Assalamu alaikum, it's wonderful to be here in the Bay Area and wonderful to see everybody in person and online. We're extremely happy to be present for this program called Presence and the Bay Area is very special for myself and especially for my father. Alhamdulillah it's a place where he started his journey to Islam and it's a place where you know there's been many amazing things happened you know have happened here and it's a place full of goodness and knowledge and so it's really really nice to be back here after I think it's been about 10 years or so that he's last been here so Alhamdulillah it's really nice. We're excited just to be here have this program also some of you may have heard we're launching an online program and you'll hear more about that when as the program continues. So without further ado I'll hand over to my father and I'm missing so Bismillah. All right take him to stand up. Yeah so do you use that for this? No you're good. You can do it right this somewhere. It's solid. I don't know why it's not. I can't see it so. Asalaamu Alaikum Alhamdulillah Alhamdulillah Alhamdulillah I always am forced or insisted from within to begin with Alhamdulillah praise be God belongs to God and for whatever comes and for whatever is especially a gathering like this where people have come all of you have come with an intention of some sort and that intention will be rewarded whatever takes place whatever I say I don't say. So the hopes and the best of what you might expect to get from a program like this even in two days it's already happened if you've come with that intention and that's for me and you equally and I am no different than you in that in that this is something for me in which I will learn simply by your presence and the exchange that we have that is subtextual subliminal that happens between people and between us at all times in spite of the words or along with the words or along with every what we give or take from each other and whatever events take place outwardly physically there's something else more subtly taking place so coming with the intention Alhamdulillah Alhamdulillah Alhamdulillah I say that because that will be the result of this this experience a job. So this is a long day I just come from New Mexico where the fires are raging and where I'm still suffering from both the grass pollens which have come up in the smoke and about 10 days of intense smoke in which my eyes and even finding my my lungs were affected a lot and I'm still sort of recovering from that so if I'm coughing along the way you know forgive me for but you know the fires are pretty serious evacuations and immense destruction and how homes and things like that. So Alhamdulillah good to see you all here this topic of this these two days is presence what does presence mean what does presence mean is something also in terms of what's happening in as we go along through the day I do like to have an interaction and questions comments anything that you misunderstand or any terms that you don't understand please please feel free to say wait a minute what do you mean what does that mean I mean even though there I think most people here are Muslims some may not be and those listening in some may not be Muslims some online because there's a pretty good online presence for this program as well but I like I'm sorry was that a question that was a a phone or something it's a little comment on the day and age in which we live so I'll jump off right away let me say one of the things I always say at the beginning of my presentations is do not expect something linear I didn't even hand that I outline out to you all today and I really if I have an outline that I give out to people I have to refer to it and I have used to have people would say hey you didn't get to the next topic in the outline but really I make this disclaimer do not expect that that's not who I meant and that's not my style my style is primarily more artistic and poetic and so the jumping off right now with that little sound that came from some device I had a student who is in Dubai and she said to me well you're coming to Dubai will you have dinner with us yes and she said would you be so kind just to talk to my daughter who's 14 because she's being bullied at school because she doesn't have a cell phone and I said well what you know I can't what am I going to tell a 14 year old who doesn't have a cell phone and her friends do and she said well would you please do that I said okay I'll do it so you did that we sat down so we sat down I sat down with her and her mother and I said to her so your mom tells me that you get bullied for not having a cell phone by your friends and she rolls her eyes I said yeah and I said well you know why your mother doesn't want you to have it and she rolls her eyes again says yeah I know because she loves me and I said well wait a minute if she loves you why would she not want you to have that and then she didn't roll her eyes this time she got serious rolling the eyes by the way for the teenagers is what I call their bs meter and see no meters meters have have things to go like that if it's a little bit and it goes like that if it's really big you know meter a little needle but the teenage bs meter is rolling the eyes it's like uh you know that's I've heard that all before too many times and uh she was serious after that you know how is it that your mother's love she said well devices divide and I'd never heard and I'd never put those two words together devices divide and so we were both kind of shocked at like wow you know what it's a brilliant thing she said and we waited for a moment and then she said and there will probably be blood we were shocked again and she said maybe even more because device division and divisiveness separation she didn't say this but we know that that's division separation and the inability to see that we are done Adam the children of Adam that we are us the simple ability says wait a minute okay you're wearing a red hat that says trump 2024 or whatever you're doing something else you know you've got a rainbow shirt about the LGBT doesn't matter we're all Danny Adam or old children of Adam it's very hard to stay with that in the modern world especially especially when we have on the social media we have we have mechanisms that will send material and in entertain or in train or bring attention to this group of people and that group of people and they'll be identified and separated and and promoted within their own group and divisions divide and rule is the principle one of my biggest theses that I've always brought is the ability because Hikmah as a Hakeem it means that means that we look at the sort of basic principles and underlying patterns understanding the basic designs and principles that God has created in this creation in every aspect of this creation there's a pattern which we call the sonnet of Allah the pattern of Allah the manner in which Allah has done these things and this is what makes metaphors such a great thing because we can look at something in nature and we can see the way in which it manifests itself and that will teach something about something in ourselves or something about society metaphor is the sort of overlapping and the reflection of all forms and realities and the patterns that we can begin to see Jalaluddin Rumi he talks about the ant that's crawling on the carpet and the ant sees the red the the black threads and the yellow threads and then the green threads and then the ant is smart enough to begin to recognize oh this is the pattern and he begin to get a semblance and understanding of the pattern of it and Rumi says but he does not see the entire carpet or the maker of the carpet so this is what we're dealing with and this is why you know as Muslims we say there is no God except Allah and Muhammad is his messenger but that as a convert I remember one of the remarkable things that when I looked at it closely it was no God no God there is a law and that Allah means is a name for a reality that's beyond anything we can formulate as a concept as an image as a representation of the absolute and ultimate reality that's beyond our hand beyond our ability to know or even conceive of we can't even conceive of this is what makes Islam and true monotheism remarkable and unique God is something greater or the God Allah is something greater so Hikmah is the ability to begin is the principles of understanding and beginning to understand to see to recognize and make use in terms of understanding of the basic principles of the patterns and the design of the creation in us and outside of us so my teacher in you know I look for a teacher excuse me this is the this is the the the fires in New Mexico the fires in the fallings there might be with this all day so please forgive me for that my teacher in Pakistan that I finally met he said I learned medicine in the forest with my grandfather and I'll teach you whatever I know and that was the time I knew he was my teacher because that principle we whatever we learn whatever we learn and wherever we would in whatever form we learn it we will if we're learning in a deep way will that understanding we have of that topic and that particular subject will be relevant to anything else we might want to understand if there's true understanding in terms of the depth or the principles of what we're learning does that make sense anyone okay I usually look for nods out there and nods nods are one of these great communicate some of you've heard this from me and if I reiterate anything please forgive me but you know a lot of these things need reiterating because a lot of the material I present is not typical and obvious and not I don't think something you find often in books not the subtle the subtle realities one of the basic principles but that I teach and I concern with developing amongst the Muslims and amongst anyone who's willing to make the same track which is the development of the principles of Hikmah the principles of these basic when I say Hikmah I also say Hikmah and I can do I'll do this thing and this this gesture that I make represents a principle or a basic Hikmah kind of like a headline or a bumper sticker or something to put on the wall some basic principles I remember I worked with a woman once by email and I said to her I said you know she was very sensitive hyper sensitive person and I said this what really an important that something important for you to learn and discover and learn and understand and discover in a deep way in which you know this not that it's an idea only and that is sensitivity is a strength it's an enormous strength now there's that nod I was looking for right there my teacher one of my teachers said he said he said you know we we believe the wise man nods because he's wise and he said maybe he's wise because he nods and that's a deep principle to deep wisdom there's there's a good that's a good wise person nodding we wise we nod and and we could say that when that person the wise person nods because he's wiser vice versa because what's happening there is the affirmation bodily affirmation of recognition what that person is saying is true I hear you I agree with you I understand it I recognize it I recognize that I know it again from inside we have a common reality that's taking place and that nod connects us it could be they would you know listen or bank I remember sitting with a husband and wife the husband was a great scholar well great scholar a recognized scholar probably great too I that's not the point but he was a scholar was very dry in his nature very much in his books quote all sorts of things from many many books and I was talking to him about a lot of these principles online and he was everything I said he was just there still unmoving face just he didn't there wasn't not even one and she was behind him she was doing that doing that whole time and I thought well who's getting this and and you know I mean some people cannot nod and still be taking it in but that's a dry attitude in it and it's not a collecting this topic of this conference or this workshop is presence being present and the subtitle being better connections in ourselves and then with others and I have a firm belief in this principle that people say well you know I can't meet people and like you know I'd love to meet somebody and you know hook up or get married or blah blah blah whatever some people are very good at meeting people and one while there's tools and there's techniques and there's principles that we can learn depending upon who we spend time with and our you know where we're taught and where we learn these things in what sort of setting some people are very formal but they know how to sail they know how they know how to talk I one of my dear friends uh one of my dear brothers I tell him I'm just sitting this is my jumping off on tangents by the way I was sitting in a coffee shop with a dear dear friend of mine who's deep wisdom great knowledge of Islam but you know he's had problems with his teeth so he's no longer has any teeth and he's gotten overweight so he has you know kind of a belly that shows and he just wears whatever is there he's not interested his his point being I don't care about them it's like I'm fine I'm fine at myself I'm okay with myself so I don't care about other people we were sitting there having coffee and talking and whatever we were talking about the couple the next table when they got up the late leave they came over and they said you were talking about such as a country are you from this country they brought up a conversation and asked the questions about what we're talking about and then they left and then this man who was you know he was just shadowed my love bless him and that's who he is and you know for him that's great but he said to me um he said why did they go up and talk to you they didn't even look at me and I said by name I said look I said look look at what you're wearing look at your teeth look at your hair look at your state you know I could say that to him and he was recognizing it and I had you know I have I was dressed well I had the my bright yellow Moroccan shoes I said you know that people when they meet you on first impression 80 percent I mean this is inside 80 percent of the judgment on who you are and what you are is on your clothing and 80 percent of that is on your shoes now women understand this better than men some some men don't get it my wife my wife if I'm just wearing my clothes it's most relaxed clothes my most relaxed clothes she said so you're going to be homeless today and I I finally started listening to her say yes of course I you know I I mean I'm doing my best but uh but it's not easy so back to this what I was saying in the first place which is connecting the the basic word at one point connecting in ourselves is a key to being able to connect with others why why is connection in ourself going to have anything to do with our connecting outside of ourself with other people can I ask anybody that any why okay if you can trust yourself you can trust others you love others how you would love yourself well I mean those that's a question you know I mean is it possible to know others without knowing yourself connecting with yourself that's another question is connecting the same as knowing well what is knowing any what is knowing I mean we can get into very sort of more subtle complex philosophical and semantics of it but knowing something there's different ways of knowing something you know the principles as Muslims you know the principles of yakin yes people know this term yakin certainty there's one of the traditional ways of describing certainty of knowing is the three three stages anybody know those three stages ilmo yakin i know yakin and hawk yakin and can you describe what what are those three stages what's ilmo yakin means what knowledge