A few days ago I held a free online class, I wanted to offer you the recording here if you feel called to a look. It will be available to watch for a short time.

Free Class

Passcode: 6DfuYC+8

I also wanted to offer to you a 30 percent discount on my upcoming course (it starts today Sunday the 5th!) with the code MOMENT30 at checkout.

Daughter of the Moment

Through poetry, somatic practice, and the lineage of women saints, we explore what it means to meet the Divine beyond the inherited wounds that have shaped how we see God, and discover who we might become in their absence. This class is for all women, from any background or faith, who feel a calling to the Beloved.

Across three sessions, we lay the foundation by exploring human nature and who the Beloved is. We come into honest contact with the ways patriarchal structures and conditioning have shaped our inner world, and recover the lineage of Sufi women who carried this tradition before us. And finally, we find a new ground to stand from, one rooted in divine love as the foundation of our existence.

Some reflections on language landing at Zurich airport. This is part of a much longer message I wrote to my dear friend Amir.

“I have to admit that for me German is an extremely fascinating and funny language. It just inherently tickles something in me.

I was stood in the queue of the passport control and I had to cover my face because of how amusing I find the intonation at times, I really do not mean this to be in any way diminishing of the language.. I am aware of the great depth I am not in contact with because I do not speak German, let us not even mention Rilke or Meister Echkart.

I find being in airports a fascinating and sometimes distressing experience, I feel in the airport, particularly in the queue I come in touch with some deep repulsion I have towards the human condition. How we allow ourselves to be herded like sheep between utterly meaningless rituals of submission to power. I come into contact with the most dejected part of me, that in order for me to be able to move across this earth, that belongs to no man or woman, I am at the mercy of meaningless acts of control, I am a slave to senselessness. I know that you are deeply intimate with this beyond what I can even imagine. Apart from feeling that familiar sense of disquiet, I started thinking about language. Language is shaped by landscape and weather. It is formed by the moisture in the air of each place, it bends and dances to be heard. It is one of my favourite things to marvel about, the development of language. I find it simultaneously is a tool that separates us from the world as we use it as this tool to name and categorise and to conceptualise. And mistake the name for the thing named. And with this language becomes this veil between us and the blooming unfolding, never ending flux of reality.

And yet, this somehow feels like a western affliction, something that has begun to plague them only in recent history. I watch videos sometimes on the development of the English language over the last thousand years, theres something that happens at a certain point… a cold terseness comes in, almost as if you can feel how the sounds, the parts of the mouth and throat, parts of the being that are needed to create particular sounds become diminished, a shadow of themselves. Sounds that are too raw, too human for modern English, a rounded gurgle that lives deep in the chest, a whistling in the nose that simply won’t do if this is to be a language of domination. I firmly sense this is affected by ideology, what ideology asks of us, it has the power to change how our tongues express sound. It reminds me of the Dome of the Rock in Palestine, the mosaics in the interior, bejewelled palm trees, chests full of shimmering clusters of pearls, highly life like, reflecting the state of perception and expression of muslims during those early early days. Fast forward 800 years in Cordoba Andalusia, and the muslims of that time would never dream of creating something that attempts to display in such hyper realism the creation of God. The forms and patterns in the great mosque of Cordoba (which you and I will visit) are highly representational, alluding to Gods creation instead of trying to mimic it, as if this would be some great act of blasphemy. Maybe you have heard how muslims do not draw faces, as it is somehow offensive to the Creator.

I am not sure how I feel of this, some high lofty moralistic part of me agrees, how could we try and mimic the creator! And then in a wild flash a thought… what would Rilke say? God! I long for what is true to sprig forth from me, the way it is with children.. he says something to this effect.

When I hear that old old English, there is something of it that exudes the essence of moss, something that lends itself to wet earth, to precambrian dew and forgotten belonging. In the Quran there are 7 different words to refer to dates. May I not fall into the trap of romanticising that which has been lost, or fabricate in any sense what our ancestors may have experienced, that being said, when I hear certain languages that still carry something of the essential within them I take note of something. Their language feels more like an experience of a courtship with reality, instead of in a categorisation of reality. As if in some holy act of listening and honouring is what is taking place.. being in response to what is emerging. There is a word in Arabic for the name of the opaque string that lives between the central crevice of the date stone.

Can we even imagine? How much is God partaking in the sounds we are making. The start of your book speaks of how the tongue becomes a traitor.

Language is truly what we make of it, do you believe God sent us down the words? How do you think They did it? Or did they emerge from a great listening? When I hear some dialects of Arabic, of Welsh of Gaelic, of Greek, what I can hear being expressed is not emerging from the human mind, forced in any way, but the relationship between the things being named and the namer, as if the plants, the foods, the grains came into agreement with humans about what they should be called. In some great forgotten council perhaps, some great gathering. Amir! What an image!! Our ancestors thousands upon thousands of years ago, hearing in a dream that there would be a great gathering of naming, so that we could come to know each other.

All the plants and animals, the winds and the rains, gathered with humans and partook in a great act of translation, an act of true listening. Do you know there is a story of a prophet in the Abrahamic traditions, I must find the source for this, who had a particular affinity with plants, he would speak to them and ask three questions.

What is your name?

What are your properties?

Do you harm?

Please excuse the messiness of this piece, it is better to just send it now, sweet dreams”

Love,

Medina

SOME REFLECTIONS

1. Not taking things personally is one of the greatest gifts I am beginning to be in touch with more and more… truly there is actually an impersonal feeling to the universe at times. It makes me think of that thing I am not sure where maybe in the Quran where it says Allah is closer to you than your jugular vein but also that there is a great veil of between us and the divine reality.

