Breaking the Tomb: A Journey into Love, Integration, and Social Justice

In this deeply moving episode of Beyond Names, Dr. Habib Boerger is joined by Abdullah Pat Aylward—board chair of the Shadhiliyya Sufi Communities and founding leader of the Sufi Center Minnesota—for a wide-ranging and heartfelt conversation about spiritual seeking, transformation, and embodied love.

Pat shares his remarkable spiritual journey, beginning with a Catholic childhood and early yearning for meaning, through decades of study and practice across traditions including Vedanta, Hinduism, Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, mystical Christianity, and ultimately Sufism. Along the way, he reflects on the teachers and saints who shaped him—Krishnamurti, Ramana Maharshi, Dr. Usharbudh Arya, Dr. Ibrahim Jaffe, and Sidi Muhammad al-Jamal—and the ways presence, not concepts, became his true guide.

At the heart of this episode is Pat’s honest account of “breaking the tomb”: a profound period of personal collapse that stripped away identity, image, and certainty, and opened him to a deeper integration of love, humility, and compassion. From this breaking emerged a seamlessness between inner spiritual life and outer engagement in the world—work, relationships, leadership, and service.

Together, Dr. Habib and Pat explore:

• What it means to love ourselves without needing to fix or perfect ourselves
• How spiritual practice becomes real in everyday life
• The deep unity of spirituality and social justice
• Why compassion, inclusion, and joy are not ideals, but lived realities
• How suffering can become a doorway into freedom and belonging

This episode is an invitation to rest in the truth that there is only one heart, one life, and one love—expressing itself through us all. 

Transcript

Beyond Names: Spirituality for Anyone and Everyone

YouTube Channel: Beyond Names with Dr. Habib Boerger

YouTube handle: @BeyondNamesPodcast

Episode: 30

Host: Dr. Habib Boerger

Conversation Partner: Pat Aylward

Title: Breaking the Tomb: A Journey into Love, Integration, and Social Justice

Description: In this deeply moving episode of Beyond Names, Dr. Habib Boerger is joined by Abdullah Pat Aylward—board chair of the Shadhiliyya Sufi Communities and founding leader of the Sufi Center Minnesota—for a wide-ranging and heartfelt conversation about spiritual seeking, transformation, and embodied love.

Pat shares his remarkable spiritual journey, beginning with a Catholic childhood and early yearning for meaning, through decades of study and practice across traditions including Vedanta, Hinduism, Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, mystical Christianity, and ultimately Sufism. Along the way, he reflects on the teachers and saints who shaped him—Krishnamurti, Ramana Maharshi, Dr. Usharbudh Arya, Dr. Ibrahim Jaffe, and Sidi Muhammad al-Jamal—and the ways presence, not concepts, became his true guide.

At the heart of this episode is Pat’s honest account of “breaking the tomb”: a profound period of personal collapse that stripped away identity, image, and certainty, and opened him to a deeper integration of love, humility, and compassion. From this breaking emerged a seamlessness between inner spiritual life and outer engagement in the world—work, relationships, leadership, and service.

Together, Dr. Habib and Pat explore:

• What it means to love ourselves without needing to fix or perfect ourselves
• How spiritual practice becomes real in everyday life
• The deep unity of spirituality and social justice
• Why compassion, inclusion, and joy are not ideals, but lived realities
• How suffering can become a doorway into freedom and belonging

This episode is an invitation to rest in the truth that there is only one heart, one life, and one love—expressing itself through us all.

Transcript:

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Welcome to Beyond Names. I'm Dr. Habib. This is a space for spiritual seekers and soulful misfits, for the curious and the committed, for those grounded in a tradition, and for those who are not sure what they believe.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Whether you call the Divine God, Yahweh, Allah, Elohim, Brahman, Great Spirit, Higher Power, you are welcome here, including if you're still searching for language that fits.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Together, we'll explore the intersection of spirituality and daily life, the wisdom of many traditions, and the ways we return to our true selves, to our source, to the light that each of us carry within.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I'm so glad you're here. Let's begin with introduction of our conversation partner for this episode, Pat Aylward. Abdullah Pat Aylward currently serves as the board chair of Shadhiliyya Sufi Communities and has been doing so since 2023.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Abdullah Pat is Muqaddam Murrabi Ruhi and founding leader of the Sufi Center Minnesota community.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: He was a board member of the Project for Pride in Living from 1985 to 2010 and served as its chair from 2001 to 2007.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Project for Pride in Living is a large Minnesota nonprofit organization whose mission is to provide housing, job training, and education for people who are poor and/or of moderate income.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Pat has been a board member and an officer of a number of nonprofits. To learn more about Pat and his work, please visit https://suficentermn.org/. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Pat, welcome, thank you for being here.

Pat Aylward: Thank you, Habib. I appreciate the opportunity. I'm looking forward to our conversation.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Great. So, as you've been forewarned, I'd like to ask you to introduce yourself by sharing your spiritual story.

Pat Aylward: Sure, I'd be happy to do so. My spiritual journey is a bit of a long one.

Pat Aylward: I grew up in a Catholic family.

Pat Aylward: Five kids.

Pat Aylward: So, and, you know, as a kid, as a child, I was… I had an interest in the religion. I was an altar boy. I wanted to be a priest when I was in the fifth grade.

Pat Aylward: Lost that one within a year or so. But I've always had a yearning for spiritual understanding, you know, even from that age.

Pat Aylward: As I got into high school, my interests turned more towards social justice, both what was happening within our local community and what was happening in the greater world around me. 

Pat Aylward: And the spiritual quest was always something that was an integral part of my life such that, when I was 16, so when I was a junior in high school, a couple of friends of mine came to me and said, there's this guy teaching these classes on, like, yoga or meditation or something, and we want to go and listen to him, so why don't you come with us?