knowledge meaning what there's a metaphor that's used for it ilmo yakin is you you learn that there's a fire in the forest this is appropriate for me coming from New Mexico these days there's a fire in the forest i know yakin is what seeing you see it with your eyes you actually there's the fire and then hawk yakin is you're there the smoke's doing this thing through your eyes and your lungs and you're in the fire it's degrees of knowing and degrees of the same thing true for the self we can learn that well I have certain amount of earth air fire and water and in this particular balance and therefore that's my massage which has become a popular catchphrase these days as if that's going to help us know ourselves which it can but one of the things that's important here is the recognition of one of our Islamic principles by a love's design and articulated by some of the best of our scholars and philosophers through these many years which is the self contains an entire universe no more no less when I went to my teacher in Pakistan he said I learned medicine in the forest a love's pure creation without corruption it used to be we could learn so much from the animals a love didn't place those animals there at random the animals and everything in his creation was purposeful and part of this extraordinary perfection of perfection of design with us at the center of it not at the highest point or better than any piece of it but at the center of it as his caliphas and representatives with the mandate to care for it we we have an obligation to care for the stone the horse for the camel for the bug even the mosquito in whatever manner that care is is meant to be so wholeness we talk about health health health health health health health health you know whole foods I remember the whole foods in New Mexico there's a sign as you're leaving whole foods it says the world the the world's healthiest grocery store something like that and someone crossed out the H and put in a W but but the point is we talk about health all the time but what does it mean it means whole it means whole to become whole and how whole do we become do we become whole and then I did in our heads or do we become whole my teacher in Pakistan he used to say the entire whole being the healthy present present being is the one who thinks from his toes to his fingertips his face and his heart and who feels from his toes to his face hands and heart and those two are whole together and that present that means present whole wholeness I remember I was in England and I was at in Glastonbury and they gave me this woman amazing woman her name was zero and zero is this woman convert woman who supplied thousands and thousands of wheelchairs that she designed out of plastic that could be used in Africa for people that need you wheelchairs and she was kind of an unofficial mayor of Glastonbury even though she was a Muslim in Glastonbury is famous for the for the Abbey that was there and the Christian community and the even the people say that Jesus and I his alum visited Glastonbury at some point a while you know but she set up this program in the Glastonbury Abbey and took two days of workshop but the point I want to make here is that I gave a lecture there to a group of people I was the only couple of Muslims is mostly Christians and people from Glastonbury and other people and a woman came up to me afterwards and said you know I really appreciate your presentation and I appreciate your your ease with yourself and I never heard that before I'd never heard ease with myself I do something you know but I realized well I guess I do have a certain amount of ease I mean I can say what I feel I need to say I can be with you know say anything to anyone without sort of hesitation I know I recognize what she said to me was like a revelation revelation that yeah I do have an ease and I remember also I was asked to do something many years before that I was asked to I was asked to give the lecture on Rumi at Harvard and I thought about this I'm not a scholar I've never read Rumi in the original language I know that Rumi's been a part of my life since I became Muslim and before I became Muslim because Rumi talks about in his matnavi talks about making shahada and that you just recite this formula and you become Muslim and I remember I didn't know anything about it and I was walking down the street in San Francisco and I said well wait a minute let me see there is no god but thee god and Muhammad was his messenger and then I waited for something to happen you know like it didn't happen but it did happen a couple of months later that so that was the beginning of it so it happened from Rumi first and then I actually met a Muslim and it did happen but I was at Harvard and there was a group of maybe three or four hundred people and there was this and you know it was the Emerson Hall and was this this what do you call this sort of high sort of scholarly kind of place that what am I doing here I'm an artist I don't you know I've never gotten a degree of any kind I don't have any initials behind my name at all not even an MFA master of fine arts I didn't have that and I thought but wait a minute my heart is true I believe in Rumi and I made and so I began to sing I just but I had this I had this it was the first time that I felt I could do whatever I wanted to do say whatever I needed to say and there was absolutely no fear of any sort and I realized later that that was from the primary the work that I'd been doing that we call somatic work with my teachers working with the body and recognizing that the body how can I say it simply so many ways of saying it Adam when Allah created Adam he placed the spirit in Adam at that time and Iblis objected what are you doing and Allah said I know what you do not know but at that time atoms the spirit was put into Adam's body and that was the beginning of the human experience to this day like all of us with that spirit in this body and that's principle the Hikma a basic principle in the Hikma is the spirit lives in this body this body that goes through all of these details and all of these things and all these ins and outs and all these places and times and events and experiences and all of these exchanges and our body contains the biggest part of our memory of our identity of who we are and what we are for those of you who maybe heard me say this before I'll reiterate reiterate it but the the the rate at which synaptic patterning is taking place in our mother's womb there's anybody here who heard me talk about the thousand and one nights or thousand thousand days for the no okay well I can reiterate it but there's I was there was something I discovered a lot of what the work I've been doing is a lot of it's in the realm of neurology which I've discovered being separate from spiritual things offers a great opportunity to see how neurology can be commentary and proof for a lot of these things that we we have inherited in our traditions and so one of the terms and one of the expressions one of the terms I found them in the neurological field is what they call the thousand days and the thousand days represents the last trimester of our being in our mother's womb and the first two years of life and that period of a thousand days in which our brains are not even formed there's no crevices and crinkles it's just almost smooth but the learning experience that's taking place in that thousand days is the neuro neurosynaptic patterning that takes place at the rate of what kind of speed how many synaptic any numbers can you imagine anyone I mean I'm obviously it's unless you know that it's kind of a it's kind of a nebulous abstract principle 40,000 synaptic connections are made per second that's huge in terms of learning patterning foundational building of a sense of self in a body in a body that continues up until you know the second you know in the in the second years of life now interesting when we when that thousand days is up that's when we learn how to speak that's when we've taken in all this data from that previously built and designed synaptic patterning of a kind of intelligence and being then we begin to speak we learn how to talk that's when at around two speaking starts to come in and that's when we shift a lot from that to more of an outward taking in and learning these words and mimicking and connecting in a different way to the world outside of us the point finally here being the recognition that we have a hard time in the modern paradigm to understand is that our identity and our memories are primarily in our bodies not up here in the brain somewhere along the way we got this idea everything happened here in the skull and that was never in any of our traditional models we believed in character and the perfecting of character the change of character but character has to do with an overall sort of quality of our being so how do we know ourselves you know someone once asked their prophet said to him how do I know if I'm a good person and prophet said to him say ask your neighbor and the truth is from neurological point of view from a scientific point of view from a traditional point we cannot know ourselves without the other we can go into a cave and all sorts of things can happen but to know who we are we need the others and that others that connection with others begins when we're babies and all of us know this thing when we see a baby there's not a thing we read in the book well there's a baby I need to do this thing but we don't we didn't read it but we just go to the baby we say hey how are you we change our voice so the baby and we'll make spaces or gestures and babies within moment minutes can connect and mimic what they see that's the also the beginning of a very human development of what was called the ability to imagine the ability to posit another reality there that being a human being which enables the positing of one of self as well I mean in other words there's a reciprocal reality that's there human and I'm here now that the interesting thing is that ability is not developed with children the many many thousands of children who have been raised by animals because they don't have the same thing of the gays they don't have that same thing of the I mean a lot of the animals don't even have eyes in the project if you think about it but that human quality and there's many examples of that and so children that have not had that gaze early on they're remarkable beings and they have all kinds of sensory and sensibilities that are very developed and extraordinary and it's in the anyone who studies these it's amazing thing to study because it's so interesting so the self is developed in this way and then every instant of every day of every moment that takes place more or less memory is imprinted on our being by our senses that the Hakeems used to say that everything that we sense is written on our blood and then our blood in turn builds you know the bones and the tissues and the organs and all these things of our being physically so the self what a woman came to me once uh one of the things I do with a lot of people I work with I send them it's two documents to fill out one is a timeline a history of their health their life you know from birth to the present with important events and illnesses and things that you know impacted them are meaningful for them some people it's very easy to do some people it's very hard some people will be the long and complicated and then the other one is what I call symptom picture just like what what ails you you know how is these systems how your eyes your head all these different parts and part of the reason I do that is not for necessarily the the data that I'll get and use which I will use for homeopathic medicine but for them to do it themselves it's kind of little kind of seek without them realizing it's kind of little biography themselves and that's helpful to recognize well I did this this this this and I haven't put it in chronological order just so they have this and a lot of people find that healing holding bringing holding us anything that brings connections within ourselves you know the great line Humpty Dumpty fell off the wall and great empty had a great fall and all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put them together again and I know it may sound cheesy but only a lock and put it together again and but the irony of that particular story of that particular poem or there's rhyme or whatever it is that Humpty Dumpty anyone know who Humpty what Humpty Dumpty was where that came from from what Charles the first but what was who was Humpty Dumpty huh no Humpty Dumpty was a cannon was a big cannon and it fell off a wall and shattered and that was it no more Humpty Dumpty all the king's horses on but the point is we get shattered you know I mean you know the great the great line about presence that I have to quote here I feel redundant because I've done so many times like Shakespeare you all know who I'm talking about when I say some of you know what I'm referring to when I say Shakespeare right Tariq sorry Shakespeare there's no P in Arabic so Shakespeare Shakespeare he said to be or not to be to be or not to be simply that is the question and then he said is it nobler to take arms in the face of the slings and arrows of life and that's the point I'm making here the slings and arrows of life it happens at the moment we're coming at the moment we're coming to this realm they used to like smack their baby so they would cry you know as if that was a necessary thing which is obviously not but but you know the saying is that the wise person the wise person there's a one who laughs at death when someone dies because whatever that person however they live they're right they will go to as they say their just desserts they weep at the birth because they know this pure being and this is what we believe firmly as most of we come into this world with absolute purity but and even Freud finally before his death admitted okay I had that part wrong he changed he changed his opinion to something more within the Islamic principle we come in pure they laugh at the death weep at the birth and then they say the wise person is silent at the marriage because Allah knows and that was a good response for the ones that got that way and this is wisdom yes well they're both come together don't they I mean so many people when they're getting well I mean how many times I've heard priests people say I know now especially when there's addictions involved they say I know now I can't be with those people I need to be with different people oh sorry the question was you know what about people that are negative and they sort of zap your energy and are these choices we make or what was the other part of that it's both is it an energy it impacts us or or is that how we respond it's both things but how are we respond can be something we take on consciously and we can consciously make choices to do we do know because the famous hadith and what someone asked the prophet said I'm you know are the this is the great question about free will that people who aren't Muslim there Buddhists can understand it but a lot of people who aren't Muslim don't understand how can we have free will and how can there be absolute command someone asked the prophet said I said I'm you know is this is the story something that's been pre-written or is it something that's unfolding and he saw I said him he said the pens have written it they've lifted themselves and the ink is dry right tariff that's that's absolute it's written but we do have this odd thing that we can't it's hard for us to fathom in terms of a logical understanding of free will we have choices and we can change and another thing that comes up when you say that yes there are some people that zap your energy no question about some people that are negative about everything