2. Humans are funny creatures, training as a body mind maturation coach now for the last 9 or so months has been the biggest internal work I have ever done, and one of the deepest take aways for me has been that I am part of a race of beings, and that we are inherently like one another. I did not release the level to which I saw myself as different, as separate, either above or below other humans. We don’t realise the extent to which a unconscious belief or blindspot is running our lives. For me this idea that I was inherently different from others was just reality for me. That has been completely shattered now and I am so relieved. It has given me access to a profound amount of compassion for myself and others

3. An upcoming course I am holding - Daughter of the Moment:

   

   I’m am sharing with you a three part series I will be teaching called Daughter of the Moment.

   A few weeks ago I taught a single class under this name. Over seventy women gathered. I felt that the topics we touched upon needed a lot more time to unfurl, to land and to be integrated. This three part offering is that space.

   Through poetry, somatic practice, and the stories of female mystic saints, we explore what it means to meet the Divine beyond the inherited wounds that have shaped how we see God, and discover who we might become in their absence. This class is for all women, from any background or faith, who feel a calling to the Beloved.

   Across three sessions, we lay the foundation by exploring human nature and who the Beloved is. We come into honest contact with the ways patriarchal structures and conditioning have shaped our inner world, and recover the lineage of Sufi women who carried this tradition before us. And finally, we find a new ground to stand from, one rooted in divine love as the foundation of our existence.

   Daughter of the Moment

   “Everyone knows that each of us stands in the midst of development and unfolding. What is being unfolded is simply our self, but each self is unique. We do not know the full answer to what we are because at the moment we are only what we are right now, and at every moment of our existence, we are something new. So what is our self? It is the I of the moment, and each moment is new…. According to the standard Ash’arite theological view, as refined by numerous disquisitions on the same topic by a variety of Sufi authors, the new self of the moment is God’s constant and never-ending renewal of the self’s creation. At each moment of our existence, a new self arrives to us from God, just as, in this body, a new breath arrives.” William Chittick

4. I often experience disgust and hatred, but I do not make this wrong, if anything I am deeply grateful that my system feels safe enough to express these emotions. I do not need to make the fact that hatred and disgust are moving through my system make it mean something about who or what I am. There are no wrong feelings, we cannot moralise emotions. They simply are what they are, how can anything that is not be? We expend a vast amount of energy trying to suppress or avoid what is there because it feels unbearable to feel, or that we should not feel something. This causes stagnation in the system, part of my work now in many senses, or of of the hills that I am willing to die on, is that all expression is valid. Each layer we move through to reach that core, the thing our survival mechanism is hell bent on us not feeling… thats where the gold is. You won’t die if you go there! But it will feel like you are! ha!!

5. I have no idea what to eat, food is confusing. I eat a lot of sweet potato and broth. I hope thats good?

6. A couple of years ago I got into this author called Clarice Lispector, this Brazilian woman, she was a force of nature!! They say she writes in such a way, unlike anything that has ever been seen before! Often it actually felt like hearing the voice that is happening in your brain, except you are also hearing the voices of all the brains of all living and non living things haha. Here are some excerpts from her work that I adore. “When I suddenly see myself in the depths of the mirror, I take fright. I can scarcely believe that I have limits, that I am outlined and defined. I feel myself to be dispersed in the atmosphere, thinking inside other creatures, living inside things beyond myself. When I suddenly see myself in the mirror, I am not startled because I find myself ugly or beautiful. I discover, in fact, that I possess another quality. When I haven't looked at myself for some time, I almost forget that I am human, I tend to forget my past, and I find myself with the same deliverance from purpose and conscience as something that is barely alive. I am also surprised to find as I gaze into the pale mirror with open eyes that there is so much in me beyond what is known, so much that remains ever silent.”

   

   “It is because I dove into the abyss that I am beginning to love the abyss I am made of.”

7. I am holding a free online class on Wednesday July 1st that will be an introduction to me and my work, this intersection between Sufism, the Beloved, mythology and the somatic. Will launch in the next few days!

8. A poem to end with:

   KEEP DOING THAT

   Love, you have wrecked my body.

   Keep doing that.

   I am more well with this deep ache of missing you

   than content with the physical wonders you can pacify us with.

Quickly before we get into the madness of this newsletter I have to do the promotional bit because this is my job.

WOMEN IN SUFISM SEPTEMBER COHORT

This space is devoted to the questioning, deepening of and tending to - our relationship with the Beloved.

Through poetry, Sufi teachings and embodied inquiry, we bring our attention to the inner dimensions of worship, exploring the feminine way of experiencing, through the body and the heart.

This course is for all women.

Find Out More

I feel a strong need to be in reaction to all the AI writing and write in a an extremely human way.

I noticed that I haven’t been writing here because I felt it should be some prepared thing, some wholly thought out fleshed out ‘thing’… but it just is not happening. I am challenging myself to just write this and not edit it at all. Maybe I can share a constellation of strands of experiences and thoughts I have been in, memories and moments from the last months. Writing this from a quiet cafe in South London, it is raining outside and is feeling really fresh, I’m like a bird by Nelly Furtado is playing.