Pat Aylward: And so I did.

Pat Aylward: I went with them, and the guy teaching was Dr. Usharbudh Arya, who was, at the time, a professor at the University of Minnesota who taught Asian religions and Sanskrit.

Pat Aylward: And, as the word pundit implies he was a scholar, but he wasn't an ordinary pundit.

Pat Aylward: He had grown up in India in a Sanskrit-speaking family, speaking Sanskrit as their primary language.

Pat Aylward: Now, many people think that Sanskrit is a dead language, and he would remark on this to us on occasion, and he would say, no. In India, a country of, at that time, I don't know, 700 million, however many people it was, he would tell us, there are 2,000 families in India, that keeps Sanskrit as their primary language.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Wow.

Pat Aylward: And so he was, an extraordinary scholar. So he was teaching these classes in his house, near the university, up in his attic.

Pat Aylward: And the classes were attended by kids that were either his students or a friend of his students, so they were all in their early 20s. They were college kids. And the three of us, high school kids.

Pat Aylward: So he was teaching Vedanta, pure Vedanta, and for those in the audience who may not be aware, Vedanta is like classical Indian, Indian meaning South Asian philosophy.

Pat Aylward: It's a complete structure of philosophy and religion and living.

Pat Aylward: So he was teaching this using Sanskrit language a lot, and I understood maybe, maybe 5% of what he was saying.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Hmm.

Pat Aylward: But… I was struck by his presence and who he was.

Pat Aylward: And I said to myself, I barely understand anything that he's saying, but there's something that he has that I need to find out about.

Pat Aylward: My friends, on the other hand, were like, this is really boring, we're out of here.

Pat Aylward: So they never went back, but I did. I kept going back, and I kept studying with him.

Pat Aylward: And this was during the summer, so this was between my junior and senior year in high school.

Pat Aylward: And at the end of that course they did a retreat at a state park in Minnesota where everyone, you know, camped at the state park, and I had to get permission from my parents to do this.

Pat Aylward: And so, you know, we would set up tents in the state park, and in the morning, we would go down to the river, the St. Croix River, and people that wanted to would swim in the river, then we'd come up on the banks of the St. Croix and do yoga, practice yoga.

Pat Aylward: And then he would teach in the mornings and in the afternoons. And it was just… it was like being immersed in this other world. And during the course of that week, there was a couple that got married, and so they created these garlands of flowers and a fire pit, and they… they had a traditional Vedanta wedding.

Pat Aylward: Cooked all kinds of great vegetarian food, and there was music going into the night, and for a 16-year-old, this was quite something, man.

Pat Aylward: And at the end of that weekend, I got initiated by him.

Pat Aylward: And my mom went with me to the initiation, you know?

Pat Aylward: And you bring presents to the teacher.

Pat Aylward: And I think I brought, like, an orange and a case of Memorex tapes, because my dad was a manufacturer's representative for electronics, instruments, and one of his lines was Memorex.

Pat Aylward: And Dr. Arya used to tape every lecture that he gave. He loved that. He loved that tape, that box of Memorex tapes. He would refer to that for years, when I was in the audience, and he would see me. And Pat and his mom brought me Memorex tapes!

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Oh my goodness.

Pat Aylward: So that… he was my first spiritual teacher. He was my first spiritual teacher. I started studying with him.

Pat Aylward: His guru was Swami Rama.

Pat Aylward: And so I met his guru sometime later, Swami Rama, and I was part of that community in my late teens and early 20s.

Pat Aylward: And, I then went from high school into college, and I said that I was very interested in social justice, which I was and am.

Pat Aylward: And so I went in as a political science major. And in my first semester at McAllister College in St. Paul, I met another extraordinary person who was a teacher in the South Asian Studies Department, David White.

Pat Aylward: And I took a seminar, from him on Gandhi.

Pat Aylward: And David White was, again, David White had done his, dissertation, his PhD dissertation, on Ramana Maharshi.

Pat Aylward: He introduced me to Ramana Maharshi, and for those, again, for those who may not be aware, Ramana Maharshi was one of the greatest saints of the 20th century from India, a human being of just legendary and extraordinary presence and being.

Pat Aylward: So David had done his dissertation on Ramana Maharshi, and he was a conscientious objector during World War II. Spent time in a federal prison because of that.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Wow.

Pat Aylward: When he got out, he was later personally initiated by Paramahansa Yogananda, personally initiated by Yogananda, and started, practicing that type of meditation with Yogananda.

Pat Aylward: David's lifelong pursuit of understanding was the Bhagavad Gita.

Pat Aylward: He was a scholar and student of the Gita and was working on his own translation.

Pat Aylward: And by the time that… when I was a student with him, he had maybe 6 or 7 chapters of the Gita translated, and we would use his translations in our studies, you know?

Pat Aylward: But he would sit up on his desk, he was pretty much completely bald, kind of a Yoda-looking figure in a lot of ways, with a thermos of hot tea, and he would teach us about Asian philosophy and Asian religions, and he embodied the Gita, the karma, you know, the yoga of action, the yoga of work.

Pat Aylward: And I learned so much from him, so he set me on the path of exploring Asian philosophy and Asian religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Zen.

Pat Aylward: And so I started studying all of these things, kind of neglected my, political science studies, and started moving in that direction of philosophy and religion.

Pat Aylward: And, over the course of the ensuing years, in my early 20s, I actually returned to Christianity for a while.

Pat Aylward: I started studying Christianity from a scholarly standpoint, and also from a mystical standpoint, especially the Eastern Orthodox tradition, and what they call the practice of the Jesus Prayer.

