Whirling Water Dervishes
- Paula Pryce
- Mar 31
- 9 min read
Tools for Turning around a Hostile World
Part One:
Conscious Work, Conscious Play
Illuminated by a near-full moon, several women and I made our way along a forested lakeshore across from a Midwestern Benedictine monastery. We had crept out that night to extend our Wisdom School lessons in intentional living to the serious work of play. A half hour of twisting climbs and descents brought us to a rustic altar and wooden benches that the monks had built high on a rocky outcropping. There we stripped to skin, scrabbled down, and leapt into black silky folds of water. The lake’s surface rolled with mottled silver, and the silhouettes of islets and trees stood out against the stars of an indigo night. Loons trilled their haunting cry. We called back, swirling and singing to loons, trees, rocks, and stars. “Let’s whirl!” exclaimed one of our companions. She lifted her right arm in the Sufi turning posture while spinning herself around and laughing. So we chanted and turned in a circle of friends, propelling ourselves noisily through the water. Someone ventured to name our company of synchronized skinny-dippers the “Whirling Water Dervishes.” Could the monks hear us in their cells across the lake? Their Great Silence was well augmented that night by high-spirited splashing and gleeful song.
The playful turning of dervish naiads is a perfect image for Lent. Lent asks of us to repent, after all, a word which comes from the Greek perichoreses – to dance or to turn around. Dancing, turning, refreshing the gaze, finding new ground, new chances, and new beginnings. The dance of Lent, like whirling in water, can be exuberant: turning ourselves around with joy and at the same time, working to turn the world towards good.
We can be forgiven if we don’t feel too playful at the moment, however. Who among us is not feeling anxious and disempowered before a relentless media cycle that keeps us up to the minute on so many alarming events. Who among us does not feel a tug in the direction of paralysis. The noise of political renegade jackhammers appears to drown out every humanizing and compassionate gesture of society. Jackhammers whose mission seems to be the decimation of love. But love cannot be destroyed. Even now, the Lenten dance proclaims that we have good work to do. That work is essential to the life, health, and peace of all.
Back at that Midwestern Wisdom School, the whirling dervishes and their fellow students were learning how to live intentionally by experimenting with conscious labour. A fundamental contemplative tool, conscious labour is a labour of love that can effect astonishing change, even in a time of social destructiveness.
Cynthia Bourgeault describes conscious labour as “any intentional effort that moves against the grain of entropy, i.e., the pervasive tendency of human consciousness to slip into autopilot. . . . Whether the effort is as modest as simply noticing a negative emotion rather than blindly reacting or as heroic as struggling with an addiction, it is not the scale of the undertaking, but the honesty of the struggle that reverses the direction of flow” from degradation towards the brightness of being, clarity of purpose, and willingness to serve that are hallmarks of a relationship with the Divine (Eye of the Heart, 54).
Intentional living is incarnational living. Much like the wise maidens who attended their lamps in anticipation of the Bridegroom’s arrival, subverting sleepy-headedness with attention practices both helps us to become more aware of Divine presence and welcomes God into our midst. Our consent to the Divine thus facilitates an energy exchange across the realms; we can become receptive and emanating conduits of healing energy. “Exchange is at the very heart of [Jesus’] understanding of ‘no separation,” Cynthia Bourgeault writes in The Wisdom Jesus (45). Our open consent is an active agent that laces the world with relational, generative energy.
Rejoice always; pray without ceasing; in everything give thanks – 1 Thessalonians 5:17
Wisdom Schools have included daily conscious work periods since their beginnings in the 1990s. Cynthia Bourgeault adapted the daily rhythm of Benedictine ora et labora (prayer and work) and G.I. Gurdjieff’s practice of The Work to a short-term learning environment. Unlike tasks at home, these conscious labour sessions have no logistical agenda of getting necessary jobs done, but are instead a contemplative laboratory in which participants experiment with the art of keeping attention and intention in everyday life. They help students learn how to embody and awaken to a quality of aliveness in energetic relationship with the Divine. Conscious work sessions disrupt our natural tendency to let our energy dissipate and our minds wander; they show us how to cultivate lives of “ceaseless prayer.”
At the Wisdom School that inspired the nighttime skinny-dipping escapade, Cynthia Bourgeault taught that attention is an observable force that becomes especially noticeable in work situations: “A job done with attention is better than a job done without attention,” she said. One working with attention has “collected, directed subtle energy” rather than “distracted, mechanical automated energy.” The intention of work periods is to train people to understand the difference. Transforming old habits is demanding, Cynthia said, a kind of “purification by friction” in which we work through “like and dislike” to “confront our own automatic behaviours which put us to sleep.” Work periods can be most effective when you are doing unfamiliar things, such as performing tasks with a non-dominant hand; they can destabilize the ordinary and habituated, and can potentially jolt one into wakefulness. With perseverance, Cynthia said, sharpening attention during these less-than-comfortable work periods can give practitioners a greater facility with staying alert and keeping presence, as well as bring them to “a place of rest that is alive” in any situation.
Each day at that Wisdom School, Cynthia gave us an “outer task” and an “inner task.” The outer tasks in this case were washing windows, gardening, clearing paths in the woods, and preparing vegetables for dinner. The first day’s inner task (or learning intention) was to keep interior stillness by using only the muscles that were necessary to work the tools. A few eyebrows went up and an older woman voiced what seemed to be on everyone’s mind. “That’s too hard! I give up!” she said with a laugh.
Cynthia simply looked at the group and gave a short primer on experiments with intentional work: “This isn’t about getting anything done but about finding how accustomed bodily postures pair with habitual thought patterns that send us to sleep. Just like practicing kenosis in Centering Prayer, you can expect to have to re-awaken seventy or eighty times over the work period.” She then suggested that we try sensing inner stillness by feeling a vertical pillar through torso, legs, and feet, thus anchoring our body to the centre of the earth. From there, we would have the grounding to identify the muscles necessary to the given work.
