Resembling an iceberg in that
only a very small percentage is above-the-surface-and-visible-to-the-eye:
most of me is internal...

Exploring, wondering about, engaging, testing, experimenting with, making various levels of sense of, responding to, generating art about, and seeking solutions for or searching for the fulcrum points which, when activated, trigger the transformative paradigmatic shifts which mark evolutionary change-- this process, rather than any product, has been the overarching motif of my life. One might say I began life as an artist and then became a life-artist who, somehow, in the middle of that journey, passed through several iterations in a participant-observer experiment but was never quite capable of keeping herself from messing with the cultures she was exploring, so eventually, forced to abandon anthropology in favor of psychotherapy and transformative spiritual activism, (she, he, they, we, that, I, that being, I) landed here and now.

I suppose one could say I was born a mystic. Certainly, for as long as I can remember (which is at least from the age of three) I've openly asked questions most people do not apparently ask (at least one could easily infer this from the reactions many people have had to me) and had experiences which are generally categorized as "weird" (wyrd) or mystical-- lucid and precognitive dreams, visions, voices, a sense of implicate order, and a yearning to know God, the Ancestors, my purpose and place within it all, and myself.

The only child of two free-thinking parents (an Atheist-Agnostic physician descended from an Indigenous lineage of Hungarian healers who escaped the Inquisition to lead the Polish Underground in WWII and a Pantheist artist descended from Rebekah on her mother's side and King David on her father's), I've often wondered if my impossible life is the result of the Ancestors trying to pass on their contributions to only one offspring in the familial generation into which I was born. I've also experienced this as quite painful, feeling for much of my life that were I to choose the "wrong" path, I might damage the Web of Creation.

Do all only children feel this way?

Be that as it may, I seem to have lived several lives in one. It remains to be seen if I've been successful at any of them. I've lived them, nonetheless. There's a Sufi saying,

Die without dying and resurrect now… -Murshida Habiba Kabir

Perhaps at the very least, I've become somewhat adept at that.

In the world of form, I started out in public education after which I attended Quaker School in Philadelphia from 4th grade through Senior High. I went on to Bryn Mawr and Bard Colleges for Undergrad, then stepped away from school for several years to try my hand at the wilderness of life. At age 30, I returned to formal education, earning Masters and Specialist Degrees in Mental Health with a concentration in Systems Theory (Marriage and Family Therapy) from the University of Florida. As a newly-single mother without child support, I wanted a stable career to support my daughter. Life, however, had other plans.

Graduate school confronted me with clear and undeniable indications that my mother's mother's lineage had suffered generations of sexual abuse. As I dove into my own transformative healing, facing for the first time the extent of both my own and my family's trauma, I became fascinated with exploring recursive mirroring between internal and external systems, was diagnosed with an auto-immune disorder, stumbled into the healing power of sound, encountered spontaneous whirling and embodied experiences of divinity which fueled new forms of poetry, and discovered a form of work called, "the Recovery of Indigenous Mind." Somewhere along the way, I ended up counseling and designing life skills education inside the criminal justice system. That job came to an end as the local Sheriff's Dept took the jail away from the counselors in 1996. Our nation was careening into Mass Incarceration. A year later, I was presenting Healing Sound as a modality at Harvard and scooped up by three Dervishes who hand-delivered me "to the teachers".

22 years have passed since the day I first sat before Murshid Shahabuddin David Less of the Chisti lineage of Hazrat Inayat Khan and Pir Sherif Baba of the Marufi R'fai, the "Howling Dervishes" of Turkey. Today, (she, he, they, we, that, I, that being, I) am/are/is a teacher and guide (Pira) of the Message Collective, prison abolitionist, and human being charged with felony convictions for defying marijuana laws in Georgia in response to a call to change them. In mystical Judaism, this Path is called "Tikkun Olam". The Sufis call it, "Shafiyyat." Because it is often impossible to see the true nature of a problem from the outside, the practitioner steps inside, willingly becoming a living offering. In Christianity, this is simply called "a leap of faith."

There are two poles of justice:
The pole of human justice and the Pole of Divine Justice.
The pole of human justice must continue to evolve toward the Pole of Divine Justice,
or the law will cease to serve humanity,
and, instead, humanity will be forced to serve the law.
— Murshida VA

I don't believe human law was ever intended to become a religion, but in the past decade, I've encountered many people who seem to have forgotten that human law is not the word of God-- or Buddha for that matter. I fail to be convinced that any human being has the wherewithal to know the Will of that which is, by definition, Omniscient, Omnipotent, Omnipresent, and All-Pervading, and I'm quite certain the originators never once intended human law to be confounded with anything burned into rock by the hand of an Almighty.

Perhaps in the place where faiths intersect there is a memory of the birthplace of all religions, a memory of that need, that human yearning for connection, connection with that which challenges us to remember our fragility and our greatness all at once. And perhaps if we can recall that place, we can and will find a viable way to loosen the grip a few of us have on laws that no longer serve humanity, laws like the slavery exception clause in the 13th Amendment of the Constitution.

It will take about 100 years to dismantle our prison system completely. But dismantle it we can, and dismantle it we must. The alternative trajectory is genuinely unthinkable. In the meantime, it is my work to liberate

Rain of Blessing,
—Murshida VA

*The above Biographical Statement composed during the Masters in Peace and Social Justice at Claremont-Lincoln University, 2020.