and there are some people who you know they're positive but it's not obvious positive like my wife refers to respect for any Christians I mean I don't mean it belittle any any group of people or any path anyway but she's much uses term she said you know some these Christians are have kind of euphoric pathology pathological euphoria you know everything is nice and wonderful and a lot of Muslims have that one of the big tasks I've had with the Muslim community which has primarily been my people that I've worked with for now for over 50 years is getting them to be real and not mashallah mashallah alhamdulillah well how are you feeling well I feel like crap alhamdulillah you know and I gotta say that one of my teachers in Morocco he'd say how are you doing kappa how and I say alhamdulillah which is sunnah alhamdulillah ala kulli hal but what's your particular house you know I feel just so excited I can barely stand on my own two feet I feel so bad I just want to go out punch somebody you know alhamdulillah but getting them to be real and it's called spiritual bypassing spiritual and that's a term that came from the Buddhist but it's very accurate and that's one of the biggest tasks I remember man I was playing somatic work with and the somatic work is where you enable a person to go into a journey I call it a visceral journey into the feelings and sensations sensations of all kinds that are in her body and I remember you know when a person successfully makes that journey they begin discovering all sorts of things in their memories and things that they don't even recognize as memories better in their body and I remember he had this state that he was in and and and part of one of the things that you just might see we'll get to that later might see some of you know how many how many of you shared might see with me anybody else few people might see is moving according to making movements according to this visceral sensations and these more subtle nuanced sensations telling and allowing your body and giving it license to move whatever so he was making movements and sometimes when the person's in that state they'll be very very slow movement has to be slow and it might be tremoring but you can tell there's a state of being in what something is happening more than simply lifting the hand there's something deeper because all of our movements are absolutely integrated with the sense of self absolutely how we get up from a chair this is Feldenkrais and Alexander the people know those people Feldenkrais these are body working people Feldenkrais you must know and and Feldenkrais to talk about when you're sitting in chair how you get from get up from that chair is patterned you'll get up in a certain way you always get up the same way you use the same muscles the same shift of center of gravity etc etc Ralph Walder Emerson the American philosopher and writer he said for the one who has eyes and wisdom by the gate by the posture and the gate the person has their being is exposed as if it were a Swiss watch opened up and you can see the inner workings by the way they stand or by the gestures they make etc etc everything the body speaks at all times the body this is one of my hiccups the body speaks at all times awake or asleep from the body to the body and to the self yes come yes so do I need to reiterate that yeah she was saying about you're in coma and and you at some point in some place you had this impulse to walk rhythmically down the street you know actually at the last workshop and and you know a low island we don't know because places have a reality that's much greater than we realize to you hypocrites wrote 20 volumes on water air and places the geography of place there's one amazing researcher who talks about how the geography of play of a place of the environment will affect the speech and the language of the people who live there amazing man Alfred Tomates in the 40s amazing things he he worked with anybody I want to get lost on that because I want to get back to this man who is moving in this state it's the kind of state he got into and he was moving it's something was happening inside him and he was a scholar and he was very erudite but a lot of his Islam was didactic it was wrote it was something that Hamdillah to this day now he's becoming he's making it real but he had this amazing thing in which he did something and and I called him on that later I said you know that session we didn't he just cracked up laughing because he knew it was he very slowly with great difficulty he reached up very slowly like this it was like something deep was happening and you could see and he took his cookie off he left his cookie and so what was the meaning of that he moved from being a dress up Islam Muslim dress up of Muslim to being a real Muslim more genuine in himself so so the connections in oneself and knowing oneself we can say I know myself I I mean I met a man recently who said well I spent a lot of time with with people as a as an attorney and I'm used to them telling lies and telling the truth and I begin I know the difference and I've developed that in myself but I was questioning and you know a lot and but due respect I said I didn't feel that he honestly did know himself but the way I would test something like that about a man back to what the prophet says how do I know if I'm a good man ask your neighbor well the thing one of my basic principles that I use in my practice and I've seen results from this that are remarkable which is ask your wife or ask your daughter or your son we don't have neighbors anymore barely some places if you have neighbors used to be thankful but a lot of men I mean I've had men I've had men sort of recoil at that you know whatever happened to you know the Islamic principles on the patriarchy that you know the the heroic thing of patriarchy we're we're men we're in charge you know that kind of stuff I have to doze men dislike what I say when I say that if you really want to know someone say you do what watch them use an old computer I don't get it you get a what I see I say I say okay yeah my one I one of my one of my things I've done about age how old a person is is I feel and now at 81 I can wear my pants at my waist instead of down there yes please yes more or less yes yes absolutely well what the question was or the comment was wherever we go we're taking in information more or less I added because we also learn how to create I mean the modern term they would use for this is boundaries that is we have a limitation and boundary to our being some things we don't want to take in one of the things I wanted to do with this workshop and I didn't have it set up was create a camera obscura you know what a camera people know what a camera obscura is I've been a science nerd since I was a little kid and when I was like 13 years old I used to build camera obscuras in which you take a room that's completely darkened and you open one hole about this size in one wall and anybody what happens if the sun's sunlight outside what happens a beam of light array of light anyone else what happens in that room like that is the same thing that happens at every moment for all of us which is the eye eye takes in all of the I mean you're seeing me up here carpets walls but what what's happening you know one of these neurologists that I really like I mean he can get a little carried away but I like him because he said something that I really appreciated what she said he said the eye is not like any other part of our body it's like a piece of our brain pushing out through the holes in our skull brilliant because the eye it doesn't the light ray doesn't know everything comes in everything comes in that's why I wanted to build a camera obscura and everybody but when you if we really have this this one of these walls open to a lighted area sunlight better that hole would project onto this wall everything out there upside down that's a camera obscura that's why when I was when I was a little you know 13 year old nerd so I built it for the neighbor kids and said come and look at this and go outside and they go up you know we had great fun I I did it with my kids right because that's what's happening in the eye and the eye is translating everything that's out there as a brain with the break with the rods and the the retinas and it's turning there was a man also at that time many years ago maybe 50 years ago 40 no 40 yeah maybe 50 years ago who created glasses that if you wear the glasses it turns everything upside down and of course that you know walking you're doing anything it's like it's it's hard to do but in time after about two weeks people back normally there so it's all normal but then when they take the glasses off everything's upside down again what we see is enormous everything we see we take into some degree there are a lot of studies that say we remember so much more than what we realize we're taking in and I see in my people that I work with for example I see couples who have distressed between them after watching long episodes of a particular tv series and they have fights afterwards and they don't realize why they're having the fights because they don't realize that it wasn't the words and the plots and the stories there were heroes and there were victims and it was something underneath it the obvious of the discussion the dialogues the style that they were learning we're learning so much from movies television and that's been going on for decades and decades now all right you're well you're absorbing it you know bob dillon how many how many people are familiar with bob dillon's work okay not as many as would be nice to see he said because he won the Nobel Prize for literature and a lot of people said this guy's a pop singer what how can you win an award for literature Nobel Prize and he gave a one hour and it's available on youtube he gave a one hour answer to that question and the one hour thing was he said people people appreciate and they reiterate my my songs not because of the words he said because of the source from which they came and he said the sources of all my songs are from the odyssey moby dick great literature that he read when he's very young and he said he knows all these songs came forth from a poetic right brain part of his being that was not logical that just came you know the uh mr tambourine man that comes you know the muse that comes to him just creates this stuff but he recognized that it came from all of these things that he was affected deeply by in terms of their meaning and the depth of their meaning so right brain left brain so that's how many are familiar with this current concepts of right brain left brain the quran the quran says on the day of judgment our skin and our bones will speak i was going to refer earlier that way back many many years ago there were studies done about how much we actually remember is huge but we don't retain some people are very good some people memory and presence are very connected one of the examples always give is is you know when we have an event that's remarkable we remember things about it there are people i had a young boy i was working with one time and it was so sad because he was one of these people who remember everything are you familiar with that people people who remember everything huh and well that's what they used to call it but yeah it's more than that it's like they you can give them a date they'll tell you where they were that date they can tell you to close it everything they can go on at length there's that young man and these people are considered uh they used to be used the word savants you know and unfortunately they called them idiot savants you know like but because they're not normal people but our capabilities and within us are so much greater than we realize some some are developed in this way some are developed back to your question though we take in everything and what we learn how to do is to create not just boundaries or barriers it's like nowadays this term of boosting your immune system my comment is i do not want to be immune i want to be alive and healthy alive in the way that's i can manage whatever comes but we can look at boundaries as being obstacles in something barriers or we can learn it in terms of sustaining and maintaining wholeness of our locus and being you follow me we don't let that come in but if it comes in we can manage it an example of that i mean my wife and i when we watch we watch a movie we do watch movies we have a we have a we have an automatic fast forward when it comes to the sex scenes that i mean they happen and and it's not it's never incumbent on the plot of the story or the exposition of it but if you take it in you take it in something we used to be this term the term that we used to use in the language was called obscene obscene what's the meaning literal meaning of obscene anyone literally it means obscene i mean you don't you don't you don't look you don't see it you don't want to see it there's no need to see it and what we don't realize is is that all of these things that we take for granted oh hell that's an one example but it's also with people and things the point i want to get to here at some point today is recognize how do we build this locus of being and standing on our own two feet and then another bodily somatic term we use that term he can carry his own weight he can stand on his own two feet or i'm having a lot of difficulties now but i'm going to get back on my feet or rejala law i want to know that term rejala law rejala law it means translated usually as man of a lot but it's actually genderless it's a person of a law but it comes from rajala to stand standing on your own two feet person of god so developing this sense of being and being alright not that i'm hot stuff or better than anyone else at at no way far from that it's the opposite of that i'm at the center of creation by Allah's design by his command to be his caliph but that doesn't mean i'm better than any dog i have a role as the center to speak for the trees for the stones for the waters for the fish and the peoples i have an obligation to stand for them to care for them to to to to be a caretaker for his creation and we failed miserably so we take in all these things and and on one hand we can avoid everything i mean i remember this this is this woman who most of the woman who used to go through the magazines her daughter would get the fashion magazines and she'd go with through with the black felt dependent just mark out all the things what do you think the response to that was anyone what we think a child's response to is blacking out half you know all these things redacted well i mean she would she would go to school in fully job and in her bag she had short you know bare midriff clothing that she'd put on when she got to school i mean that was one example but i'm i'm just saying that that's you know it's it's not it's it's it's developing the positive choice and preference and respect of being who a lot is designed is designing you to be a lot is al cali al bari al musawir and that means that every moment of every day every second of every moment same as in the 40 000 synaptic patternings in the first thousand days from that point on we're building with data coming dated data coming data coming data we're building this sense of self now the problem is so much data is coming in and it's so bizarre if nothing else i mean to me anyone who can't see how bizarre it is to be hurtling down highways in 2000 pounds of metal with rubber wheels at 70 80 miles an hour anyone who can't see this is absolutely totally insane i have to say you gotta wake up there's this is not okay and do not think that it's just part of modern life no it's affecting you your children your answer your boss it's affecting everything how do we do it so we on one hand we can say oh i'm going to go live in the