Pat Aylward: That's a practice that's used in Eastern Orthodoxy, and I started practicing that. And it's kind of like a mantra when there are long and short versions of it. The longest version is, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, you know, have mercy upon me, a sinner.

Pat Aylward: And the shortened version would be something like, Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me. Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me. So, in a way, it's kind of a Christian tawba [repentance] practice. And so I did that. I practiced that, and did fasting. My longest water fast was, like, 40 days.

Pat Aylward: And read, you know, the Bible, the New Testament, and Christian literature, mostly the writings of the saints, and the sages of Christianity. And so I dove deep into mystical Christianity in my early 20s.

Pat Aylward: And I always had a, a thirst for understanding, and so I read Ram Dass, I read, Ramana Maharshi, I read Alan Watts. I read Jiddu Krishnamurti.

Pat Aylward: I was so taken by Krishnamurti and the writings of Krishnamurti in my mid-20s that I actually traveled, in one case, to Ojai, California, and in another case to San Francisco, to be with Krishnamurti, and to receive the teachings, you know, from him directly.

Pat Aylward: And so, all of those were huge influences on me.

Pat Aylward: Minnesota happens to be a community where there is a significant Tibetan population.

Pat Aylward: And in my work as a real estate agent here in the Twin Cities, I came across Tibetans who became clients of mine and introduced me to the aspect of Tibetan Buddhism.

Pat Aylward: And so I started studying Tibetan Buddhism with some of the rinpoches who were here in Minnesota and was fortunate to have seen the Dalai Lama when he came to Minnesota one of those years.

Pat Aylward: And so, I moved into Tibetan Buddhism for a while, and, after that, I kind of slid into Zen, and started practicing Zen, Zen Buddhism. 

Pat Aylward: So, a lot of different things, a lot of different… in fact, a friend of mine, a colleague in the real estate world, we were at a party one night, and he says to me, he goes, are you going to try every religion that there is?

Pat Aylward: Because he saw me go from this to this to this.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah, yeah.

Pat Aylward: So, how I came to, the Sufi path, you know, when I was in college, I did study Islam, because I studied everything.

Pat Aylward: And… I… read, the writings of Pir Valayat Khan.

Pat Aylward: So I had a little bit of an understanding of Sufism, and I was introduced to Rumi, the poet, Rumi, again when I was in high school.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yep.

Pat Aylward: And again, some friends of mine invited me to a poetry reading. I had never been to a poetry reading before.

Pat Aylward: And so we went to the downtown Minneapolis Public Library for a poetry reading.

Pat Aylward: And the poet was Robert Bly.

Pat Aylward: Robert Bly was one of the preeminent poets in the United States in the 20th century.

Pat Aylward: And he was reading the poetry of Rumi, Mirabai, and Kabir.

Pat Aylward: And with him, he had, two people who eventually became friends of mine. One was a sitar player, and the other was a tabla player.

Pat Aylward: And so while they were playing, he was reciting this ecstatic poetry.

Pat Aylward: And I had never heard poetry until that day, like that.

Pat Aylward: And that opened up the world of Rumi for me at that time, and I became I fell in love with Rumi, which I still am to this day. You know?

Pat Aylward: So, we find ourselves in, the year 2000 or so. I have been divorced for a couple of years, and a good friend of mine had set me up with her friend in Chicago.

Pat Aylward: And so, I talked to Carla a few times on the phone, flew down to Chicago, this was pre-internet, so I had never seen a picture of her, just flew down to the city.

Pat Aylward: And we went out, had dinner, went out on the town, had a great time.

Pat Aylward: And didn't become… it wasn't a relationship for us, but we become very fast friends, which we are to this day. She's one of my closest friends.

Pat Aylward: So, about a year and a half after our date, she called me up and she said, there's this man coming to Chicago, you have to come and see him. His name is Dr. Ibrahim Jaffe. And you need to come. You need to do this.

Pat Aylward: I had no idea who he was. You know, I knew that she told me he was a Sufi teacher, and I knew a little bit about Sufism.

Pat Aylward: But I said, okay, if you say I need to come, I'll come. So I did. I flew down to Chicago, and Ibrahim, Dr. Jaffe, was doing a workshop with his then-wife, Nada, and it was on relationships. And I wasn't in a relationship at the time.

Pat Aylward: So, Dr. Jaffe is up on the stage, and he's a healer.

Pat Aylward: And he's doing his healing thing, and he's people… bringing people up to the stage and doing demonstrations with them.

Pat Aylward: And people are laughing, and they're crying, and they're having all kinds of experiences at all ends of the spectrum.

Pat Aylward: And I, who had been used to meditation and various systems of meditation, had never been exposed to healing or spiritual healing at all. So this was completely new to me, and I'm thinking to myself, this is kind of weird.

Pat Aylward: He's up there in his robes and his hat, and he's doing all these things, and I sat there in the middle of the audience, kind of scrunched down and just said, I hope to God he doesn't pick on me and bring me up there.

Pat Aylward: But again, just as I had with my first spiritual teacher, Dr. Arya...

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Hmm.

Pat Aylward: ...I was struck by his presence.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Hmm.

Pat Aylward: And he communicated to me, he gave to me a presence of, of acceptance and unconditional love and, like, arms wide open.

Pat Aylward: And I said to myself, whatever it is that he's got, that's what I want. That's what I've been looking for. That's it. What he has is what I want.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

Pat Aylward: And, I didn't say a word to him that weekend. And I just started traveling to various cities where he was teaching, so I could take things with him. 

Pat Aylward: And 2 months later, I found myself in what he calls a personal retreat intensive, which is 4 days with 9 other people. And so I'm there for a 4-day intensive with him, having met him 2 months prior.

Pat Aylward: Everybody else in that workshop was either a graduate of his university, a current student in his university, or they've been on the path for a very long time, and me.