Along with several others, I worked in the woods to decrease the fire hazard of built-up windfall. Others doing outdoor chores clipped overgrown vines, swept walks, or weeded flower gardens. It was heavy going, not just hauling logs and branches, but also struggling to let go of distractions to return to the inner task of noticing and isolating muscles at work. By the lunch bell, I gladly returned my tools to the shed out back, straining all the while to do it with attention. It was so challenging that after lunch, many of us opted to take afternoon naps.
Conscious work may be demanding, but it can be playful too. One day’s inner task was to “change the tempo.” This meant to quieten ourselves enough to first discover a primary inner pulse. Once we had gotten the feel for a baseline of our own embodied rhythm, we were then to shift the speed of our movements in relation to it. The primary pulse could act as an anchor for presence, explained one of the Wisdom School teachers; if we were attentive to it, we could be flexible with other paces that an environment or work situation demanded without falling out of presence. Then she layered on another inner task: “Be conscious of your left leg from the knee down.”
I wasn’t sure if I had found my primary pulse or not, and I frequently forgot about the left leg, but I did persist through the awkwardness of it all in my attempts to return to alertness. I also had a lot of fun playing with being attentive to the tempos of movement. Cynthia and I cleaned windows together, I on one side of a pane of glass, she on the other. A way of observing and participating simultaneously, we began mirroring each other’s actions, shifting and matching tempos amazingly well. We also tried to trick each other out of rhythm and ended up laughing all the way through. Cynthia later said that she didn’t often have that much fun during a work period.
That week, a participant named Brigid seemed to have learned her lessons on keeping attention in work periods particularly well. At our group discussion at the end of a long day, she sat quietly at the edge of the retreat house common room, giving the impression of being shy. However, when she found an opening in the conversation to convey her experience with conscious work, Brigid spoke with such a fine quality of aliveness that the whole room listened in uniform stillness. Brigid compelled the attention of others by speaking with immediacy and intensity while being unafraid of lengthy potent pauses. Her way of speaking that evening itself seemed to be powerfully attentive to the Divine.
Brigid had been assigned to kitchen duty for the week’s experimental work periods. That morning Ward Bauman, then the retreat house director, had asked her to chop cucumber for a salad. Brigid described what she noticed in the intentional way she worked: the weight and feel of the cleaver, the pressure of hand against knife and the positioning of fingers, the intensity of the cucumber’s colours meeting in concentric circles of deep green skin, near-white inner flesh, and transparent innermost seeds: how the blade bit through resisting skin, then sank through the firm but giving inner flesh, its varied densities and leniencies. “Not the green or the white,” she said, visibly shaking now, eyes bright with recollection, “but in their meeting place – where they came together – was their place of surrender.”
Brigid sat silently for a few moments but had something more to add. She said that in the middle of the work period, Ward had passed by her side-counter station, taken a quick look, and said, “Smaller.” But Brigid had resisted. She said, “I’d cut these perfect circles and stacked them three pieces high in perfectly aligned rows at the edge of the cutting board.” The seed circles had reminded her of a Sufi poem that praised seeds at the center. In the end, she had recognized her impulse to cling and went ahead and began slicing into them anyway. “The cucumbers were slippery and the tiny pieces went everywhere,” she said. Ineffectually trying to corral them, she had stopped with sudden realization: “Abundance!” exclaimed Brigid, “a gravitational outpouring of abundance everywhere around us!” She stopped for a moment then summarized what she’d learned: “I could see the beauty in the cucumber, but if I had kept to what I knew and what I thought I wanted, I would not have understood the abundance.”
No one made a sound. All motion had been arrested by the incarnational energy with which Brigid conveyed her experiments in the kitchen. Her intentional way of speaking offered a glimpse of the Divine that bound the community, much like a gifted priest at the altar. The air itself seemed to shimmer.
After a while, Cynthia said in almost a whisper, “Someone’s paying attention, wow.” A friend seated nearby glanced over at me and quietly said, “Our very own T. S. Eliot.” Brigid’s vibrant practice of conscious labour not only took place while cutting cucumber in the kitchen that day, but also appeared in the common room where her address to the group prompted an energetic exchange across the realms.
Interaction with God through the media of cucumber and conversation is a striking illustration of the power of intention, attention, and consent in daily life. Yet while the group experienced undeniable beauty in Brigid’s openness to the Divine, we also know that conscious labour like this is not for self-edification. Contemplative tools, teachers insist, must be employed seriously, in service of the greater good, whether done through work or play. Awakening means participating in the Divine exchange through relational prayer – prayer that is emanating and receptive, and that bestows brightness of being, energetic liveliness, and a capacity to respond intentionally rather than to react out of fear or anger.
This is incarnational work for those who follow an incarnational path. Cultivating attention and intention in work and play – consenting to take our part in the Divine exchange – can profoundly alter the energy in the room as well as energy in the greater world. Our everyday labour, when enacted as relational prayer, is the potent, active love we can offer as one antidote to the destruction everywhere around us. Whether we are washing dishes or rallying thousands for the sake of justice, our efforts at conscious living turn the world towards good.
Paula Pryce writes reflections for The Contemplative Society every other month. She is a cultural anthropologist and writer who specializes in ritual studies and contemplative religions. Her publications include The Monk’s Cell: Ritual and Knowledge in American Contemplative Christianity.
To connect with Paula about this reflection, please e-mail TCS at admin@contemplative.org. Your e-mails will be forwarded onto her.
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