1. I have been wondering about saffron, I remember seeing a few years ago a woman doing a whole course on saffron. It is quite an amazing thing, these little strands of red gold that are so precious, so expensive, they take so much effort to harvest, I think it has to be done by hand. And then I think of the ‘is-ness’ of a thing like how saffron simply is just saffron, and in its molecular structure and foundation it is just.. one dimensionally somehow just saffron? But actually its not true it has lots of aspects to it, it is affected and engages dynamically with its surroundings, you bloom it in water it does one thing, you do something else with it.. it does something else I guess? It just IS what it is, the saffron is not in resistance to being. Is it conscious? I certainly believe of course that it is a strand of God’s reality. When I cook with saffron I feel extremely sophisticated and better than everyone. I don’t actually think I like how it tastes, it is rather metallic. They used to sell these little fake cubes of it in Spain and we would add them to paella.

2. I feel like I am engaging with a lot of Zen Buddhist thinking as of late, you know the whole thing like, ‘being in resistance to what is is the cause of all suffering and that you can experience pain but suffering is a choice’ all that stuff. It is coming mainly from the DEEP work I am doing in my training as a Body Mind maturation coach, where I feel like I am having seismic shifts in my experience of who Medina is, in my relationship to all of reality. Sometimes it is pretty dramatic but most of the time it feels like this slow experience of a plant pushing itself out into the sun. There is a lot of experience of ‘popping’ or ‘flickering’ where I go into this state of awareness, or more that awareness arrives into me. It feels like all my life before this work, and now probably like 85 percent of the time I am Medina and I am trying to get in touch with timeless awareness, but sometimes timeless awareness comes in, and I am able to witness Medina as just this thought pattern, this geometry of an idea of who I am based off of years of…being me. I remember what I really am. Not who but what. Its quite bloody hard to write about this stuff because I feel like am I really engaging with these profound teachings or am I full of shit? But that judgment itself, the mechanical judgement, I have begun to just notice that too… and know that it is also not what I am. It’s just all happening all at once, the magic happens when I can engage in paradoxical thinking. I saw this quote yesterday that said “Your ability to hold two contradictory truths simultaneously is the hallmark of adult thinking. Life is beautiful and painful. Binary thinking is comfortable. Reality isn’t binary”

3. I really need to learn how to drive. I am so scared and I keep saying it’s expensive but that is just an excuse. Yesterday me and my friend Daisy, who is in the same predicament, said we should buy a car together and that would be an incentive to start to learn how to drive. But I think the car would just rot somewhere. Maybe I am scared of how free I would be!

4. I have been in a inquiry about power recently, what and who is a powerful person? What does it take? Growing up I absorbed this idea about power that powerful people we’re also liars. I was around a lot of ‘powerful’ people but could sense somewhere that there was a lack of integrity or deceitfulness. At least this is the story that I absorbed into my being. This caused a confusion in my experience. This is very much from a masculine perspective. I became aware a few days ago (with support from an exceptional mirror) that I have of course absorbed this in a way that I was not conscious of. I noticed that every time I launch a course, every time that I teach, before and after even sometimes during there is the presence of this fear that I am a fraud and deceiving people. Actually it goes deeper, its not a fear, its an assumption that Medina simply is somewhere fraudulent. So then when people have a really positive experience and everything is good I have a bit of an identity crisis. It is just so shocking to me that I have been living from this place and didn’t fully realise it. So yes.. for me being in my power comes with this automatic response where I doubt my integrity. And you know then I just keep going, because in the end I know my heart. And power, it is aliveness moving through a human being, it is to do with letting go and getting out of the way and allowing something to speak and channel through you. It is not something you have, it is something that moves through you.

5. I must start making art again or I fear something in me will cave in and DIE! I have not been making with my hands, and I feel haunted by some deep creative force, like an ocean that is threatening me more and more. I must drown in it. That last line is very Sufi of me. This calling of my creative life feels unlike anything I have felt before, I have always been making visual art, but looking back now I can see I have really only touched or grazed the edges of what longs to be known through me. It is a crazy crazy experience to know that something from that great awareness must move through me, and again I have to get out of the way and let beauty and necessity move through me. It arrives in these sort of shimmers, moments of true listening and of course never ever when I am in any way trying to feel it. I was in Cornwall a few weeks ago, deep in the South West of England and it just arrived, and it feels like the most important thing in the world to me. It feels beyond the familiarity of my experience of myself. It feels good to write about this.

6. Remembering this a lot: ‘Everything has been stripped away. To affirm that there is One is to look around and see that all of it is one thing. Beneath the outward weave of the world, this reality is one. Duality is an illusion, but it is not bad. It is one. Duality is part of the matrix we and others have made. It becomes problematic only when we believe it and invest in the idea that one thing is better than another.

   We accept duality while knowing that beneath it everything is one. Precisely because of experiential multiplicity, the science of Unity exists. We need duality in order to know the One. There is not even continuity, yet we persist in believing in it. Everything ends. Everything is constantly changing. Nothing is permanent.’ From my last substack, notes from classes with my father.

7. I am launching a new course that I want to title ‘The Holy and the Wild’ and its a longer format course, and it basically is just bringing together everything I love, all the INCREDIBLENESS of Sufism/Tassawuf, the feminine and mythology. The way I am envisioning is like 6 weeks, and each week we use the architecture of a fairytale or myth, taking from the phenomenal Women Who Run with the Wolves and then focus on a theme of the story, and deeply apply it to our own lives and weave in the Sufi teachings and also the Body Mind Maturation training I am in. I want this to be a deeper container, where the participants are asked to truly commit engage and bring themselves fully into the space. We would go on the arc of this journey together and allow ourselves to be transformed by story.

8. I want to share the offerings that are taking place apart from the above which I hope to launch soon

   -I am holding a class on Henna this Sunday! I can add the link here. https://medinatrevathan.com/products/the-spiritual-tradition-of-henna

   -I held and incredible class last Sunday called Daughter of the Moment on Sufism, Liberation and Womanhood. You can purchase the replay here. I think its an excellent introduction to my work.