Pat Aylward: But I just… I knew that it was it. I just knew it. I knew it intuitively. And so I just jumped in, and I didn't question myself. I just kept saying yes.

Pat Aylward: And shortly after that I met his teacher, Sidi Muhammad al-Jamal.

Pat Aylward: And shortly after that, I entered the university, what is now the University of Sufism.

Pat Aylward: So I met Sidi Muhammad at a home in Chicago back in the days, he would tour the United States, and a lot of his teachings would be done in people's homes.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

Pat Aylward: And so, I went back to Chicago, my friend Carla took me to the house to be with all the other people that were there, and Sidi.

Pat Aylward: And, you know, Sidi was teaching in front of the fireplace, and at one point when he paused, you know, there was a break, he started walking towards the kitchen.

Pat Aylward: Carla grabs me by the hand, and she says, come, come, I want to introduce you to Sidi.

Pat Aylward: So she takes me up to Sidi, and she goes, Sidi, this is Pat.

Pat Aylward: Sidi's walking towards the kitchen, he stops, he turns around and looks at me, and he says, I've been waiting for you for a very long time.

Pat Aylward: And then he turns back and heads to the kitchen.

Pat Aylward: And that was my introduction to Sidi.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Oh my goodness.

Pat Aylward: So I just, started attending the university.

Pat Aylward: And, the university at that time was… consisted of a lot of people that were, entering from the healing professions.

Pat Aylward: So there were a lot of people that were therapists, or that practiced traditional Chinese medicine, or acupuncturists, a lot of people from the healing professions.

Pat Aylward: I'm a real estate agent.

Pat Aylward: So… and what I described, as far as Ibrahim doing his Ibrahim thing and the healing and the demonstrations, that was what school was like, only more intense.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

Pat Aylward: And I sat in the back, and I just watched, and it was like, wow, man. I mean, there was so much that was going on, and I just kind of absorbed it. I said hardly anything to anybody, but I just kind of absorbed it. And over the course of weeks and months and years, I started changing.

Pat Aylward: Now, at the time, I would not have been able to see it, but looking back, I could clearly see it, you know?

Pat Aylward: One of the, one of the… there were many stories from that era, but one that I like to tell when I'm teaching is that a lot of the people coming from those healing professions had very, developed intuitive gifts.

Pat Aylward: And they were sensitive to what was happening with somebody on a non-physical level.

Pat Aylward: Me, not so much.

Pat Aylward: And, Dr. Jaffe is very visual in his subtle perception.

Pat Aylward: So when you speak to him, he'll see… he'll say, this is what I'm seeing, it's right here, it looks like this, and he'll describe things in visual terms.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

Pat Aylward: And, one day, this was in my third year, so my last year, he's going to do a healing demonstration, and usually, when he would ask for volunteers, all the people would raise their hands, pick me, pick me, pick me, and I would never raise my hand.

Pat Aylward: This time, he looks over the raised hands, and he goes, Abdullah, why don't you come up?

Pat Aylward: So, when Ibrahim says, come up, you come up. So I went up to the head of the class, I forget what it was that we were working on. 

Pat Aylward: He had me facing the class. And he says, okay, Abdullah, look at this, this, and this.

Pat Aylward: So I closed my eyes and, like, black, blank screen, nothing, right?

Pat Aylward: So I'm going, okay, here I am, up in front of the class, he's saying, tell me what you see, what am I going to do?

Pat Aylward: And so, in that moment of panic, the only thing that I could think of to do was to scan myself, like, what was happening in my body at that time, and to describe what I was feeling.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Hmm.

Pat Aylward: So that's what I did.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yep.

Pat Aylward: I just discerned whatever was happening with me at that moment, and I described the feeling to him.

Pat Aylward: They said, yeah, that's it.

Pat Aylward: Which was a huge moment for me, because I had translated what he was saying to me into my language, which was kinesthetic and not visual.

Pat Aylward: And gave him the answer that way, and he, said yes.

Pat Aylward: And it gave me to understand that there are different ways of seeing, quote-unquote, seeing things, you know? That was huge for me, and so that… that was a big learning for me to know that there's different ways of doing things, and I need to be comfortable with what my way is, you know? And to find what my way… my is. 

Pat Aylward: So, as I was going to the school program, at that time it was for one week, and we would travel to a location in California and we'd be immersed in this setting with all our fellow students and teachers, and, we were, like, in a bubble, a bubble of love, actually.

Pat Aylward: And, it was an extraordinary, opportunity to really, look at what's going on within your life and to move in directions that are, you know, the directions that I wanted to move in, that we wanted to move in.

Pat Aylward: And as I came out of the school setting and went back into my life in the world, it was… in the beginning, it was really hard because I was going from a situation in which everybody was in a similar kind of state and vibration and intention, and going back into what the world is, you know, what we all know the world is..

Pat Aylward: And in the beginning, it would take me anywhere from 1 to 2 weeks to transition, where I actually felt comfortable back in the world.

Pat Aylward: And that comfortableness with… within the world was me more like being in the world and not quite being in that place that I had been at the school.

Pat Aylward: And over the course of those 3 years, that transition from being in that environment of love and compassion and acceptance to being in the world got less and less to the point where I could walk from this world into that world, and it was seamless.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Hmm…

Pat Aylward: And that has proven to be my experience, increasingly so ever since.

Pat Aylward: So that, whereas in the beginning, there was my Sufi world and my other world, my family, my work, whatever that might be, now there's only one world for me. They're not two worlds. They're only one world now. 

Pat Aylward: But it took a long time for me to integrate that within myself to be comfortable within myself as to where I was, what I knew, what I didn't know, all of those different things, you know?