forest which is fine you know there's a uc berkeley professor that goes every month one month he goes into the forest no electricity no no none of that stuff at all and he said if he didn't do that he wouldn't survive one month with his family i remember when my son over there i remember when we had electricity turned off in in new mexico and it was off for three days and when it's time and they my kids said let's why don't we just leave it off we did for a little bit and i remember another time with it with a controversial figure in england of apocata sufi who is a dear man close i was very dear to me i remember one day i said to him you know we were all living as a group in this building four stories three or four stories bristol gardens is how tall three stories four stories four stories and all these people were Muslim who all did vexer together on a regular basis a lot of stories about that place they're pretty remarkable remarkable time and i remember saying to him you know i said you know maybe because we were having trouble with the electricity and the gas because we were rebuilding those buildings to live in them we were fixing the gas and electricity and i said maybe we should just not use electricity and gas we could just use boil lamps and otherwise and just just and he looked at me like some revelation and he stood up and he right out in the hallway started shouting down the thing hello akbar hello and we did it we did it for months we'd cook whole sheep in the basement in the kitchen in the fireplace with wood and charcoal and we'd serve whole whole cooked sheep to the people from the from the central mosque 35 35 countries one day were represented we would feed these people that so i mean one hand we could do that on the other hand what we want to we can also do is develop this absolute integrity of our own being they can walk through anything i like to say i like i believe and i appreciate being with bikers and bankers in massajid or mash pits right some people will laugh that when i say mosh pits that some some people won't even know what a mosh pit is i miss mosh pits and crowd surfing to be honest i've done it anyway i've done raves all night all night raves when my kids are having naps and falling asleep i'm up in the dawn and i'm still but i'm doing hopper with the techno music going we live in a body our souls are in this body and i say to my i say to myself his soul how are you doing in this body where i've taken you what i've done with you and uh how is it and you know it you know the the line there's a line i'm a very i'm a advocate for popular music and popular expression because it's the voice of community and people even however corrupt it might be it's a voice and the voice is speaking and it's a body in the same way that the the body of the community in the world the body of the community the neighborhood the city those bodies and the world all speak in the same way that our body does at all times our body speaks to our body and to our self at all times awake or asleep someone was telling about their dream last night and when we understand these principles and understand what it means for a body to be speaking to itself and things like understanding what what is this dream about i mean he was asking me about a dream and one of the things i learned from one of my teachers is that you know what your dreams are because it's you and it's your elements of existence that are speaking and processing in your dream hopefully dreams are the means by which we process our experiences play is another way that we process our experiences art and expression is another way we express we process our experiences play is a good example children when they play it's not random they play with what has taken place for them and they've taken in and they're processing it because designed into us by a love design is this inclination towards wholeness and integrity and coherence to be whole to be healthy and one of the great secrets and i say secret because some people get it and know this but a lot of people don't and the main group of people that don't get it are the medical doctors and the medical profession in the modern world with due respect the greatest thing they do as healing is probably their intention to do good and help other people that probably has much more effect than any medications they give to be honest but the great basic principle that they don't get is that the the symptoms that we experience any symptom that we experience where does it come from what is what is pain in our body where does pain in our body come from the nerves our nerves in our body why why it's uh it can't yeah it's it's like it basically gets a voice our body speaks it off so how does our body speak at all times to our body and ourself pain so i'm standing on our foot our foot says get that person off there if our back is hurting people have chronic back pain and i try to try to get them to hear your back is complaining it's complaining saying don't do this anymore don't sit in chairs anymore don't sit in the car with your back like that don't sleep on a soft mattress with your back and don't don't sit huddled over the computer whatever we offend our bodies and that's the problem well again it's knowing these things another hikma the other hikma is every single thing takes part in every single experience that we are aren't everything takes part and the on the scene it's so much bigger than the final result it's just the fragments of results the material world it's just the aftermath it's constantly coming into existence at all times every day every moment he is on a new thing but it's discerning that and getting to know yourself it's it's it's not just knowing how much earth air fire and water makes up your massage quote unquote but i was going to say earlier this this two documents that i get out to people the symptom picture some a woman sent back me symptom picture with pages of details about all the things she's experienced and i looked at i thought wow this is really complete and complex and i said to her i said i got your paper your document and it's very detailed and complex alhamdulillah she said yeah well i'm a very complex person i said yes you've got it you got to realize that you're much more complex and i didn't mean this with due respect to how many therapists are there here only one well you know that abla halim mahmood the sheikh al azhar one of the most remarkable of the shakes of azhar he said every every super sheikh is also a psychotherapist that's if they're doing that kind of work because some shariok or not that that's not it's not to transform people or to heal people but shake up be my shake in morocco he said he said the shake is only a midwife it's only there to catch the baby and the baby is you your whole being inshallah this is the work to become all to become who a lot designed us to be and at this point in time i remember being in a in a in a supermarket this was one of those memories forget all i could be my place myself there at this moment this husband and wife are having conversations she was saying well what should we should we eat italian tonight or maybe we should truly eat chinese should we they were trying to have a discussion about what kind of food they were going to eat but it's kind of like but it sounded like they were saying well are we chinese are we indian you know but it was they didn't know what to decide and the point i'm making is we've lost touch with a natural style of life on which we grew our own food in the neighborhood week the average meal in this country has traveled 1500 miles to get there to our table it's not it's it's messed up and it inevitably will bring illness and sickness all these things it's it what 10 minutes uh okay 10 minute break now okay so we can resume okay everything is up the last part mindful yes present it's not necessarily mindful a lot of people they learn mindfulness and they have pretty much mindlessness but there's more than the mind that we want to have present in our being pretty much saying it's not the mind and people say well mind you know mind your body there's one very famous that psychotherapist who's student of someone i do appreciate very deeply he's a student of dr allen shore from ucla who's he understands right brain left brain much more deeply than other people and so but one of the students says and so we mind our sensations we mind our body but he's always went from the mind to the body rather than being there with the body the range here's one thing of the range of sensations available to the body by a loss design is no more and no less than everything he couldn't find in creation that's a lot and that's the material the artist knows about because that's well from what they draw these extraordinary nuances of everything has a reality and all of those realities if we even know of them it has a presence bob villan he took from all those things he wrote and just came out and people would for years and years and years people that's what's the meaning of this song and he says this the song's the meaning of the song and you get upset because they're not getting the point so we take a break thank you i i hope everybody got tea or refreshments or whatever they need so inshallah we'll continue and then we're the next stop will be in an hour for lunch and then the hood and then we'll continue on you know one of the the things that we encounter when we do these programs is we always seem to run out of time is there so much to talk about and you know hakim loves to engage with people but we just continuously run out of time and are never able to cover as much as as we would like to from the participants and hakim as well and so you know one of the things that we've been working on is how do we remedy that and alhamdulillah we've been working on a way for hakim to interact with people and i'm sure some of you have seen in the emails we've sent out or online is that we've been creating a platform to allow for that to happen so i'm sure as we'll see here is no way we can ever cover everything that we'd like to and so moving forward is we're actually going to be able to engage more and there's going to be a lot more content coming out of hakim being able to you know just be hakim and do what he loves to do which is interact with people so just keep an eye out for this stuff throughout the day today tomorrow we'll give you guys more information on what that looks like how to you know sign up etc etc but inshallah again um you know we'll we'll continue until lunch and then we'll pray the hod then continue um alhamdulillah so in respect to what yasin just said the topic what i was saying is in terms of uh in in terms of what he was referring to and since it's my work as a hakim and what i said earlier is my hope to develop the principles of hikmah together as muslims and to discover and bring forth i mean after all we're told and we believe that islam is the last guidance for the people of this planet and with due respect to all people that means it's and also that there's healing in it and and if we're going to honor that we have to do more than imitate what came the things that came before us you know it was the prophet said the muslims will will follow the christians and jews and they're in their path even means going down a lizard hole and uh and with due respect to the islamic psychology movement and the wonderful people that are doing and the good they're doing and and you know i'd like to talk a little bit more about that because a lot of people here when i talk about i try to avoid his psychological terms and psychology they misunderstand that it might my wife is pretty rabid therapist with all the techniques training all the time and but but but i you know i see the shortcomings of that and i think what i would hope to develop is like like yes he was saying there's so much to present because if we're talking about hikmah i mean we're talking about common sense wisdom about everything that's ongoing ongoing and unending i mean i mean even in the scientific world one of the things i mentioned is the vastness of the self i like to point it and i like to frame it like this at some point at this moment probably in some country there's some person a scientist or a medical researcher or somebody and they've just gone ha ha jimmy hendrix aha they've had this aha moment where they discovered some secret about some chemics chemical of the brain or something you know like autophagy how how the cells you know this we get rid of old cells and so forth some point at something and and person saying aha i found the secret of this thing and my studies have proven out and now maybe i'll get the maybe i'll get the nobel prize is what they're but you know due respect that will not end because again the principle here that i pointed to earlier is in it in us is contained an entire universe and the interesting thing it's our own particular point of view of a universe which will have more things in the foreground in the mid ground in the background but it's so vast it's no less vast than everything we can see in the creation and everything we can experience everything we can know about and there's a lot of things we don't know about so having said that that's what i hope for is is to begin and what i've been trying to do in my work is to develop from the model of understanding the vastness of the cell the model of what kind of work can we do besides telling our story and reiterating our story in the psychological manner and like i say but due respect to them i mean there's at least almost the two thousand kinds of psychology and there's tens of thousands of people who will give testimonials for how wonderful it was for them and how changed their life yeah that's true and i'm not like i said i'm not i'm not degrading or saying less about psychology but i'm saying there's something more i believe we can come up with the work and some of you know that how many of you got many have gotten these the three primary exercises from me the the ground sanding and grounding tracking in my chi how many and i've had i'm adding something to the my chi today we'll get to that later because i want to do some interactive stuff with it i'm sorry we can't be more interactive uh we can i would the last the last workshop what you the you back in the corner sorry i didn't hear your name but when you were you were in where you were at home and how you you just felt like walking rhythm rhythmically that's it you got it you know and i remember last the last workshop like i shared with the group how my daughter when she was like i don't know how old she was i'm terrible as far as age this is like four three or four something like that i said and i don't i like to ask children or my wife or any anyone to get something from me i get it myself if i if i possible and i said could you give me such and such from the other room to my granddaughter jenna and she said yes grandpa and she stood on her tip to this way she went into the other room like that and i told people about that and i said and i and so then that what i did is i got this was at the other workshop i won't do it now but i'll just show you i got down on like this and i said so let's do this i got down and fought and then i started crawling under the floor pulling on people's legs and got everyone to play play is something we've forgotten how to do the prophecies and played with aisha you know when they were well into adulthood we forget but we forget and we don't understand the state that play brings play is a unique thing and i like i liken it to play i liken to sleep to make in love to art it's all of these arenas that are not controlled and not done by rote rules there has to be a giving up and submitting to the state you have to relax and play and allow the play to take place it's not random but