   -And finally myself and my dear co-facilitator India Rose will be running our fourth cohort of Women in Sufism! I am deeply deeply proud of what we have created together. You can find out more here:

   https://medinatrevathan.com/pages/women-of-sufism-september-cohort

9. I am learning how to play the Kora, it is hard, I love it so much and I have reached a bit of a plateau.

Okay that is all from me I think, thank you for reading this if you got this far, tell me your thoughts if you have any!! Lots of love always, lets whack a poem in here at the end too.

Even though I am everywhere at once

I long for Your Grace.

Light encounters no obstacle in me, spreads to the edges which are

constantly expanding.

People say You walk through me on Your rounds

Or sit on a Throne amid majestic

Billowing clouds, face shining

but I can’t contain you You, I can’t

even see You, I’m in fact just the

Open sea of Your seeing

Even I am just a sesame seed beside You. I could be

Flung aside and disregarded by You

Which makes me all the more

Long for You

-Daniel Abdul Hayy Moore

It is often the things closest to us that are the hardest to see clearly. I was raised in a particular Sufi community in Southern Spain and I received a very distinctive flavour of Islam through this. Some of the essence of my experience as a child of being raised in this environment was the sensation that there was always inherent access and immediacy to the Divine. I felt drenched in the Divine, I felt totally supported, encouraged and nourished by the adults in my life around my direct experiences of God as a child, particularly by my father. Understanding more now as an adult around the developmental stages of a human being, I am infinitely grateful for this. Part of the work I dedicate myself to now is the dissolving of identity and story around who I am, who I have been being in the world. This maturation process of outgrowing the body-mind in order to see clearly the story in which it is living, and welcoming the possibility of knowing ourselves beyond it. It is a slow process of dissolving the structures of my beliefs and truly examining how I perceive reality, and, how I partake in it. It is a deep questioning of everything, all my assumptions. The things I just accept as reality. It is a fascinating experience to examine my Islam, my experience of being a woman and the strength and power that I feel in the spiritual lineage that I feel a child of.

There have of course and continues to be great battles, questionings and the deep journey between my feminine experiential knowing and ‘rules’ and absolutes I often find in Islam. My mind is laden with associations, automatic responses and somatic experiences even hearing the word Sufism. In light of all of this, I wanted to share some things with you. There is something coming up for me to do with me being a woman and claiming my power and capacity to share about these topics which often feel so laden with a constrictive patriarchal energy, whilst I wish to invite you into the dark fecundity of ‘I don’t know’ around these explorations. Of the permission to get it wrong, of there being no right or wrong.

A universe exists on my notes app, I fear that if I was to die they would reveal disconcerting amounts of insight about my psychological states. There is one note in particular I come back to over and over and over again. I wrote it in the winter of 2019 in a tiny flat staying with my father in Rabat, Morocco. I was 20 years old, brazen and sure that I was really grasping what was being taught. They are notes from my father teaching me about Tasawwuf/Sufism through the works of many influences Sheikh Muhammad ibn al Habib, Ibn Arabi, existential philosophers, and his own idiosyncratic insights. These are mingled with my own reflections. There is a ruthless existential cadence to them that I adore, a directness in tone which makes me feel close to my father, and something I feel I inherited from him.

I have tidied up these notes slightly and tried to keep some of the messiness or lack of structure or sense as I find it rather endearing. I am not sure why this is titled ‘Affirmations’ it simply is. And I will just leave this here before you read on: William Chittick shares that Islam is “a religion that teaches people how to transform themselves so that they may come into harmony with the ground of all being”

Affirmations: Tabula Rasa

Tabula Rasa baby!! Wiping the board clean. An empty board. Even Islam must be wiped away.

There is the famous Buddhist saying, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” We are thrown into the world. Facticity. The nafs (self) constructs itself around facts and reality. Universally, the human problem is that we believe the narrative our ego has constructed.

To ask someone to be completely objective is already difficult. Even the concept of God must be let go of. Sweep away everything you think you know. Authenticity and inauthenticity are not necessarily good or bad. Inauthenticity is when you take on the conventions of thought and action of the world you are in. For example, stepmothers are often asked how they get along with the children because stories portray them as evil. These assumptions can be swept away. She is simply a woman who married my father.

This is a deconstruction of the world as we see it. Like millions of others, the idea that everything is one and everything is the same can itself become another concept. Do not focus on your facticity. This is how the world should be. This is how I am. These are the means by which you function in the world. Your story about yourself. You view everyone through the filter of your own perception. In any encounter there is you, the other person, and their judgement.

Let go.

When you meet a situation, meet it as it is. You will fail again and again. With time, and by the will of Allah, you may reach a state where you overcome it. Yet you never overcome the struggle, that tension, that conflict is an aliveness. Even the concept of God you know must be put aside. Forget punishment or good and bad. You are only approaching it from your own perception.

Ghafla is lack of awareness, forgetfulness. Direct awareness is its opposite.

Religion, from the Latin meaning “to bind together,” as explanation or arena is equally false. To mistake the name for the thing named, the category for the indicated, is to make Tasawwuf/Sufism inaccessible. Non-realities that have crystallised in the imagination, such as history, class, or individuality, must be set aside. Do not get caught up in the structure of Islam, which is just a form. It is like admiring a beautiful car and forgetting that the car is meant to take you from A to B.

The subject of Tasawwuf is you.

The subject of Tasawwuf is reality.

Let us begin from the beginning, which is One.