Pat Aylward: But, that's… that's true for me now. 

Pat Aylward: And this… work…with the Sufi community, And this commu- community…has, in ways both big and small, saved my life on any number of occasions.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Hmm.

Pat Aylward: And, you know, I still work as a real estate agent, and I have my work in the Sufi world, and my work in the Sufi world is as important, if not more important to me now, because, you know, what I do, you know, with the teaching and the work that I do with the organizations is me, giving back in acknowledgement of every gift I've received, which are of such a nature that I could never begin to repay them.

Pat Aylward: But that's… that's the motivation for me doing what I do these days.

Pat Aylward: That was a long answer to a short question.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: It was the perfectly long answer to that question.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah, you know, I've heard that, that, for many listeners, the part where people share their spiritual stories is their favorite part of the podcast. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So, yeah, I think it's great to hear how we get to where we are, and it's always fun for me when I hear little pieces, and I'm like, oh, no way, I can really relate to that. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Like about the same time that I came to Sufism, I was also going through yoga teacher training.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So, I was reading Sidi Muhammad al-Jamal's books at the same time as I was reading the Bhagavad Gita.

Pat Aylward: Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And I'd be like, oh, that sounds so much like that, and that sounds so much like that! 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And then I would find that really enlivening, to find these commonalities between these two different systems that I was studying at the same time, and I have remained that way, where I'm enlivened by finding the commonalities between.

Pat Aylward: Same. I'm the same way. I mean, I really like teaching to brand new people, people who have had no exposure to this. 

Pat Aylward: One of the reasons I enjoy it so much is that, as my friend said, I've either studied or practiced a lot of the religions out there, and so no matter what somebody comes to me with, whatever their background is, I can relate to it in a lot of ways, and so I really enjoy that a lot.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I mean, we also really appreciate the, I'm going to use the word sincerity, I hope that that's okay, but the idea that you were searching from such a young age.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I, I really turned away from anything to do with religion or spirituality, and came to it much later, and then when I did come to it, I came to it skeptically.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah, and it's not the same as your experience of sitting in the workshop and going, oh, this is kind of strange, you know, this is a little weird, but it was kind of like, okay, I'm just sitting back and going, huh, well, I'm going to try this, but I'm going to look at it like a science experiment, you know, I'm just going to, like, do this thing, do this practice, see what happens. And it was years before I took the promise to be a part of the Sufi order, yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So, there are different aspects of your story that I can be like, oh yeah, I can relate to that. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: The seeing part, when you talked about Ibrahim Jaffe, and seeing, and I… yeah, I was one of those who was like, yeah, no, I don't see anything. Nope, not a thing.

Pat Aylward: [laughing]

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I'm feeling it. I'm feeling some things, but I'm not seeing… I'm not seeing anything.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And then, I kept praying about which major to be in, and of course, my guidance was to be in the healing major, which is the one that I absolutely did not want to have anything to do with.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Oh, God knows what's best for us, and we don't, right?

Pat Aylward: That's right, that's right.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah, yeah..

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So, yeah, there's obviously parts of your story that I especially appreciate, because I can relate to them closely. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I want to follow up on a couple of things, but one of the things is you mentioned this seamless transition. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And I remember what it was like for me to be in school, and at the time, I worked for, the state government, and I was managing special projects.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And I… I don't know that… I had a really difficult time with the transition, but I do know that there were… that what I quickly used to help with that was, like, okay, this is practice field. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: This is my… so… If I was in a meeting and the stakeholders were particularly contentious, I looked at it as an opportunity to practice what I had been practicing at the University of Sufism.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And I found that it was amazingly effective. That suddenly meetings went so much better than they did before.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Suddenly people started being much more polite to each other when I was just holding the pull of, this is the standard. In order for you to participate in this meeting, this is how we're going to interact with each other. And it worked!

Pat Aylward: Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So, I was wondering if you had any advice around that getting to that place of seamlessness where you bring together this inner experience that is so impactful, that is this experience of unconditional love, and this experience of acceptance, this experience of this embrace, and… and then, in the world...

Pat Aylward: Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: ...doing business in the world, interacting with…a business transaction, or a… and so on and so forth. You get the idea.

Pat Aylward: Yeah, I do. There's a lot of different ways to approach that.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

Pat Aylward: But, I'll talk a little bit more about how it, developed for me.

Pat Aylward: And, for me, integral to being at this point now, was I needed to be, stripped of my images and conceptions of myself.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Hmm.

Pat Aylward: ...of who I thought I was.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

Pat Aylward: And how it happened for me was through an extraordinarily difficult and hard time in my life.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Mmm.

Pat Aylward: Which was some years back. This was after I had met Ibrahim, after I had gone through the university and was going through a divorce.

Pat Aylward: Really, really challenging relationship, on the one hand.

Pat Aylward: And I don't want to lose the gifts of that relationship, so if… so remind me if… if I… if I don't refer to them, because I do want to refer to them.

Pat Aylward: But at the time, it was really, really hard.

Pat Aylward: So I was, like, the person that had kind of, like, founded the Minnesota community, and shortly after I started doing things, a couple good friends of mine, Phil and Kay Sorensen, came into the community.

Pat Aylward: We had known each other for a very long time, and, you know, at that point, it was the three of us.

Pat Aylward: And, so we would have teachers come in, and we would be doing workshops on a constant basis.

Pat Aylward: And during this time, when things were going really bad in my marriage, we had a very senior teacher come into town and do a weekend workshop with us.

Pat Aylward: And, I and my then-wife would have private meetings with all the teachers that came in. We'd talk about our relationship and what we could do, and so that was kind of a, you know, something that we would do.