it's not and it's not controlled and it's therapeutic play is one of the greatest therapies and unfortunately we live in a world now back to what you were saying some of the you know the world now the children will play with guns and when i was a kid we used to play with guns and we'd shoot and from movies and the what we knew about the world that we would we would play you know we'd shoot someone the gun and i mean oh the person would pretend to die and fall down on one hand that's you know parents say no no we're not allowed to play with guns well they're all playing with guns out there and they're killing people and what do you think this natural thing inclination for a child will be to do is to try to process what's going on play is the means by which we process experience sleep is also the means by which we process our experiences someone came in to me this morning telling me about this beautiful dream he had in which someone shot him and i was saying that's a great dream you know and that's processing you know the thing that we don't realize about dreams and with due respect to ibn sireen and you know who knows ibn sireen i know you would know who knows really oh great but with due respect to the to those principles while they're archetypal models and metaphors in creation that are solid like a bear in a dream yeah okay that we could say that typically might mean death or there's there's those correspondences every person's dream is their dream there's a i mentioned uh there's a how many of you see my facebook posts anybody so did you anyone see this recent one i did where i reposted the mother's day a mother's safe home from david white david white is his poet see i'm kidding i'm i'm i'm feeling free just to go up on these tangents david white's a poet who's uh he had this wonderful mother and my wife and i were sharing one time when we heard about his mother's his mother and mother's day and we both shared what must that have been like to have a wonderful mother because someone said well we we hear that your mother was his wonderful person can you give us an example the interviewer he said well i was walking with her when i was about three years old and the son was out and we were walking and she's and he said i looked up at the sun and it was kind of amazing to see son that he looked at his mother and he realized she was more amazing and i was so my wife and i was with him and then we said what must have that have been like because we had difficulties with our mother a lot of us too and he wrote this poem and after she died and she he was sharing it and hit the poem you can find this david white it's i think it's called the letter from my mother that's the poem uh and he the poem is was about a dream he had and in the dream he received a letter from his mother and it was very he was very excited he went to sit down where he used to sit with his mother on the bench to read the letter and as he got into the letter he was reading it and at the middle of the letter he will come and he woke up but i missed that dream you know i didn't finish the dream and he was really disappointed really disappointed and then he realized something and this is the point of trying to make there's a big secret in what he discovered and he said he said i realized i could finish the letter why she was in him this is the truth that we don't understand or recognize or give credence to as much as we might he finished the letter and the person's dream i remember i went to one of my teachers he said he said to me one night he said well do two rockets go to sleep and come see me in the morning and that sounds like well and i had a dream and i had some questions about the dream you know i had a question questions about things that i wanted to buy from him he said do that and i came back to him and he said well and i said i had a dream he said and and i said well i'm not not sure i know what it meant he said yes you know and i knew immediately yeah of course it is there are dreams and to reflect on our dreams we're the best we know ourselves both in the best way and more completely than anyone else and we're hidden from so much as well kind of an equal you know hopefully not equal measures so it's something it's not that we don't see good advice from others even about dreams but so many people i've said to they've said well what's the meaning of that dream i said you know the meaning of that dream and then and they suddenly oh then say yeah well yeah i guess i do because that is if a person has a dream in which they're being and i've had this happen people have a dream people have a dream in which they're being chased by someone and this is a recurring dream over and over recurring dreams are attempts for the self to realize and process completely and finally certain kinds of things does that make sense it's coming up in the dream coming up the dream being chased being chased being chased and then one day the person in the dream stops when they're being chased turns around confronts the person and chases them away and the dream is done they never had a recurring it's done process finished resolved we seek resolution before the break i was getting to this important thing that's missed in most mainstream medicine and that is you know one of the sayings that i love it's a it's a funny thing i love this this expression that opium what a wonderful medicine opium is it has it has saved it has brought the relief of so many doctors and that's the element that you know it's part of the human nature it's not the best part of the human nature to take that tack but one of the thing the most one of the most major things that's important and it's finally becoming a little clear in some of the research now for example in and i'm getting to the point with with what this thing has been missed and in some of the research now there are researchers who are saying Alzheimer's and dementia is the system attempting to heal itself it's not that there's something got wrong it's a mode in which they've gotten into that they're managing what's happened but to maybe get somewhere further in that mode they've gone pretty much it's pretty much gone to a right brain mode left brain is gone the the the the cognitive ordered logical brain is shut down and they've gone to this metaphorical brain which is real we speak in metaphors something some enormous percentage of our language is in metaphors and we don't even realize that i don't know if anybody's done research on metaphors but there's there's several people one of my dear teachers who passed away several years ago he worked totally with metaphor and trauma so so someone would come with trauma of any sort or difficulties and knowing even knowing or not knowing that they had trauma the person the person would come and they'd have the problems and they'd express the problems and he he'd say well what's that like for you and he said and and this i've heard this more than once people say well it's like a wall i come up against so he would say and i've done this with people so tell me about this wall what does it look like imagination we'll get more from imagination but let me get back to what i was saying what was i saying the the single thing i want to get to that think about the doctors the single thing they miss so i can get back to my thread so the single thing they miss so often is it the symptom is the healing the symptom this symptom is the body attempting to heal duh it's like you know someone's standing on your foot it's painful the the mind of your foot and your foot says get that person off my off me my back as i said earlier my back says don't do this to me anymore it's complaining to be able to listen to this body and how does the body speak let me ask you that how does the body speak if it speaks at all times awake or asleep that's my hickman body speaks at all times awake or asleep how does it speak sensations yes what else pain pain is an extreme sensation yes did you say something emotions which is sensations here's another thing sensations are part of the spectrum i mean emotions are part of the spectrum of sensations emotions are part of the spectrums of sensations in the spectrum of sensations right now we're all experiencing a kind of sea of sensations the temperature of the room color the kind of light the ambiance the sound all of these subtle things as well as the more noticeable growth things this is ongoing like a level basis foundational basis baseline emotions is when i say something and it makes you angry or makes you unhappy but it happens in the body and it is as if waves rose from that something that sea well-regulated person with well-regulated emotions they have the emotions but they let them they're like the sea they let the waves raise and settle rise and settle and it's just part of ongoing being alive as my teacher said a whole person is happy sad angry depressed hopeful scared courageous i could go on and on and on and on and on my teacher said that's called being alive and regaining the ability to do that is coming back to life he said back to life is to me healing coming whole again we were all when you know like my granddaughter when she walked to the other room like that that was just being present or when she saw the earth warming she jumped up and down seeing it and then ran to share it was like come on look at this come and look at this that's being alive and we learn how to be stoic we learn to keep every i'm going to keep everything under control god forbid i should submit and let go so when we did that play thing crawling under people they were a lot i mean i'm not we could do it but you can imagine what what happened is everyone they kept doing it and we had to kind of okay okay okay we had to sort of call them together like the you know the the school teacher okay okay class come on you know stop playing we we miss play and we miss having and play is not the reason for being but it has a function and it's an important function anyone who doesn't play it is not playful uh it's it's it's difficult for the serious thing there's a time for playing a time for being serious but one enhances the other one enhances the other period it's the way it works because it's being alive it's allowing the truth of reality to accept its rightful position in the dynamic of the moment it's allowing reality to accept its place with its living and all of its qualities in the dynamic of the moment and the dynamic of this moment right now i am with you and i am taking in what your expressions are you're nodding and when i said some other things laughing and doing these various things that's what brings the life and that brings the connection back to the theme the present and present in ourselves and more whole in ourselves allows the safety to be connected with others and allowing whatever can happen i like you commented sense i like it's your comments comment yeah that's okay but the did so i'll repeat the question more or less two kinds of processing first of all back to one of the things i already said and this is really important it's in that list you've gotten lists of hikmas did everybody get that if if you read through those carefully and if you spend some time on each one they have far reaching they have a lot of implications one of the implications of one of those is all sensation also the the bottom line i said gel already moved me said i am irrevocably bound in this cage of earth air fired water when i was in bahrain at the coran institute there i gave a lecture and i said i asked people in the group in the audience of people i said um you know can anybody is anybody willing to share their very sort of remarkable spiritual experiences and it's specifically said spiritual experiences and four people i chose four people and they told each one told their experience and then i went back to each one i said well you said this and i demonstrated to them that their description of their spiritual which supposed to mean it was all bodily it was all things they felt it's like this that light came in through my arms and i felt this and it was like electric failure but this like you know lifting me it was all bodily expressed spiritual experience back to what rumie says they're being irrevocably bound by earth air fire and water the elemental things of our soul and spirit non-material out of time being here and living in this domain of the body we it's hard to get that because we've been trained that the brain there was a long argument between uh henry james the the father some people call the father of american psychology and walter b canon about where emotions took place and the discussion could go on could have gone on forever they wrote letters back and forth and disagreement but we have to recognize that emotions take place in a body so the right brain left brain now you're familiar with right brain left brain from from what source yeah you said you were neuroscience do you know do you know uh allen and short i'm sure uc le okay you're a biker now right no i'm just joking sorry um well in any case the end the means first of all sensei every sensation is connected to a process a sensation in the body that needs nerve activation nerves and recognition and all the all that that entails and all the subsequent things that take place from that including emotions how the father those things it nothing nothing six in a vacuum alone everything another one of the hikmas on that list is everything in creation is connected to everything else in creation and that's from anatomy you know a lot of the traditional islamic scholars and philosophers amongst other people many people including homey paths and i mean a lot of people who recognize that but i go one step further i say not only is it in connection with every other thing but it's in dialogue with every other thing we look at something we could say that something looks back at us i mean however you want to describe it there is an inevitable connection and when there's connection it means a kind of dialogue now this gets to so back to your thing about processing there's endless kinds of processing there's cognitive volitional processing this is often i found this in the people i've worked with i've done this work for over 50 years now i can say i've seen very very uh advanced professionals quote unquote very good at their work international uh attorneys for corporations and things they've got it down how to control and manage what takes place and the regulation is cognitive they regulate by control if i do this and i think this and i feel this and then i do that and i do this and i do that and all that's going to be okay i can function and i can get the job though although my wife she's not so good with it you get what i'm saying here when those people realize those men for the most part when they realize that you can't control everything it's very clever it's a very clever kind of manipulation of feelings and emotions and physical things this happens a lot in meditation things it's not that we but but we you know there's a final thing of of i mean islam what does it mean how do we start this like hands up like okay i give up you know you know that's the the classic posture you get you get a salt but someone's got a gun on you okay i surrender and i give up it's allowing what wants to take place to take place it's not a control thing and it's not something that i learn in their book and therefore i do this same with adab adab is the way we behave with someone adab thinks comes naturally from good character comes organically from good character one of the models that i've always used i thought was really a great story was about native americans who had their own very particular adab you know in all cultures all high what they call high context cultures and very complex i mean there's some cultures you don't do that with you know