’s enough for now.” This is how we overcome our habits, as a prison that needs to be broken.
In the 3rd station it gets a bit more confusing, with regard to sensory entanglement, for two reasons: One, we start to have periods of fana, when we are absent from our senses. Two, we are increasingly able to be aware of both the sensory and non-sensory worlds at the same time, which means we can get mixed up sometimes. What might be called “extra-sensory phenomena” become more prominent, and can affect our body as strongly, or more strongly, than physical sensory experience. We may be terrified of jinn, or seduced by miracles. It’s an intermediary zone in which we are in a quasi-sensory reality full of images and sounds and smells and tactile experiences, which can be very pleasurable or horrifying. This can be very hard on our body, and again the solution is to turn to Allah—easier said than done when demons are attacking you or wonders are seducing you—towards the Essence, away from the sensory or extra-sensory experience.
The sensory experience clarifies and fuses in the transition into the 4th station, nafs al-mutma’innah, such that we are perceiving via the Qualities directly from Allah, rather than through the physical senses alone:
Music of the Soul p 227
“The human being receives the divine abundance through the perfect mind, through thought (al-fikr), inspiration (al-ilham), and seeing. Through these capacities he can transform his animal nature into kindness and humanness, and rid himself of the darkness, and rescue himself from the grossness. So his body becomes purified of this darkness and his mind is purified of imagination (al-wahm) and he becomes brilliantly lit by the light of life and realization. These capacities which are the centers of perception—hearing, seeing tasting smelling and touching—are his assets. Without them, nothing of the pure heart (al-fu’ad) would appear on the outside and he could not realize the light and truth of his life. Understand.
Understand, beloved, that without the quality of hearing, hearing would be impossible or without the quality of seeing, the human being would not see the truth of the pictures. Only through the inner seeing can he see truly. If he didn’t have the quality of touch, he could not feel solid objects and be sure of their existence. Without the quality of taste, he could not taste the meaning of words and what they refer to. Without the quality of smell, he could not smell the odor of revelation and its goodness, nor the smell of our beloved God and the subtle breezes of his love. Through the outer senses we can realize the meanings and the secrets of our bodies and our lives in the human rank.”
This is the nafs al-mutma’innah, the station of tranquility, which is the place where you love your veggies in exactly the right way, in exactly the right amount, and your body really doesn’t lie. This is coming closer to what Sidi means when he says things like,
MOS P 57 “There is no more body because your body is broken.”
MOS P 61 “When you are in this station, there is no body because you have lost your body. It has become completely light… Keep your body special for God. Your body is His and you are His mirror.”
MOS P 67 “You can touch every quality with your whole body. But your body must change in everything and begin to walk to be born again, giving birth to a new soul. Then you begin to be clean and alive, and to show your true self.”
Your body hasn’t really disappeared. You still gotta put clothes on when you walk down the street, or you will get arrested. You still have a body. When Sidi says that your body has disappeared, he means that not only does your body no longer lie, but it is a mirror for your heart, and your soul, and eventually your secret, such that you are able to be a living manifestation of the tajalli of God.
When our body is in the station of nafs al-mutma’innah, we are a truthful one. We love what is good for us, and we hate what is not good for us. We are clear; it’s not triggered, not conditioning. We are not just acting healthy; we are healthy. Our body does more than just not lie. It is a body that reflects divine truth.
What happens next is difficult for me to describe, even though I have studied the teachings, because I certainly don’t live there yet. I’m kinda half-way up the mountain, but sometimes on a sunny day when there are no clouds, I catch glimpses, and fragrances of what the higher “fana” means.
What happens next has something to do with the difference between health and holiness. To be healthy, we need clean the pictures, clean the delusions and lies. To be holy, we need to clean—or break—our health, not in the sense of destroying our health, but going way beyond it. In these stations, progressively our body no longer defines or limits our consciousness in any way—not because we are ignoring our body, but because we have effaced it fully.
To grasp what this means, I wrote a children’s story:
A horse and an eagle were friends. The horse was a very fine horse; and the eagle was a very fine eagle. In fact, they both strove to be the very finest horse and the very finest eagle that they possibly could be.
The horse spent a lot of time eating fresh grass, cantering from one end of the field to the other whenever it felt like it, and swishing its tail or shivering its skin to get rid of flies. The eagle spent a lot of time repairing its nest, soaring around looking for mice and other small animals in the horse’s field, and defending its territory from other large birds.
One day, at the same moment, when the horse was running across the field and the eagle was soaring high overheard, the friends felt an illumination come to them.