Pat Aylward: And so we did with this particular teacher on Saturday night, before the Sunday teaching, and she said to me, Abdullah, I… I think for you, you need to be completely transparent and honest in front of the community. I'd like to do that with you tomorrow. Are you willing to do that?

Pat Aylward: And I was again at a stage in my life where I said yes to everything, so I said yes.

Pat Aylward: So the next day, Sunday, she was getting people's feedbacks from what had happened the day before, and she came to me last. She goes, Abdullah, would you come up here? I said, sure.

Pat Aylward: So, I'm up there in front of… now, this is my community.

Pat Aylward: And she goes, tell them what's happening with you.

Pat Aylward: Now, I had been a person that… on the outside, if you looked at me from the outside, everything was fine. Everything was good. I was a leader of the community; everybody related to me that way.

Pat Aylward: She says, tell them what's going on with you.

Pat Aylward: So I told about the problems I was having in my marriage. This was right around the economic crash of 2008. My business sucked. Everything was going bad.

Pat Aylward: So I started describing this, she goes, tell them in more detail.

Pat Aylward: So I did!

Pat Aylward: And by the end of that, she had various people come out and act voices of me. This person was my voice of God, this person was the voice of my ego, this person was, you know, da-da-da.

Pat Aylward: And by the end of that, I was, like, on the floor, kind of, like, you know, in a fetal position, and just a puddle of water.

Pat Aylward: And, so, and my wife hadn't come to that session, so she didn't see any of this.

Pat Aylward: I go home, and I'm just, like, Great.

Pat Aylward: And she sees me, having no idea what had happened, and she goes, oh, he's in really bad shape.

Pat Aylward: I went to the bedroom, crawled into the bed, pulled the covers over my head. She, unbeknownst to me, called my psychologist brother and said, Pat's in a really bad place, you need to come over here with your father, and, you know, he needs… he needs either help or commitment or something right now.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Wow. 

Pat Aylward: So they drove over to the house. And my sister alerted me to the fact that they were coming, and in my internal state of, like, shaking and not knowing what's going on, my dad and my brother are trying to convince me to go down to the Hennepin County Medical Center and check myself in.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Oh my goodness.

Pat Aylward: And I'm trying to convince them that I'm planning to go out to this retreat center in California with Dr. Jaffe and Dr. Laird, who are, you know, physicians that are friends of mine, and they're going to take care of me, and they go, oh, it's too far, you know, we need… and blah blah blah blah blah, until I finally was able to convince them to let me go. Leave me alone!

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yep.

Pat Aylward: And so, a couple weeks later, that's exactly what I did. I went out to the retreat center in California with my life completely falling around me.

Pat Aylward: And, for the weeks and months that followed, I mean, I was completely broken.

Pat Aylward: On the outwardly worldly plane, I was broken, my business sucked, I didn't have any money, my marriage was ending, I was…

Pat Aylward: And I could no longer keep up any facade about being this kind of a spiritual teacher.

Pat Aylward: Because it was evident to everyone that I, you know, I was, you know, a broken man at that point, you know.

Pat Aylward: And I was, and this Sufi community saved my life. They raised money for me.

Pat Aylward: When my biological family said… I went to one of my brothers, and then I said, can you loan me a couple thousand? He goes, man, I'd like to, but my wife says no. Can't do it.

Pat Aylward: But my Sufi family? Absolutely did.

Pat Aylward: And, I didn't teach for quite a while, because I was… I didn't know who I was at that point.

Pat Aylward: And we had a number of Indonesian families in our community.

Pat Aylward: And they brought me in, and I would start… resume teaching in the basement of one of their homes, and it was, like, 5 or 6 of them, and I would teach from Music of the Soul. And they just were my friends, and they just embraced me.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Hmm…

Pat Aylward: But as I re-emerged back into the community, I was different.

Pat Aylward: I wasn't the same person that I had been.

Pat Aylward: I was broken, but Sidi, our teacher, talks about breaking your tomb.

Pat Aylward: He describes this as being something that is necessary for a human being to do.

Pat Aylward: And when I read those words the first time, I didn't really understand what breaking your tomb meant.

Pat Aylward: But when… as I was experiencing those things that I was experiencing, I understand very well what breaking your tomb means.

Pat Aylward: And for me, HabibI had to go through that.

Pat Aylward: I had to come to a place where my image of who I thought I was, or who I wanted other people to see me as, had to be let go of, and had to be broken, and had to be discarded entirely.

Pat Aylward: And it took that for it to happen to me.

Pat Aylward: And as it did happen to me, I became a different type of teacher.

Pat Aylward: I became a different type of human being.

Pat Aylward: And it became clearer and clearer to me that my values in this world are creating a life of love, and compassion, and kindness and inclusion and respect for everyone that I encounter.

Pat Aylward: And what I accomplish in my outer world, and the money, and the awards, and the tributes are fine. There's nothing wrong with that, but they're just things.

Pat Aylward: They aren't the core of who I am, and I'm really, really clear on that.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Thank you for sharing with such honesty.

Pat Aylward: You’re welcome.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Again, there's a lot I can relate to. I can relate to that sense of just being crushed.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And… And trying to just put the pieces back together, and hang on, and… 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And… also that…getting to that point where you have to face that all the ideas of yourself that you have about who you are, that you… you’re just coming to that point where you can't not face that the time has come that you have to let those go. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: When I was in that space, I was at the land, at the Sufi Center, in Pope Valley at the time, Pope Valley, California at the time.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And I would just sit in retreat, in isolation, and do the recitation of la ialaha illallah, There is no god, little g, but God, big G, for the listeners who may not know, ul-Malik, ul-Haqq, ul-Mubeen, the Clear, Manifest Truth.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And so I just sat and did that recitation again, over, and over, and over, just, like, surrendering all the stuff that I thought about myself, all the images of myself, who I thought I was, who I thought I'd been for a very long time.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So, did you have any particular practices that were a part of that transition, that process for you?