in the desi community you don't put your leg up in front of somebody that's not the chief of sight you know that's i'll go over here i had to take care because sometimes i'll say these things and i realize whoops that person talking about being muscle bound and how is that's not a very good thing to be muscle bound and i realized oh my god there's a guy who's really muscle bound it's it's a it's a disastrous thing to get to where you have to have to cut off sleeves to show off here you know i once in mexico i lived in mexico for a long time years ago in the 60s and i used to be at least to be amazed that these truck drivers would come down you're doing down a hill and truck driver would come next to you and hear down and wow make this incredible blast you know and one day i was a truck driver i said how come these truck drivers they all seem to drive up next to you and then shift down and just have this blast i said why do you do that and he said to scare you and i said why do you want to scare me and he says then he got with these things because we're all afraid which is beautiful and afraid and being afraid is an incantation of what kind of iman we have you know that wonderful story i'm sure some even read it there's a book it's popular these days about the woman who's on a ship and her husband is a samurai anybody know that and and the ship is you know it and and the the seas are like threatening to turn the boat over she's on one side of the boat she's going to go to the other side to see how her husband's when she gets over there and he's sitting there very calmly with his sword and samurai you know the great zen kind of master kind of story and he's just very calm sitting there looking at the sea looking at the waves and she says she she said well how can you just sit there he says look what's going on and he draws his sword and goes and stops like this right at the edge of her neck and she starts to laugh and he said why did you laugh she said because i knew you weren't going to cut me and he said exactly and that was the trust i mean it's fine for the scholar to say well if you're afraid that means you have poor iman well okay yeah but we're human beings how do we gain the trust especially if we've lived the life in which everyone that meant something to us did bad things to us and we lost trust in other people this is the modern world this is well i mean they're having fear is a natural quality that we need to have i mean i know neighborhoods i would not walk down the dark alley with on my own at night duh that's a natural healthy fear i know some people that i know i couldn't get you know in gate embroiled with financial matters with them and so on so there's natural balanced fears that we want to have but at the core and this is dr shore alan shore he took into his stuff some time he talks about the early stages of mother being the one who manages our varied affect expressions and she's there for that and how we develop at an early stage or don't develop at an early stage a sense of security in ourselves and then in time we we reinforce that with our dean with our teachings building building you know more for trust and when trust is broken i mean that's one of the biggest jobs i have is people that come to me because their trust has been broken and one of the egregious ones in the modern days is the person that has some spiritual teacher that it's done some things and then they're sort of shattered because they were looking to this person but that's kind of the story of any any you know family member or something like that that that has betrayed us there's so much to talk about and so much to sort out and understand in my opinion in the lens of hikmah in the lens of basic principles of what we want we want to feel safe and it's the closest that safety is the closest thing we call iman yeah hold on i guess yeah going back to yusuf aley salam story like you we are mentioning an embodiment of uh islam like brought up and we talk about everything is uh we are internal internalizing if that story he is a prophet he sees his son seeing a dream he knows the answer of all his uh brothers will one day bow down but still he loses his eyesight in crying for his son the loss of it and and all that in his own life experience of that islam living a prophet suburb embodiment of environment and yes jealousies all of these things so can you explain that please thank you and i kind of missed the final question the question was like the question of the embodiment of our environment affecting us yes and hikmah of utilizing that and how are we to utilize when the environment and the people and the things affect us we are not no prophet but even he ended up losing eyesight yeah so as human being and being in simple terms how do we walk through our life with the stresses and how do we go through our life with well let's back to this what i was saying from shaykh zubair to be or not to be is the question are we going to be present and develop and become who we're meant to become or find our way back to the trajectory where our fitra is taking us to what we're meant to become in this world by a lust design how do we do that i mean yeah we need all these things we need others we need we need all sorts of things we need other people and we need to develop the wholeness within ourselves but nevertheless all those commands will come and the other thing that's important to realize that a lot of people this is aside from the physicians or anyone we don't realize that we say 18 at least 18 times a day bismillah ar-rahman ar-rahim and we koran tells us his ar-rahma is over all things you know i mean but we don't recognize that and we don't know because we're just the lamps on the carpet with certain patterns we can see this we can see and as far as hikmah i'm of the hakeem i have no claim to any hikmah you know and there's hikmah i was sharing yesterday with someone about albert einstein with a hakeem he was he was an amazing hakeem if you if people look at his life and look at the way he lived his life and some of the things he had to say and things he did way ahead of his time i mean from the beginning the first days of israel saying this is wrong and fleeing germany knowing that was going to be wrong and other things one of his saying one of his statements was god may be subtle but he's not mean he's not mean and and in the most disaster i mean how many people have come to me in my career in my life dealing with sick people and they said well i have fourth stage cancer i'm dying and it's okay i've learned something that i'm thankful for in this place that i never knew before how many and i see people nodding because you probably know this experience from other people or yourselves i know i mean i know a man who who went through that he was diagnosed he took this totally had a certain number of this psych there the physician's lot they feel so they're obliged maybe legally to say well you've only got maybe a month two months i know some guy was going through for a month or two months and then he got back to him said sorry sorry we had all the data wrong you're fine what a lesson that was for him it was like really so so yeah all these things happen life happens and to be whole and complete doesn't mean it's easy yeah i i gave that example of feeling ease with myself but that was remarkable for me at that time because i remember growing up for the most of my life i had such fear in public that i my knees were literally shaking i'd lose my voice i couldn't or it just shut up and then all that energy of what i wanted to say could have said all goes in and there's very specific physiological things that happen when it goes in goes to your stomach most typically then it'll go joints anger it's one of the most destructive things we can have but there's a righteous place for it and a valuable good kind of anger you know there's times when we need to be angry and we live in a time where a lot of men have excessive anger and that's often the anger that success in so many men in the modern world women too a bit more men is covering up fear compensating for fear i have to be the strongman i'm gonna have this car that goes you hear me you know i want to go and say i hear you what else do you do but you know people it's like the truck driver said yeah we're afraid and and and so we men we we're expected to be courageous and strong and strong is not sensitive then we have men that go to men's groups there used to be men's group i don't know if they still haven't and the men would go it they develop their feminine properties and qualities and then they come to me and say well my feminine aspect has pretty well developed i cry quite easily and i say yeah well you probably rage pretty easily too right and that's unfortunately the reality that comes with that that that prescription it's becoming whole and it's accepting who you are and what you are now that's for somebody that's hard to do doesn't happen overnight when we experience shame or when we betray ourselves what happens in ourself is enormous when and i say betray ourselves is when when we very young i remember you know i grew up at a time when yeah we get the you know what beat out of us was something if we did anything wrong we'll get our mouthwash i was so literally to know all these things and we were told you know and this is cross the board for most spiritual teachings across the board this is for your own good right spare the rod and spoil the child kind of concepts but inside it hurts and it feels like too much especially when what they thought i did i didn't actually do so i'm getting punished for something i didn't actually do you know all when we betray ourselves and we don't speak out that's a kind of betrayal of the self i know this i believe this but i'm afraid to say it when we don't speak out and we betray ourself that energy in terms of a biological reality it's very unnatural and so it creates a kind of tension that has to be expressed so when men in the classic thing i've seen it i've been able to track this with men when men do things that violate their principles we have in the muslim community a huge uh addiction to pornography amongst the men in countries the biggest group of people and and how many men they feel oh i'm a bad muslim or they they've made excuse for it or they go to a therapist and the therapist says oh it's okay you know in the modern world there's no nothing obscene anymore you don't believe what comes in stays in or needs processing in a deep way in a way that may not be able to be processed in real life but but men who betray themselves and don't speak out from they they then that energy that's inside that's that odds with each other with itself it demands expression and it'll come out in aggression for the family usually is that oh okay i couldn't quite make it out because it looks like five five minutes okay now i are there any threads that i left behind back to this thing from the physicians yeah i think that's an important topic you brought up about um the internet stuff like what do you prescribe for that though for which the pornography thing that how well if you have you treated people with the pornography oh yeah how do you treat it and stuff like that it's hard it's hard because it it gets into the body and into the hormonal system and the hormones and the neurology and and it's not for the most part in the world uh you know it's okay that makes a difference in terms of being able to free oneself from it you know because the whole culture plays into it in so many ways and amplifies it or keeps the momentum of it it's a juggernaut juggernaut yeah sorry um they respond you give an example of the men and how they respond but what do women do when they betray themselves and don't speak out what is their biological response i mean men and women are different and it's important to recognize that i mean in spite of a lot of the movements today there was a woman who wrote a book many years ago called brain sex she gave it that title because she was a researcher who originally started out in her research to demonstrate by her research how men's brains and women's brains were the same and as she went along she realized whoops they're not at all the same and she lost her funding for the book but she got it by calling it brain sex and making it kind of book that could be sold but women i mean all the same things can happen i mean we overlap i mean text i use i mean we look if we look at testosterone and oxytocin right people know that this kind of demonstrates some basic differences but the prophesorism he said the women the women have a realm and a kingdom that is vast and we men have no access to it and that's it's it's really important to get that clear we have as men we have a biological animal dominance by our voice if we raise our voice once to a woman that's a message it says behave yourself because if it comes down to it i will kill you whatever you know sounds funny but we laugh we haven't even gotten into this why we laugh and what we laugh at and what the laughter does i mean it's a it's a really powerful thing because it's back to that first it comes in the thing in the alternation of day and night rising to a peak activation and settling and laughter is when there is compression and contraction come and the brilliant sound of comedian plays works it works it works it works it's and then bam gives that tweak in the punchline in which we don't we don't cognitively see brother in city you know we don't cognitively decide to laugh it happens we can't say oh that's funny i'm in and everybody laughs when i say that what's interesting is they laugh at recognition yeah no it's it's a spontaneous organic it's a kind of orgasm autonomic system release and that's why the the stand-up meetings they know the topics that will always have contraction you know marriage oh and to the jokes about politics family gender nowadays so they know how to tweak it and they're masterful in their it's a kind of therapy the thing is that the release of laughter is not necessarily not necessarily therapeutic and it doesn't necessarily heal although some laughter i've seen people laugh there's a Moroccan joke i don't have the time to tell i told it's a Moroccan the guy fell off his chair and it was on the floor like you know i've seen another in new york man i told a joke about new york and he started laughing it didn't stop laughing until he was crying yeah so that was an example of it going deeper but but really these stand-up you know accidentally have all these stand-up comedians now man it helping us to manage the insanity of where we are at the life we're living right now and they they serve a good purpose you know it's more than the court gesture it's you know but it's it's so uh women do the same thing not the same as men because your your men women's mandates are different although they're changing in a lot of what women are led to believe is well you need to be more like men that was a my fair lady didn't mean how many people really are sticking none in my fair lady great why can't a woman be more like a man that's the song why can't a woman be like and and the outcome of that story because that's from what's what's the story it's from big million yeah because in the end she leaves he's done i'm done with them so women yeah they process differently and they they don't do the same kinds of things that men do there are i believe they're pretty likely more weak what we could call what's the term they use uh narcissists but in in the story original story of narcissists narcissists was a man and the woman was echo his partner was echo and echo could only repeat what he said she couldn't have any creative volitional things from her own self he was only repeating what he had to say so we can continue after thank you for the attention i love the