Sheikh Muiz Brian Brinkerhoff
Muiz Brinkerhoff was formally inditiated into Sufism within the Sufi Islamia Ruhaniat Society; he is a certified Dance Leader within the tradition and is also recognized as a Sheikh (teacher). His Sufi work is informed and deepened by a wide variety of interests and talents from other areas of his life, including his most recent certification as a MotherWave Awakening Practitioner--a new personal transformational technology combining breathwork, movement, and belief system modification techniques--as well as by what he refers to as a "zany and irreveent sense of humor." As the first openly gay Sheikh, he enacts both archetypes of consciousness scout, or "going first," and that of spiritual teacher, or sacred functionary. By incorporating humor and irreverence in his work, he also personifies the role of sacred clown.
The Dances of Universal Peace,
he explains, were "brought through by Sam Lewis, an American Sufi master. Although the traditional orders do not use them, it was Lewis's teacher, Inayat Khan, who brought Sufism to the West in 1910." Khan's innovations and distillations of traditional learning from India evolved into American Sufism. Brinkerhoff asserts that the dances are an "expansion of meditation; they come from that same place of stillness, and translate it into movement. They are designed to help people open up to Spirit, by opening up inside first. Originally each one of the dances was centered on sacred phrases or divine names from different traditions. In that sense they were mantric. The movement comes from within as a response to the experience of a sacred phrase."
The Dances of Universal Peace are different from the whirling or turning practiced by another Sufi order, the Mevlevi order founded by Rumi. The name stems from the word mevlavan, which means "our lord, our master." The turning is used as a meditative practice to reach high, ecstatic states, althought, Brinkerhoff says, "critics, such as renowned Sufi scholar Idries Shah, believe that the Whirling Dervishes are imitating the effects of Rumi's state, rather than what actually led to it."
In any case, the practice takes anywhere from twenty to forty-five minutes, and, from my personal experience, even watching it dome can be a transcendent, hightly meditative, and intoxicating experience. If you have never had the opportunity to see the Whirling Dervishes, the film Baraka includes some excellent footage.
"Coming Out Spiritually", Christian De La Huerta pg. 70-1
Sufism, Islam's mystical tradition, is this religions only branceh presenting a positive image of same-sex love. According to scholars, Sufism developed about a century after the death of Muhammad, when, as a demonstration against the excessive worldliness--exemplified by the sultans'expensive silks and satins--which they felt was corroding Islam, a group of Muslims began wearing rough woolen apparel, from which the name Sufi derives (suf means wool). However, openly gay Sufi Sheikh Muiz Brinkerhoff reports that other experts trace the roots of Sufism back to the Egyptian mystery schools.
Emphasizing the internal, rather than the external, the Sufis pursued transcendence and ecstatic union with God, a direct experience of the divine. By the twelfth century they were assembling in communities clustered around spiritual teachers, or sheikhs. Sufis are known for their passionate poetry, which beautifully expresses the pain of separation from and a deep longing for God. Because of its emphasis on the internal, in Sufism one's sexual orientation is not as important: "the only thing that counts is union with the Divine through mystic exaltation." Much of Sufi poetry is replete with homoerotic descriptions. It should not be surprising that Sufis have experienced repression at the hands of fundamentalist Muslims, who find even the concept of shahed--that the image of God can be evidenced in a male beloved--offensive and heretical.
"Coming Out Spiritually", Christian De La Huerta pg. 181
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