Pat Aylward: I mean everything.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Everything.

Pat Aylward: But let me… I don't want to lose sight of… of the… one of the gifts.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yep.

Pat Aylward: So… You know, the marriage itself was… Really tough. Really hard.

Pat Aylward: And, she has 2 girls. And when I first met them, when I first met Izzy and Zoe, they were maybe, like, 6 and 8 years old.

Pat Aylward: And when we first got married and I moved into her house.

Pat Aylward: The youngest one was, like, not happy.

Pat Aylward: Because it had been the nice triad of the three of them, and now there was this guy, you know, in the house. She was not happy with me.

Pat Aylward: By the end when I was trying to convince my dad and my brother not to lock me up, she was my… my greatest fan, and… and… and she was just… she was just…

Pat Aylward: So, she didn't want to see me go, and so, we did get divorced.

Pat Aylward: And my ex-wife has a lot of good qualities, and one of her good qualities is that she doesn't hold grudges.

Pat Aylward: And so, we were divorced, she found herself as a single mom of two young girls.

Pat Aylward: And that's tough, it's a hard life, you know? And so, I was worried that she would cut me out of the girls' lives.

Pat Aylward: Not only did she not do that, but they needed, you know, rides to a friend's house, you know, pick up from school, help with their homework, and so she would ask me to take them here and there, and I always said yes. I never said no. I never said no.

Pat Aylward: I always said yes, so that I could spend time with the girls, and to this day, they are… we're family.

Pat Aylward: They're members of my family, they're my kids, and grandkids, you know? And… and those little girls, especially Zoe, the young one, taught me about love.

Pat Aylward: Zoe would… I mean, she didn't like it when I first moved in, but by the end, and Zoe is just… she has the biggest heart of anybody in the world, and she goes, love you, love you, love you, and as a man, I always found those words, I love you, difficult. Challenging.

Pat Aylward: And Zoe was the one that really taught me, because she would end every conversation with, I love you. Now, a lot of times, it's just, okay, goodbye. Instead of goodbye, it's love you. And so, a lot of times, it is just that, but it's more than that.

Pat Aylward: You know, because if you end every conversation that way, there's a way in which you know it's true. She does love me. You know?

Pat Aylward: And she taught me that. That little girl taught me that.

Pat Aylward: She was one of my greatest teachers, you know? So the gift that I received from that whole thing, as extraordinarily difficult as it was, if I had to do it over again, I would.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So I want to circle back to the question about the seamlessness and the story that you shared in coming out of that very difficult situation and emerging as this new being who was very much in touch with who you are at your core.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Not the outer who you are, but these values of truth and care and compassion and love, and…and integrity, and kindness, and… and so on. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So is it okay to paraphrase that as saying that that re-emergence of your awareness of who you are in your… in your core, and what you value in your core as being essentially who you… who you are, is what allowed that seamlessness between the inner and the outer, the spiritual experience and the world experience, the outer world experience? Is that an accurate…?

Pat Aylward: Yeah, it is. One of the ways that I describe it, sometimes, when I'm teaching, is that, prior to, Sufism, there was always a level of anxiety that was running within me.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Mmm.

Pat Aylward: And, if you were to, you know, pop open my head and listen to the thoughts, you know, the anxiety would run along the lines of, you know, I'm not sure I'm good enough, I'm comparing myself with him, and da-da-da, and do I stand up, you know, physically, mentally, you know, in the world, all those sorts of things.

Pat Aylward: And so I was never quite comfortable in any setting that I was in.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Hmm.

Pat Aylward: What Sufism, and the practice and the study of Sufism is essentially about opening the heart.

Pat Aylward: It's about discovering who we are. That's the essence of what it is.

Pat Aylward: And as I became to know that more and know it in an embodied sense and not an intellectual sense, I became more comfortable with who I am with my imperfections.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Hmm.

Pat Aylward: ...with my faults, with all the ways that I am not… you know, who I could be or might be.

Pat Aylward: And it became possible for me to begin to love myself with all of those things, and not try to love myself by removing all of those, you know, things that I thought that were keeping me from being this or that, you know?

Pat Aylward: And so, that seamlessness is, for me, knowing myself and knowing that I'm worthy and deserving of love with all the imperfections and faults and all the shortcomings that I have and that everyone else is exactly the same, no different than that, you know?

Pat Aylward: And in being able to do that, Habib, my life is so much happier now.

Pat Aylward: I mean, I really enjoy life. I laugh a lot. I have fun a lot.

Pat Aylward: When I'm in conversations, whether it's work, or whether it's Sufi stuff, or whether… I enjoy the conversations, and I have fun.

Pat Aylward: And, you know, I play appropriately, you know, with the people that I'm talking with, because to me, that's what life is all about, and I don't… I really try not to take anything too seriously.

Pat Aylward: You know? Even if it means, you know, I'm losing a $50,000 commission, or whatever it might be, you know? I try not to take things too seriously, because ultimately, it's about who we are, and how we are with other people, and how we treat each other. That's the bottom line, man.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I love the… I have to repeat it, just for myself. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So part of that transformation was getting to the point of loving yourself with your faults rather than this idea that you had to remove all of those faults in order to love yourself. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And, not only that, but realizing you are deserving and worthy of that love with all of your faults included. And so is everyone else.

Pat Aylward: Yeah, and so is everyone else, exactly right, yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Thank you for that. So, I wonder…

Dr. Habīb Boerger: You mentioned that you've received gifts for which you could never repay and I wondered if you'd say more about that.

Pat Aylward: There's, so many ways in which I've been blessed.