nods and they appear here so as i said in my disclaimer at the beginning don't expect anything too linear but now that you've had lunch you know the pythagoras would not take any students if they've eaten recently and basically but i try not to eat when i'm giving a presentation because i know a lot of my energy will be done doing that and in fact it used to be about any sort of long thing i had to do it i'd sort of live on just milk but i you know i now now it's pretty much like almond milk or coconut milk okay so now that you've had your food how would it be for you all to stand up what i'm going to do i'm and let me just explain something that some of you have gotten what i call the exercises and which are all exercises of awareness and exercises of awareness it means by just consciously paying attention mind is also a verb it became this thing that's up in our people refer to as mind being this brain the brain and mind are different mind is also a verb meaning to pay attention to something mind your elbow mind the gap mind your own business someone's holding you from new york right so the mind when we have pain someone's standing on our foot we can say that oh i can feel pain in my foot my brain's recognizing and there's this loop pain you know get off my foot blah blah blah i said earlier the body speaks so paying attention to something when we pay attention to something we amplify it that may be in that list of hikmahs when we pay attention to something we amplify it it's the hadith kutzi Allah is in your expectations of him if we expect the best and we believe in Allah's rahmah it's more likely we're going to find it bob dillon said if we expect the worst we'll probably get it so we know this clearly we some people look at the world have full have them you know that we know we all know this as a basic truth yes so the mind we you know we could say that the foot our foot is saying get off we can also say the mind of our foot is saying get that person off or the mind of our back my teacher as i said i think earlier we if we ideally we we think and understand with our whole body and we feel whether a whole body from our toes to our toes of finger their fingertips and there are people blind people where's the dentist there are blind people that develop the ability to see red and green with their fingertips i met a mad once that's a longer story i won't go into i met a one man once because he believed in he follows the principle that the arabic language like sanskrit the arabic language is something more than symbols informs on a paper for something else they have life of their own each letter form some of you may be familiar with that concept in islamic philosophy but he actually lived stayed with a man in pakistan who he demonstrated to someone who didn't believe it he demonstrated to this man i stayed with by smelling the sentences the man wrote an eric and could read them by the smell of the letters the ability for us to develop our sensibilities is enormous it's enormous it's so much more than we realize women tend to have it already better than we met by the nature and the sensitive nature um so i had to stand because the exercises of awareness i mean let's just start with this if you're standing on your two feet first of all are your knees locked or unlocked locked who's locked who's locked okay that's an unnatural way to stand we learn to lock our knees when we're children if you watch children that three or four or five years old they don't start locking their knees until usually difficulties in their life because when we lock our knees the dynamic polity and the sense of being on our own two feet and connection with the earth and the ground is cut off so from the hips downward dead it's hard if we lock our knees it's hard to get back to this dynamic in which your legs listen your legs feel the weight of your body for anybody who's in the medical field or know that have you know we we we recommend for women you know in menopause when they're getting older when their hormones have changed for for bone density to take calcium well okay you can take as much calcium you want but if your system is not assimilating and putting that calcium into where it's needed then it means nothing in fact it could be damaging you all for hear that it's pretty important it's not quantity it's effectiveness and the ability to manage something same with what we experience in the world that another one of the Hickamons on that list is a definition of trauma that I don't see many trauma therapists using which is anything that we cannot that you take in back to the questions and discussion we had earlier about things anything we take in that we cannot assimilate into the wholeness of our being or eliminate becomes toxic the greatest the biggest example of that is an arrow in fact the word talks comes from the Greek word for the poison that was on end of arrows the arrow goes in we can't assimilate that if an arrow goes in it's even hard to pull it out experiences can be the same very difficult to so there's a you know there's an art manage how to do this and that's art of like you know healing from things of that sort so anything we cannot assimilate or eliminate that we could call trauma we could call that toxicity and poison for our system so the exercise of the wholeness that I give out to most people I work with are three three stages one is standing and grounding and in grounding how many you're familiar with this film of documentary called earthing anybody earthing earthing to well it's worth watching and one because it's something I've been teaching for years and years and years which is you know the value of walking barefoot wherever you can wherever you can and whenever you can in Pakistan they used to have this they used to say if you have any problems with your liver you walk on the fresh wet grass in the morning with the dew that that goes through the body the body is much more dynamic than we realize what we feel with our feet what we feel with our hands is this research someone just told me about recently that our animal nature is so much more vast than we give it account for in my mind because how they said we do not deny our animal nature we honor it respect it and we go with it we run with it literally or gallop with it if you want to think pounce with it all these things but someone told me recently about a study in which people they were in a situation they had assistance situations set up where everybody was shaking hands and they they discovered with these cameras that most people who shook hands with strangers you know they'd go away and when no one was looking they'd smell their hand like what did I just do there what did I open myself to and you laugh because I mean yeah there's something I mean people it's people are strong you know anyway so the exercises of where and we can develop these sensibilities to very very high degree the man that was could smell by you know when he discovered this man that could smell by reading the Arabic letters by smelling he said to him well how do I develop that sense and he said he said you develop it by doing remembrance of Allah and that of a certain kind la ilaha ilallah over and over and over and the value of doing these recitations whether it's in Arabic or any other sort of uh uh kind of practice in which you repeat a mantra this has rhythm to it the ilaha ilallah it has breath it has sound and if it has meaning for us in terms of our beliefs and our faith it has another power that's very powerful in terms of developing integrity and wholeness within us singing the last workshop I did I got everybody to raise their hand and speak their name like I Akim Archuleta commit to singing as often as I can as I can with my family or with anyone I can find every day if I can do it as much as possible until this from this day on and everybody said yes yes yes actually people did it people I got emails they said I've been singing with my family it's great and and I recommended a book called rise up singing and it's got all these songs of all sorts that you can sing we used to as human beings sing together and dance together every single culture I don't care how rigid spiritually they were or religiously they were I should be better say everybody has singing and dancing as part of their culture no planet on earth is without that because naturally comes forth from us right is there anyone that could disagree with that no I said this in Bahrain when I gave that the thing I was referring to when I asked people to give share spiritual experiences and I just noticed you're having trouble with standing out to stopping I'm sorry we just had a meal too so I said that I said everybody the same group that I demonstrated that their spiritual experiences were very physical that same group a man came up afterwards and that's right said everybody sings and dances and he said excuse me brother but dancing you mean like Michael Jackson and I had this image of this this wonderful you know elderly desi your uncle whatever doing the moonwalk and I said yeah if you can do it go for it movement is one of the most essential things now but these exercises they're not like calisthenics or anything although calisthenics from the greeks had care with it a great deep understanding that learning was also intimately integrated with the body and body movements so one of the basic hikmas that's that I work with for everybody wherever you are whatever you're doing is as is the body this came from my beloved teacher dr. Alexander lowen the way he put it was as is the body so is the self because the self and the spirit the rough lives in this body so a stiff body is a stiff person a weak body is a weak person a flexible body is a flexible person now you I've got you standing still and some of you are going like this that's okay but standing on your own two feet and balanced and with knees unlocked so the ones that raise are your other people who said locked knees are knees so locked because if you unlock it doesn't mean bend at the knees that's that that's a deeper exercise but but but not locking them your body then feels connected and standing and you feel the weight of your body your legs feel the weight of your body more fully yes can you all get that it takes a long time to get out of the habit of locking your knees but basically the energy is shut off from here now the film earthing that I mentioned is about something I used to teach science is it so I'm just you're gonna I'm gonna have you standing here for a while so till we get to the exercise I used to teach science and I was a science nerd from when I was really really young and in science class one of the science classes I did I had one boy take a big thick extension cord and hold the metal ends and he was in a room with synthetic carpet I had him walk around the floor holding this and I had the extension go two classrooms down and another boy was in that room this is my male class holding the the lead on the end of that same extension cord or actually had his finger like this made me half an inch from the end of it and he I had this kid walk around and what happened to the other kid in the other room spark a spark the spark was generated by that kid walking around on the synthetic carpet through his body through his hand through the extension cord to the one of the this film earthing points out this extraordinary thing happened in the 40s the name of one of the Beatles albums rubber soul rubber souls came about and with rubber souls we stopped connecting to the ground and the earth itself in the recent studies to go and stand 15 minutes even 15 minutes on soil or grass and earth earth the bodies these these these electro electro synaptic electromagnetic activities are kind of fire it's electric electrical energy and they do pass through our body that was the experiment for the kids to see the building of those negative ions but the point is we used to be crowded on the earth and even before when we were leather souls there was more connection and more discharge but 15 minutes on the soil or grass will reduce reducing some studies recently will reduce all sorts of in uh inflammations in the body so you know I gave this prescription 20 30 years ago walk barefoot whenever you have a chance on anything and barefoot in the mornings that's the saying in pakistan that you walk barefoot in the mornings so grounding is the first exercise that I give people grounding and standing and the second exercise is what I call tracking but we'll get we'll go through each one of them these are things uh the the grounding exercise hello is that good I don't know why that's funny is that better is that better I'll speak up so the first exercise again from my teacher alexander lowen I did this one at the last workshop I but I don't usually it's not written in my uh documents that I send out to people I work with but this one is just simply when your knees are you learn and develop the ability to stand on your own two feet that means not this one or that one but both the equally and notice how that's different than putting your weight on one notice how much more solid you feel as is the body so is the self if the body feels grounded and strong in itself this is what it addicts people to working out at the gym they feel stronger their body muscles get stronger and then you say hey this great feels great I'm going to do this until I have big huge muscles and I'm a disaster stop because you become addicted to that and and you become addicted to how you look which is unfortunate but the point is if you feel stronger you feel stronger on all levels not just in the body now the way you're standing like this good good go back this this is anybody familiar with this posture come on it's called it's called the the posture of of power the power posture it's like you know that when was something I told you to do such and such it's not the same as I told you to do such and such the body speaks at all times and all gestures and tone of voice we'll get the tone of voice over the ones this time so we have very little time to do all this stuff but again as you see mentioned the programs that are going to be opening after this workshop that will be open to anyone to all of you especially because you're here we'll be more in more detail with all of these things that each other you know you can use up with videos and stuff like that and it's a wonderful team it's people that are doing the same for me because I have not been able to write a book to include all this stuff so so the first exercise from my beloved teacher dr. loan is one in which you keep your knees unlocked when you stand first of all and develop the ability to do that and the habit of doing it when you're waiting in line just notice what it's like to lock your knees what it's like to stand on one leg and then notice what it's like to stand equally on both legs equally divided weight and how that gives you a better sense of strength in yourself no you don't need to stretch in fact levitating your stomach go is the goal at some point but we can get to that at a later time but it's equally on both feet we have another i'll get to another exercise before we finish uh on the on the standing but this exercise is simply one in which you bend and you bend your knees and you touch the floor with your fingertips go ahead so just bend down between your touch but don't rest on your fingertips don't rest on your fingertips but just hold your fingertips there and your legs are bent that's better yeah actually it's got so you've got some stress on your legs keep your feet on the ground flat if you can okay and just hold them there and notice what that feels like if you can't do it it's all right uh but the whole the whole thing is is maybe your legs will begin to tremor a bit any tremoring now you're not remember you're