After all that has been said, we are stripped right down. Garcia Lorca’s poem, Earth, Sky, Sun. (I am unsure as to what poem of FGL my father is referencing here) You and the world without value judgements.

The whole matter begins and ends with an affirmation of One.

Everything has been stripped away. To affirm that there is One is to look around and see that all of it is one thing. Beneath the outward weave of the world, this reality is one. Duality is an illusion, but it is not bad. It is one. Duality is part of the matrix we and others have made. It becomes problematic only when we believe it and invest in the idea that one thing is better than another.

We accept duality while knowing that beneath it everything is one. Precisely because of experiential multiplicity, the science of Unity exists. We need duality in order to know the One. There is not even continuity, yet we persist in believing in it. Everything ends. Everything is constantly changing. Nothing is permanent.

In dreams, objects seem insubstantial. When awake, they appear solid and therefore real. Real has come to mean solid. Yet physicists now tell us that solidity has no reality for them. We are subatomic, made of the same substance. Carbon. (Fritjof Capra)

The object slips away again. Forms are proved out of existence, and I am left holding a mental image of solidity in a vanishing world of forms, described as dynamic space. This growing awareness is disconcerting. Information about the real world becomes strange and contradictory, even ironic. The figures appointed to soothe our anxiety are often in worse states than we are. It is to this condition that Tasawwuf addresses itself.

We fear nothingness. Seeking help from others who share the same predicament does not resolve it.If you desire to know reality, you must know yourself. You are the key, the only key, to reality. You are nothing but a mirror. It is enough to reflect. The only way to understand existence is through knowledge of yourself. You are the doorway into reality. “Whoever knows themselves knows their Lord.”

Yet anxiety about what lies ahead, and within, prevents calm reflection. You seek tranquillising information to reassure yourself that everything is proven and secure. For now, information must be set aside. When you are distracted by pain, clarity is impossible. The human condition is fear of nothingness. We create stories to fill the gap. These constructions are necessary to a degree, but we must remain detached from them. They allow interaction, but we must hold the knowledge that everything we think we are is an illusion.

This requires a certain detachment. A lack of total investment in your story. A knowledge that you are nothing. Yet we forget and become caught between dhikr (remembrance/awareness of God) and ghafla. Between authenticity and inauthenticity. Heidegger’s Das Man. Reality is dynamic. There are multiple versions of reality. People describe the same event differently. Nothing can be fully trusted. Humanly, all one can do is weep.

This realisation, this is the starting point of Tasawwuf. It begins with surrendering the idea that you can think or reason your way out of the contradictions of lived existence. Complexity is too great. The main source of complexity is other people and their perspectives. The mind cannot grasp all elements of any situation.

So you give up. You accept what you see. Phenomenology. You see what you see. Surrender, though outwardly to the shaykh, is in truth to the Messenger, Muhammad, the Messenger of reality. You relinquish the idea that you can fully understand reality. Your story collides with others and becomes confused. At a certain point you accept the limits of human understanding. Emotion interferes. Clarity dissolves. You give up, yet reality remains. Submission is required to one who knows.

The shaykh represents the Prophet in the situation you are in. The Nur Muhammadiyya (Muhammadan Light). Through transmission from shaykh to shaykh, illusions are cut through. There is nothing mystical or fanciful here. The necessary qualifications are simple and profound: deep humanity, sanity, and disinterestedness. Most people are neurotic, overly absorbed in material affairs.

Disinterestedness means seeing life as dreamlike. Not false, but fleeting. You are in the world, but not of it. You engage without attachment to outcomes. You do not equate your worth with success or failure. If you lose your job, you have lost a job. Nothing more. It does not define you. Sheikh Darqawi was asked the best profession for a Sufi. He replied, “No profession.” Work should not enter the heart. It is a means to eat, nothing more. The Qur’an says: “By what you see and what you do not see, it is the speech of a noble Messenger.” He is not a poet, nor a magician. He embellishes nothing. He speaks reality as it is. “By the pen and what they inscribe… you are on a vast self form.” This is Allah soothing the Prophet, affirming the immensity of his character. Insan Kamil. The full human potential realised.

Existence is one, yet we are trapped in duality. To understand reality, we must loosen our engagement with duality and attach ourselves to one who has travelled from duality to unity. We must beware of importing discarded value structures into Tasawwuf. If Tasawwuf is reduced to guilt, sin, and repentance, we return to the beginning. Our conditioning can make seemingly highly moralistic hadith sound pompous. We must look beyond this. As you read, just as understanding arises, value judgements intrude. In speaking of fear or taqwa (reliance on God), we must abandon our assumptions. It is a response to the immensity of reality, not fear of punishment.

Transmission flows from shaykh to faqir (disciple) through the golden chain of transmission. Our concern is the alteration of the self. A peace treaty with inner rebellion. The nafs resists reason and inclines toward self-destruction. Some shaykhs say to treat the nafs like a young child. Harshness creates conflict. Gentleness allows growth. Set goals too high and failure brings despair. Be gentle with yourself.

Thank you for reading, share your thoughts with me, there is a lot here that is invigorating and challenging. I also wanted to share some sweetness and softness, an invitation to hear the words of Sheikh Muhammab Ibn al Habib, it was through him that our community found Islam.

Listen Here

Also I asked Chat GPT to critique me harshly on this Substack and the worst thing it said is ‘The Tasawwuf section borders on unexamined reverence. The notes are compelling, but they are largely presented rather than interrogated. You rarely push back on them as an adult with distance. For a piece about dissolving belief structures, there’s surprisingly little friction with the inherited framework itself. At times, it reads as transmission reproduced, not yet fully metabolised.’