Pat Aylward: There was a book written years ago.

Pat Aylward: I'm not sure if Gurdjieff wrote it, it was about him, Meetings With Remarkable Men. Have you read that?

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Mm-mm.

Pat Aylward: So, I feel that my life has been kind of a journey of meetings with remarkable people. My first teacher, Dr. Arya, an extraordinary person. Krishnamurti, I wasn't close to him personally, but again, an extraordinary person. Ramana Maharshi, you know, I met him through his words, but…

Pat Aylward: You know, and then Ibrahim Jaffe, Dr. Ibrahim Jaffe, but for me, Sidi Muhammad al-Jamal.

Pat Aylward: For me, he is what, in Sufism, we call a Wali.

Pat Aylward: The meaning of Wali in Arabic is a friend of God, what the Christians call saints.

Pat Aylward: And he, for me, was a true Wali, a true friend of God. He taught me what it means to be a human being.

Pat Aylward: And for me to have had the honor of meeting him and spending time with him, was a gift that so few of us have had the opportunity to have that, and I'll be forever grateful for that.

Pat Aylward: You know, it's funny, in the position that, you know, I have in Minnesota and, you know, within the national community, I had the opportunity to spend time with them, you know? 

Pat Aylward: And every time I, would meet Sidi, I would start by introducing myself, because he's somebody who's talking to thousands of people. So I would say to him, Sidi, I'm Abdullah from Minneapolis. And he'd go, I know.

Pat Aylward: So, like, months later, I, you know, go in to see him again. I go, Sidi, I'm Abdullah from Minneapolis. He goes, I know.

Pat Aylward: A couple months later, I did the same thing. I go in, I go, Sidi, I'm Abdullah from Minneapolis. He looks at me, he goes, I know who you are.

Pat Aylward: Yay! Okay, Sidi, you actually do know who I am.

Pat Aylward: I never said that again because he did know who I was. You know?

Pat Aylward: And to have had the opportunity of meeting him, not just in spirit, but in this physical plane...

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah. 

Pat Aylward: ... is a gift that you… it's such a rare opportunity for any human being, and I'm blessed to have had that opportunity myself.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Oh. You're bringing me to tears.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: You know, how I… you used the phrase, arms wide open earlier, and that is how I experienced Sidi. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I experienced Sidi as come whoever you are, however you are, wherever you are, just come and taste the love.

Pat Aylward: Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And would you like another taste of love? Would you like to taste more than that?

Dr. Habīb Boerger: More than that, more than that. That's… that's how I experienced Sidi, so…

Pat Aylward: Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Okay. And we're wrapping down, because I'm aware of the time. I want to ask you one more question, and that is -- you mentioned social justice, and that this was something that was important for you, I believe when you were in high school, that you talked about… and you talked about these… you juxtaposed those… excuse me … juxtaposed your spiritual quest with social justice.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So, I wonder now, after… meeting a life of…leading a life of meeting remarkable people, and of exploring many different paths, from mystical Christianity and Eastern Orthodox Christianity to the Catholicism you grew up in, and Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, and so on, and so forth.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: If you were going to say something to that teenager who was so interested and committed to social justice, and you could bring together advice that Paired spirituality and social justice, what would you say to him?

Pat Aylward: Social justice and spirituality are inextricably joined.

Pat Aylward: Because as we come to know ourselves as human beings, which is the essence of what the spiritual journey and the spiritual investigation is, just as we said a few minutes ago, that which I have within me is within you.

Pat Aylward: In fact, for the Sufis, we take it one step beyond that.

Pat Aylward: And for the Sufis, we say there is only one.

Pat Aylward: Not two. 

Pat Aylward: Only one.

Pat Aylward: And so, as human beings, as we come to understand that, again, intrinsically, in an embodied sense, not in just an intellectual sense, then we know that, and all the traditions say this, all of them do, that we want for our brother and sister what we want for ourselves.

Pat Aylward: Why? Not just because it's the right thing to do, because in reality, they are us. We are them. 

Pat Aylward: We are one.

Pat Aylward: And so, we're members of one body, one family, one heart.

Pat Aylward: And so, when we want for people freedom and peace, and an end to violence and being treated with respect.

Pat Aylward: It's because they're us in actuality. Not in theory.

Pat Aylward: You know?

Pat Aylward: And so social justice follows spirituality, and spirituality follows social justice. 

Pat Aylward: And for social justice to be at its most effective, and just look at the example of Martin Luther King or Mohandas Gandhi.

Pat Aylward: You know, when they're mirrored with the spiritual understanding that whatever it is that we're speaking out about is not our enemy. Those people are not in opposition to us. They are also our brothers and sisters. 

Pat Aylward: And so we speak out, you know, for the goodness and the welfare of all, but not from hatred and not from resentment, but from love.

Pat Aylward: And that is what has the opportunity to be a true catalyst for peace and reconciliation in this world. The two go hand in hand together.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: To act from love. To speak from love. To reach out from love.

Pat Aylward: Absolutely, yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Well, Pat, thank you for a great conversation.

Pat Aylward: You're very welcome.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Thank you to all listeners for joining us on Beyond Names. Before we go briefly, if you would pause for just a moment and reflect on what stays with you from this conversation with Pat.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: May something you heard today help you reconnect with the light in your own heart.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: May you grow in compassion, clarity, and courage.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: May you find your way again and again, back home to the Divine, however you name it.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: If today's conversation spoke to you, please like, share, and comment on this episode. Please follow and subscribe to Beyond Names.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: To make an appointment with me, please visit https://www.habibboerger.com/. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Until next time, may you be light. May you consciously participate in growing your light, and may you share your light.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Peace be with you.

Pat Aylward: Thank you, Habib.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Thank you.