not weight resting on your hands you're just touching the floor you're every all your waist on your feet and your thighs your legs right okay now that's a grounding exercise now if you very slowly slowly stand up keep your knees unlocked and now stand on your toe feet if you noticed how you were before you went into this and how you feel now you should feel more on the ground am i wrong you feel that it's going to be different for all the people now the next exercise the next part of this different endless exercises for grounding when i was doing this at a group of people in uh who were in trauma learning trauma therapy somatic therapy years ago i did this and i said well one of my grounding exercises is what we call salads prayer because our prayer is standing bowing prostrating at seven points one two three four five six seven seven points on the ground and i had the and all of these therapists none of them muslims they said well can you show us how to do it and we and i said well why don't you wind up and so we all did it and we ended up doing rock hats you know a couple of rock hats and at the end of the rock hats it was the time stop for love you know i i hate to even mention this it was the time when we first began it's it hurts me to say this began bombing at gas and one of the women at the end a couple of women started crying said this is what the people were bombing do as a regular practice you know that was a wonderful thing they were appropriately understanding from it so that's grounding now this grounding the other is really simple grounding exercise and this can be done with the hands on the hip the hands on the hip part of this i often give this to young people who are going exams and this is just simply bending at the knees keeping your upper body upright and bending at the knees until you feel pressure on your quadriceps and legs and you begin to begin to either burn hurt maybe even tremor just that any any tremoring any burning tremoring the tremoring is a good thing let me say this one of the things we misunderstand about the body is that tremoring is not a bad thing tremoring is a good thing and it's bringing about a better state the body tremors naturally with stress and it achieves something by the tremoring so this is the basic exercise people to do that going into exams if they want to do it with more for the women more this because the women the ones have been you know pushed down for so many many years centuries or they should say or whatever across the board to do this until you feel the burning and then slowly straighten up notice what your legs feel like but don't walk your knees and then notice what it's like is very simply and carefully make any kind of movements and steps and one of my teachers said if you can make three steps with total awareness of what's happening consciously and with that recognizing and experiencing it immediately and fully and directly three steps would bring some sort of spiritual arrival by that simple act this is a mindfulness principle that some people when they teach mindfulness do teach these things awareness and paying attention to the body and following and tracking the body in the all of these kind of meditative mindfulness all these various exercises and practices but martial arts all these different things can be effective providing they integrated and they're understood and they're taught and the person experiences something so you notice I said experience of something and notice what I did with my body now I don't have to do that consciously I've learned that one day I was giving a lecture in England and I've been studying these things and I realized that I was saying and not only that but you know and I whatever I was saying this represented what I was talking about like not only that I thought what am I doing here I was speaking with my body as much as I was with my voice we'll get to the voice because the voice and the modulation of the voice is huge huge huge and just as a head heads up on that it's not in the words it's in the tone of the voice and women know this because men often don't know it because they have words and parents often don't know it because the children it's just words but it's the tone of voice that tells the message and it's much bigger than the words okay so that's now there's exercise is again from dr. loan in this one you have the knees unlocked you relax your arms you're just there could do it with that too but and you let your body move the weight of your body move forward to the front of your toes the balls and toes of your feet and notice your overall state and the quality of that and hold that and then move back where most of your weight is on the heels and then compare it again forward heels what's the difference what's your experience what's what's the difference in the overall state you have to have more trust on your heels how might that be framed for anyone what did anyone experience the difference you felt on forward you felt you had more control well the forward is both are correct yeah flow what about flow if you move back and forth yeah but the difference between the forward and the back the forward position is an active position you know they they say on your toes ready get ready get sat you're on your toes now we'll get the yawning later that's good that means you're coming more into your body so i'll get to that more later maybe even tomorrow i don't how many i hope you could be here tomorrow because i would like to go more into the yawning and the value of yawning despite of the hadith which is not about yawning to wake up because yawning awakens us one of the overlooked realities of living living creatures all living creatures overlooked okay and now i have to just mention that it starts happening because it's totally involved with social engagements mechanisms of our being connecting in ourselves and then connecting with others okay so this exercise the forward position is active and the heels are passive and if i were down on the ground i would demonstrate the passive when a person's on their heels i would walk up to him and to one of the guys and i'd say to you're on your heels and that means and i'd push him you're a pushover because we can't defend ourselves on our heels you know the martial arts it's like this is yeah i'm on defense i'm ready to go so but active and passing now one of these workshops i did okay so let's do it again forward on the heels on the toes heels of balls and then back now go to the middle one of the workshops like this i did years ago i suddenly there was one one one oh oh she just let out this and everybody turned to she says oh my god she says i just felt peace i just felt this that's this place in the middle that's not going somewhere to do something and not given up when i met mike shake in morocco i met all of his mochadems all the people around him each one of them amazing and i thought was and then when he came amongst them i looked at him and i realized and i saw by seeing him at such total peace i saw in all of these other people highly spiritually involved people so to speak there was degrees of striving for something or defeated by something and in him there was no striving for or defeat he was just there so presence is like that's one of the qualities when we when we ask well what is presence there's many things we can say about presence to be or not to be it was one of the great classic ones that is no accident has been repeated over and over and almost everybody knows that phrase true and we and they say the prophet sort of said was the most present of human beings present why why the body speaks with the body it by gesture by sensation and it speaks of the vocabulary that is regular and consistent for each person when i say something happened back that time i'll make a gesture over my shoulder and i speak about the future i'm likely to do that now it's unconscious but all of these gestures we have i mean very few people if i ever been with in sessions in which if they're doing this if i asked them what is it you're not saying they almost always said well yeah this is what i'm not saying do you understand what i'm getting at now we don't want to get caught up in in decoding and seeing something beneath well that's what i mean no because there's variations and we we want these things to flow organically and naturally and with good good good at that with each other you know with honoring each other but so so she she found this place of the middle now the next exercise is a little more detailed and this are these are things that i send out you know i have written these things out and then the videos that will be coming out available to everybody if you sign up for them they i go in with more detail describing in more detail to do the exercises and kind of the implications the implications are great and the implications of all these simple hikimos that i've listed on that list you know that's what i'm saying i hope we can as a community collectively begin to develop these principles and use them as foundational understandings like one of the ones i mentioned earlier which is anything that we cannot assimilate or eliminate becomes trauma that's established and you know you don't find that principle in a lot of the people who do trauma you know the thousands and how are they doing it they don't they don't try to see that basic under under now that the yawning is good okay and even in this yawning wakes us up i don't want to get to that too soon because later on well i'm gonna have we'll talk about yawning but uh so the the standing exercises so uh this one and you stand it you find the midpoint there's forward back and there's the midpoint and from the midpoint what you do is you put your weight on your left foot and notice what it feels like your foot pressing on the floor with your weight right got it shift to the right put your weight on the right foot pushing down notice the pushing down there and now move to the middle it's less weight because they're they're shared but notice what it's like now to have both feet on the ground pushing and the balance is there or whatever else you notice okay now this next you move to the left foot again feel that left foot once again but now feel the pressure in your knee and the weight pushing on the knee to the foot to the floor got it then the right knee foot floor right got it maybe might be harder there's less nerves in the knee than the foot less active then the middle both knees both feet floor notice what you're feeling inside also generally as you do this now you're off to one side move through the middle because a lot of people at this point they will begin when just by it's grounding in fact you experience that you're on the ground to allow the Dean Rumi said with our feet on the ground and our heads in the heaven planted well planted very often people will experience in these kind of exercises good these they will experience as if they have roots going into ground and the truth of the matter is there is actually a dynamic reality physically between the feet and the ground the roots it's like I won't get too carried away on the details but from a physics point of view we're grounded if we feel grounded there's something happening between our feet and whatever we're standing yeah I kind of avoid those terms because I don't want to get confused with these other ideas you know I mean it's not that they're not true but yeah we have chakras everywhere so this the chalk with middle finger the middle finger chakra that's that sort of came out accidentally I mean fingertips have them I suppose not I mean with due respect I mean yeah you can use that method but but you know at this I'm trying to do is make this very experiential you know grounding as experiences and exercises so now you do the same thing again here left now this time feel the weight and the pressure on your hip to your knee to the foot to the floor can you get that some people it's harder because these are different qualities of nerve sensory nerves and then likewise the right hip knee foot floor and then back here both hips knee foot floor and if you need to take a breath but take a breath nothing wrong with that can you feel that your body has weight on your own two feet that's the goal of this exercise I'm standing on my own two feet equally and if you do this exercise usually there's a little bit more sense of solidity on solid the other term we use is on solid ground you know we say well that person's on shaky ground but we can feel we're on solid ground so those are grounding exercises the other one is what I call bouncing knees and for any of you who might be coming to the dicker tonight one of the practices that we'll be doing is the hadra and the word the hadra means presence and that is done by Sufis across the world not all of them some do some are considered controversial some of it scares them because it's pretty dramatic and but but I think we need dramatic worship and dramatic exercises and practices in a more than dramatic world out there that's facing us and our children and the truth of the matter is when these practices are in place we find young people attracted to doing them and engage with their Islam more that's an important piece so this one is bouncing knees bouncing knees it's just and it can be done this it's good with the hips but every time you every time with the downward thrust you feel push on the ground push on the feel your weight pushing on the floor feel the bottom of your feet feel that feel that weight pushing each time down push push push push push and then the hadra and the exercise and the dance you know with singing we do breathing along with it okay so that you can do that for a while until your legs begin to feel some stress and when you stop and don't walk your knees what do your legs feel like generally speaking what do you feel in your legs now lighter a lot of people feel heavier more typically you feel heavier they feel bigger huh maybe maybe but the stress anyway more typically people feel they're like they have I mean our legs are extraordinary things you know the Moroccans refer to the you know the number 11 bus we don't use it anymore we don't walk we and where I live I mean you know you see people walking in the street you think what's that person doing out there walking so that's the first stage and there's lots of other grounding exercises riding horses is grounding not because you're on the ground but because you need that balance and anytime you're balancing you're away you're aware of your body and your body weight in your center of gravity and all these kinds of things and if you walk something complex on something complex the balance and the maneuvering and the changing of the balance will bring in these so this whole business the feet from the feet all these nerves go up and they reach all parts of our body and the the stibular mechanisms of balance in our ear our feet inform us of where we are at all time and that's how we can walk without you know without falling over walking into a wall except when I'm really really tired and there's been a lot of smoke in New Mexico I have a hard time doing that okay so that's the first thing the second one I guess we could sit down for this how you guys feeling standing up that would invigorate the whole process the hadra but anyway that hadra you know it's controversial but I will say this that one of the local scholars very well known local scholar I won't mention his name but we were walking along and he said to me he said how came you know we should all do hadra and and then he realized there were students his students were behind him and then he said to me he said for our bodies and I don't have to mention his name because you probably think he's the most well-known scholar in the local area a convert that you know and I've see