Ha! Heres to more unexamined reverence!

Women of Sufism- An Online Container for Ramadan

I am launching an online container for Ramadan, it is a course about the feminine dimension of worship, or rather a feminine approach to relating to the Beloved. I have not officially launched it since I have not ironed out the details, but I am following my desire and impulse and sharing it here with you. By the will of Allah I hold the intention for it to be magnificent. I really feel it is a space for women who feel on the margins of the faith, or who are truly struggling to grapple with aspects of the religion and feel cut off from God. Here is a link if you want to sign up. Email me if you have questions.

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Love, Medina

Hello, welcome again before we get into dreams and animals, I have an offering for you all, a two hour class on Henna and how it can guide us to land softly into the new year. I have been working with henna for 8 years and have delved deep into relationship with her. What I am most fascinated by is how the Beloved manifests in this precious plant, what her nature is, what her character is and the spiritual tradition that surrounds her, it’s nothing short of magic. She is an incredible guide through the thresholds of our lives, and as now during this time where the outer world demands so much of us, so much pressure to birth ourselves come January into some magical new being, this class is gentle reminder to land softly, and nourished, winter is the time of stillness, not birth, allow yourself to be held by this plant. It will be taking place January 3rd and you can book your spot here.

Henna Ritual art for Transitions

Ruminating on Crabs and Stags

A few nights ago I dreamt of crabs, strange creatures, not beings that I can say come into my thoughts in the waking hours, but so strong was the impression they made upon me. Now I take this very seriously this business of dreaming, I believe, and I know that what occurs in our dreams matters just as much if not more as what is happening to us in our waking hours.

Dreams are letters from home, from the home beyond what our mental faculties can even begin to feel the shape of. Dreams come from the deepest parts of us, the hidden aspects of our unconscious, yet they also tap into great streams of collective reality, we are all connected, distinguished beings yes but not separate. Everything is in connection to absolutely everything, it seems all major traditions arrive at this realisation.

Two things come to mind, in 2024 I was obsessed with Carl Jung, I deep dived hard, I took courses on active imagination and at one point watched a 9 hour documentary on dreams by one of his greatest students Marie-Louise Von Franz (highly recommend!) and secondly the belief systems of the Aboriginals tribes indigenous to Australia. Their belief system is centred around the ‘Dreaming’ (Dreamtime): A foundational concept representing both the mythical past when creator spirits formed the world and the ongoing spiritual reality of the present.

Dreams have guided my life in these last years, for me it feels like a great listening act, I cannot remember where I read about asking yourself, with which ear do you hear the sounds of your dreams? And I recalled a dream where I had heard a river singing and in which I accidentally awoke a great creature, a stag majestic and vast by innocently watering it’s dead black body. As I turned and saw it stand in it’s full power and might I felt lightning, electricity running down my arms and I was overcome with fear at what I had awoken.

Afterwards I understood this stag to represent my inner power, the masculine reality within me awakening becoming more conscious. And the wonderful thing about dreams is that you can go back into them, I cannot tell you how many times I have visited this dream, imagined myself as the stag, felt the sensation of it in my body, asked myself questions from that place. Or become the river and hear my own song, my own sound. Since then, deer and stag have been so alive for me, I see them everywhere, and even for some time took deer as homeopathic remedy (certainly a conversation for another post)

A lot of people who would like to engage can’t recall their dreams, or find them mysterious, baffling and nonsensical, and here I would say wield the power of pure intent. Intend it, set the intention, ask yourself before you sleep, please show me something, allow me to recall something. And even if all you can remember is a wisp of an image or a feeling, this is a start, this is a thread you can follow deeper and deeper into yourself. Keep a pen and paper by your bed, write down everything, even if it’s just sensations. Tell yourself you are here. I held a retreat earlier this year where I met a woman had not been able to dream for two years after a difficult experience, except for one powerful dream. We spoke and I told her of the power of intent, of simply asking. After the retreat her dreams returned. In essence I feel it’s about what you are willing to be present with, say you are not dreaming and there is nothingness, can you be with that?

When I wish to recall a dream I just allow the dream to sit there, as it floods into my memory, it’s a state of gentle holding, everyone has had the experience of forcing a dream to reveal itself to you, the more you force the more it slips away from your grasp, you have to look at it out of the corner of your eye, like a cat pretending it’s not interested in something extremely interesting. I might write it down or sometimes someone will mention something the next day, that suddenly brings the dream flooding back, such was the case with the crab dream. My sister mentioned them the next day, and I saw a symbol of a crab which caught my attention and I referred to one of my favourite books ‘The Book of Symbols’ it’s a fantastic deep dive into many many different symbols from a Jungian perspective.

The crab it turns out comes to represent the water, the moon, yin, the realm of the feminine and feeling, and the realm of the home and of shelter. Now in my dream these crabs were being abused by men, and whilst I love consulting The Book of Symbols, of equal importance is my own association. So I thought what do I associate with crabs?? I am laughing a bit writing this to you all as I realise so much of my approach to this inner inquiry is trusting the ridiculous or unexpected parts of yourself, the moment you think that what you’re doing is stupid or non sensical you lose some of the magic or brush off real deep insight. So when I think of a crab I think they are rather sad creatures, and something about the way they can only scuttle side to side breaks my heart, I feel as if they are usually running away from something, rather rejected.