Watching the horse running, the eagle suddenly understood that “being the finest horse possible” was a prison for the horse—that even the highest standard of excellence in horseness was still just being a horse, trapped in the perspective of the horse, when there was so much more to life and the universe and beyond.
Meanwhile, watching the eagle soar overhead, the horse was having the same insight about the eagle. Suddenly it seemed so limited to be an eagle, even the finest possible eagle. In fact it seemed like a prison to spend a lifetime doing nothing more than strive to excellence in such a narrow domain, when beyond soaring and nest-building and mouse-hunting was the vastness of so much more than mere eagleness.
Shaken, the two friends came together at the edge of the forest to share their new awakenings. Since they had both received the same illumination, neither of them felt hurt or diminished in any way by the notion that their eagleness or horseness were a kind of defining prison that kept them from knowledge of an infinite existence. They were able to reassure each other that being the very finest horse, and the very finest eagle, though wonderful in its way, was ultimately a dead end as far as true knowledge of the Oneness of Being. For that, the horse must live beyond horseness, and the eagle beyond eagleness.
The eagle understood that there was nothing inherently wrong with hunting mice all day, or keeping an eye out for nesting material. It just wasn’t as important as it seemed back when being the best possible eagle was the entire goal of the eagle’s existence. The horse also understood that it was not necessary to enjoy the endless barrage of flies on hot days, nor was it necessary to renounce the eating of fresh cool grass after the rain, but it was necessary to open beyond the previously engulfing significance of these concerns, into an awareness that held grass and flies to be of relative unimportance in the vastness of consciousness, beyond the eagle, beyond the horse, beyond the body’s contingently existent but no longer defining form.
This is the journey of the nafs in the 5th, 6th, and 7th stations… the journey of effacement of our humanity, so that even while in human form, we can increasingly live from the knowledge of the truth from beyond the human perspective.
Although very few of us currently live in these lofty stations, it’s an inspiration for our journey, and gives us insight into what it means to have a healthy and holy relationship with our body, every step of the way. This is the aim—this what all the work is for, that begins with listening to our heart, not to potato chip cravings.
It is an encouragement to do our most basic practices, like making dhikr, in our body—not just floating away into the imaginal realms (Allah! Allah!), but right here, Allah, Allah, feeling the echoes and reverberations of the Name in our heart, in our whole torso, in our arms and legs, in our blood and brain… cleaning the darkness with light, cleaning the lies with the truth of the Name.
It’s like tuning an instrument, and keeping it in tune, so that our body can carry the message, the song of Allah.
From Secrets of the Heart P. 14
“The body is a vehicle for the heart and its provision in knowledge… A worshipper cannot reach Allah except by inhabiting the body and passing through the lower world… The heart gains its provision from this world and rides in the vehicle of the body to arrive in the other world. Although it cannot maintain that body forever, it must preserve it to the best of its ability in order to achieve its purpose, because the body can bring you your greatest fortune.”
Path of Yearning to Taste the Love P 21
“The human substance contains the secret of the soul of the spiritual world and the creative pictures of the world of the body because the body is not alienated. Its purpose is to reach beyond the world of the body as the strengths of its faculties to qualify for higher levels of divine knowledge because the body only calls it to the lower world. But its purpose is not only to embrace spiritualty—because the nafs does not yearn for spirituality except after spiritual practices or exercises due to its ignorance of it—but its purpose is to become a single presence which includes the sensory as well as meanings, the manifest as well as the hidden, the subtle as well as the gross, and the lofty as well as the low.”
Sufi Center Minnesota
Please know that these teachings are available at the Sufi Center Minnesota YouTube site and usually go up a day or two after the teaching occurs. The teachings happen on the 1st Sunday of every month from 2:00-3:00pm Pacific / 5:00-6:00pm Eastern. There is no charge and no registration. Simply click on the link you find in the emails announcing the teaching and join the class. The link will always be the same so if you have an email from a prior month, you can use that.
We hope you are benefiting from these teachings. Here are the upcoming teachers in this series: See the Sufi Center Minnesota website for more info on their community and the programs they offer. suficentermn.org
Maryam Thea Elijah has been gratefully on the Sufi path for more than 20 years. She is also an acupuncturist and herbalist, hence her ongoing delight in exploring the intersection of spiritual practice and the principles of healing. She lives in Southern Vermont, and her home is a zawiyah for the last 3 days of every month (please communicate in advance if you wish to attend).
Maryam Thea Elijah Learn more about Maryam and the programs she offers, including CEU’s for Acupuncture and Chinese Herbal Medicine, as well as a section on Sufi teachings and the blending of these paradigms in her series of teachings she calls “Whole Heart Connection” at her website; perennialmedicine.com.
