Rahima Schmall says: “Bring Your Heart”
Blog post brought to you by Laila Katie Helms
What Does It Mean to Hold the Deep Love?
Rahima Schmall will be one of the teachers at this October’s gathering and she invites you to come. She’s recorded a short video message for the community that we’ve summarized here for you.
A time of transition
In her video, she says:
To be honest, prior to meeting with the other teachers this morning, I didn’t have a whole lot of himma for the whole event, and was wondering what we were doing… After that meeting, everything changed. I felt completely energized, because I realized we’re in such a time of transition…a time of divisiveness within our community, within the world, within the nation. There’s something really important, as students of Sidi Muhammad, for us to come together and look at what it means to be in the Deep Love with all of this going on.
What does it mean to hold everything?
Rahima shares something that’s stayed with her. Last week, near her home in Santa Fe, she saw a man leave his four-year-old daughter alone in a car outside a health clinic. “I’m still reeling from it,” she said. “What does it mean to be in the Deep Love? What does it mean to hold everything? Do we just passively sit and send love out into the world? Are we called to action? Do our actions come from our nafs, or are our actions going to come from Allah?”
She doesn’t offer an easy answer — and she isn’t trying to. “We’re really important in the world right now,” she said. “Sufis actually change the world. We hold something with our light, and there’s something about us coming together that really will increase that light.”
Not about taking sides
Rahima named something plainly that many in the community are quietly feeling: confusion, even some division, about how to navigate this moment. “People are going, well, if I come, what does that mean? If I don’t come, what does that mean? Am I aligned with somebody? Am I not aligned with somebody? Should I align with someone?” Her answer plain and simple:
“Nobody there is going to tell you what to do.”
What the gathering actually offers, instead, is a chance to look together at how to hold the Deep Love in the midst of disagreement — how to hold it when someone else in the community is doing something different than you are. “It sounds like it’s being political,” she says, “but it’s really about celebrating and bringing forward what we were taught by Sidi — what we all hold because we are students of Sidi, and what we need as a collective community to bring to the next generation coming into this tariqa.“
WATCH/LISTEN TO RAHIMA SCHMALL
(Less than 6 minute video)
The invitation
Her invitation is simple, and specific: come, bring your heart, and come with the expectation that your heart will go deeper. Come knowing you’ll have the chance to talk with different teachers about your own real questions. There will be dhikr together, wird together, hearts fed together, light sent back out into the world together — and real, difficult questions struggled with together, not avoided.
A note on Hijama
Rahima also shared that a Hijama training will run two to three days before the gathering, with a clear long-term goal: for every community to eventually have at least one male and one female Hijama practitioner, and eventually a teacher of their own. “Sidi brought us that precious healing method,” she said, “and we want to share it, we want to spread it — if it’s in your heart to learn it, please come.”
Come, let’s take a drink of the Deep Love together, as Sidi Muhammad al-Jamal al-Rifāʿī taught us.