So where does this leave me? It feels rather fitting, in the dream these crabs were representing women and muslim men would marry them and use them, pry them open and treat them like objects. And I remember feeling like this is normal this is how things are but it feels so wrong. And I look at what’s happening in my life right now, where I am putting my energy into finding a new home for myself and moving out into a much more independent situation and the ways I have felt or experienced oppression from men in my life has reared their head during this time. And I have felt powerless like the little crab. So what do I do? I become present firstly to the fact my subconscious is trying to ask me to pay attention to something, and then I become present to how much pain I am in around these aspects of my life, and I let myself feel it fully, I give myself permission. And I allow these images these symbols and stories to influence how I move around in my daily life, how I make decisions. Creating meaning from them. In this case it was yet another message that I need to nourish and be extremely aware of what my actual needs are.

This enriches my entire experience of being alive, like the world is a huge interconnected web of invisible mycelium made of lights and every time I pay attention to my dreams I further my relating with the world, this light and I form a bond. Now when I see a crab I have the beginning of a relationship, or maybe it’s better to say that I become present to them, to the energy they symbolise, they trigger in me a different level of witnessing, of listening.

That’s all for this week beloveds, it’s been a strange time of heartbreak and questioning things in my little world, spare a prayer for me and have blessed Holy Days if you are celebrating. As always I would love to hear from you, what have you been dreaming lately?

Salaam

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It’s been a while, a busy strange old while. I have been very quiet on here even though more and more I feel the need to share away from what feels like the pervasive gaze of instagram. I am currently sat in a little Cafe in Brussels after deciding last minute to not hop on the EuroStar home.

I am integrating the thirteen days (very crucial number in mythological terms) of being in the wild lands of Iceland, I can wholeheartedly say that it has been a long time that I have felt so utterly and wholly gripped by the wildness of a place, by its sheer beingness. The mythological presence there feels untouched, like some wild and unruly cousin of the British isles who’s mother is rumoured to have been part giant.

Being there in the presence of the nordic myths and of Icelands deep pagan history, memories of the small dusty library of my childhood home in a tiny village in southern Spain gently arose, of Loki and Thor, great Gods of Asgard and their awesome feats of power and of mischief, I found great comfort in them. There is something magnificent about being a child and reading about greatness, great battles, unimaginable beasts from the comfort of your bed.

Out of the corner of my eye I would see huge shapes moving in the mist high on the mountaintops, the silent movements of giants and dragons, creatures of the deep dark. Their bodies stirring through the landscape, their sound requiring a different quality of listening, a listening from the ear that hears the sounds our dreams make in the night. These moments made me reflect on the creatures of the mythologies that are close to my heart, and two beings stood out, the Selkie and the Lindworm. These creatures were the inspiration for the course!

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Again and again I come back to the knowing that mythology is one of our greatest tools in facing the polycrisis we find ourselves in, wading in the dark of our own muck, confused about the state of the world inside and outside, slaves to our own loping thoughts and deep seated patterns, who we are used to being all the time.

Mythology offers us the capacity to address the deeply individual and the deeply universal experiences of reality. It touches the deepest part of the psyche bypassing the logical mind and entering into the realm of archetypes and myth, a realm our ancestors inhabited fully. Storytelling is one of our vital functions, one of the greatest gifts, its the way humans engage with reality. The purpose of this journey is to allow these myths of old to alchemise our own life experiences, to meet ourselves in the darkness. Mythic storytelling as a way of awakening the instinctual and imaginative realms…

This work I am offering is becoming more and more informed by the intensive year long training I am now in to become a Mind Body Maturation Coach, this teaching and this course is affecting the root of who I am being in the world.

I have been doing somatic therapies in myriad forms now for almost a decade, having a deep seated interest and commitment to therapeutic methods and what it even means to be an alive human being. This has led me down many paths of exploration and I seem to have landed quite squarely in this work, its unlike anything else I have experienced and it is frankly ruthless in the way it demands that you take responsibility for 100% of your experience of reality. Heres a few words on that.

“Combining Quantum Transformation, the Nature of Human Consciousness, BodyMind Ontology, and the shaping of identity from childhood, BodyMind Maturation works on both the Body and Mind simultaneously to activate a powerful and profound healing process of outgrowing your current way of relating to yourself and your world.“

I am very excited about what this means for my path in my life, I feel as if I have finally found something that addresses the core of my experience of reality and the ‘problems’ ( which I am learning are actually paradoxes!) that I find myself in over and over again. I can taste the beginning of a reality beyond who I am have been being all these years.

Which also brings me to share that during this year I have to complete 75 hours of training with real humans!! If you are interested in receiving 3 sessions with me(its free!) please reach out via my email address trevathanmedina@gmail.com with the subject “Body Mind Maturation Coaching”

I look forward to writing to you all next week and hope to see some of you on my course

Love, Medina

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Before we get stuck into a sweet article I wrote for almonds (and also for a magazine) I wanted to share two really special retreats I will be facilitating this September.

The first is “SONG OF FITRAH” taking place from the 1st-7th of September. A deep dive into womanhood, embodied somatic sound healing, exploring womanhood through mythology (with me!) and deep witnessing in community held by four beautiful women!

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The second one “SACRED PLANTS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN” very close to my heart I am co creating with Emilia Cianci, one of my bestest friends, and it will take place in Southern Italy September 23rd-27th. I am so excited to deep dive into the mythology, characters and spirituality of these sacred plants.

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Dreaming into the memory of almond

Sometimes I cannot sleep, and in that space I find an intimacy with myself unlike anything that can be accessed in the daylit hours. It induces, or almost imposes a texture of privacy and aloneness. There is nothing to do but lie in the dark and wait. A similar sensation to that of being in a warm bath, allowing yourself to be held, flirting with sleep, dropping into the realm of fluid, ever-changing images, one foot in, one foot out, dancing with consciousness.

This state has been taking me on journeys where I am gathering around the well of memory. There’s a technique, you see, of allowing the memory to gently float, not getting too overexcited at the remembering lest you scare it away. Visceral memories of my childhood in rural Spain come to visit, floating up from their deep sleep. I cannot believe what I can remember.

I am also unsure what came first, reading some Federico García Lorca, or these night journeys with memory, but they have been feeding each other. His dance with language feels like some kind of piercing to the heart, some kind of particular movement that finally soothes the restless child heavy in your arms. They touched me with a totality of longing that I rarely feel. I found semblances of some ancient sleeping memory that whispered at the periphery of my vision as a child, and that eludes me as an adult.

What is it about southern Spain that causes this llanto del alma, soul-cry, somewhere deep in the cavern behind my heart?

Tierra seca,
tierra quieta
de noches
inmensas.

(Viento en el olivar,
viento en la sierra.)

Tierra
vieja
del candil
y la pena.

Tierra
de las hondas cisternas.

Tierra
de la muerte sin ojos
y las flechas.

(Viento por los caminos.
Brisa en las alamedas.)

Dry land,
quiet land
of night’s
immensity.

(Wind in the olive groves.
Wind in the Sierra.)

Ancient
land
of oil lamps
and grief.

Land
of deep cisterns.

Land of death without eyes
and arrows.

(Wind on the roads.
Breeze in the poplar groves.)

I spent many formative years of my childhood in a remote corner of Andalucía, surrounded by olive and almond trees and stretches of deep, dry silences. A year in our lives could be traced by the almond—how we engaged our beings with it throughout the seasons.

In the springtime, driving with my mama and sisters in the car, the mountainside was illuminated soft pink and white by almond blossom. We would listen to old scratched Cat Stevens CDs and canto hondo (deep song) flamenco. I can remember how the petals formed on the branches, how they fell, the texture.

The gift of these experiences of how normal this reality was for us, the naturalness of it moves me. For now, underneath all the mess and noise of being a human in this age, where I am no longer living as rurally as I once did, and where technology seems to be seeping into the very core of our cells, there exists a singular desire to return.

To return to that unaffected, unmediated connection with the mountainside, with the eyes being nourished by the blossom. How right this is not necessarily good or bad, but natural and right. I am relearning what it means to gaze, to receive something truly with my eyes, not to penetrate it with my vision, but to allow it instead to meet me, to see me, to meet my eyes.

In the early summer, by our home which sat at the top of the village, there was a small almond grove. Myself and my little playmate Beatriz would go there and pick the unripe almonds whilst they were still fuzzy with their thick green skin, breaking them between two rocks. Inside, the not-yet-fully-formed almond would lay soft like a sleeping child awoken too early.

We would painstakingly break apart the thick skin with our strong little hands, both of us stick thin, wiry and already browned by the early summer sun. The taste was like a subtle burst of floral almond sweetness. We would spend the afternoon leaving little piles of husk as evidence of our innocent crime, or clamber over the wall of an ancient crone’s garden and pick palo dulce. One time she caught us and we got into real trouble.

Harvest season lasted from August into October. We had an ancient, chipped nutcracker. I can still recall the feeling of my small hands not being able to squeeze hard enough to break the hard shell.

Our neighbour Carmen ancient home down the winding hill we lived on where I would play. High up in the attic of the place, she would hang huge legs of ham and sausage to cure from the rafters and tell me about Jesus and the patron saints of our village. She would feed me sandwiches that consisted of half of a French breadstick with an entire chocolate bar inside.

I spent hours in the large, quiet courtyard at the centre of the house. Plants grew through the cracks in the uneven stone, and the space was heavy and utterly still with a knowing of itself, of decades of unchanging rhythm. One day, a man arrived with almond husk for the winter, which he unloaded in a vast pile in the corner of the courtyard. There was a heavy quiet in the air. I feel a sense of duty to these echoes, traces of dust, bits of almond shell, and the stillness in the space. The image of this scene is for some reason engraved in my memory, something about how this image could have been from two hundred, three hundred years previous. I relish in this, because everything feels so poluted with change now.

Come the winter, living so high in the mountains, we had freezing weather, snow that reached up to my chest, life would become fully internal, and growing up in that way, you were allowed to actually feel the cold of winter, there was no central heating. Similarly to Carmen, we would also receive deliveries of hessian sacks stuffed full of almond husk. We would burn this in our estufa de almendra almond burner. It was a tall cylinder, black, with a tiny door at the base and a large lid through which we would pour the almond husk.

I can still remember my mother lifting the sack and the clattering orchestra the almonds created alongside a cloud of dust, she would then crouch down and with a match light the whole thing up at the base, within ten minutes it was emiting a powerful heat, it warmed quickly and penetrated into your bones, but it burnt fast too, meaning we could easily get through three sacks in a day. I can feel its heat radiating now behind my eyes, on my arms.

In that way, the almond nourished and engaged my eyes, nourished my tongue and my cells, and radiated warmth for my body in the bitter cold. This is what fascinates me, the alchemy between human and tree, its a multilayered multifaceted relationship, the different branches of its offering to us. I didnt even go into all the Spanish desert and dishes that are created with almonds!

Is there a place where our vanished days secretly gather? In my memory I find my relating, I am amazed at the wealth of image and sensation that gathers around something as humble as an almond, and I know somewhere quietly that those trees remember me too. The places we have loved and loved in, testify for us, and will weep for us when our time comes to leave this realm.

Love, Medina

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