From Wounding to Wholeness — Embodied Islam, Healing, and the Path of Rahmah with Dr. Rose Aslan

In this deeply honest and expansive conversation, Dr. Habib Boerger is joined by Dr. Rose Aslan—community healing practitioner, former professor, and guide in somatics, breathwork, and embodied spirituality. Together, they explore the powerful intersection of trauma, healing, and faith.

Dr. Aslan shares her remarkable journey—from a childhood marked by fear to a passionate spiritual seeker, to her conversion to Islam through Sufism, and into the complexities of spiritual abuse, academia, and ultimately, profound healing. Her story is one of courage, unraveling, and reclamation.

This episode dives into:

• The impact of trauma and disconnection from the body 
• Spiritual abuse and reclaiming personal agency 
• The relationship between somatics and embodiment in faith practices
• Relearning prayer (salat) as a source of presence and regulation 
• The deep wisdom embedded in Islamic ritual 
• Rahmah (divine compassion) as the heart of Islam 

Together, Habib and Rose reflect on their shared and divergent paths, exploring how embodied spirituality can open the door to deeper connection, healing, and intimacy with the Divine.

This is a conversation for anyone who has struggled with faith, questioned inherited beliefs, or longed to experience spirituality as something lived, felt, and embodied.

May this episode help you reconnect—with your body, your breath, your heart, and the compassion that flows through it all.

Transcript

Beyond Names: Spirituality for Anyone and Everyone

YouTube Channel: Beyond Names with Dr. Habib Boerger

YouTube handle: @BeyondNamesPodcast

Episode: 44

Host: Dr. Habib Boerger

Conversation Partner: Dr. Rose Aslan

Title: From Wounding to Wholeness — Embodied Islam, Healing, and the Path of Rahmah with Dr. Rose Aslan

Description: In this deeply honest and expansive conversation, Dr. Habib Boerger is joined by Dr. Rose Aslan—community healing practitioner, former professor, and guide in somatics, breathwork, and embodied spirituality. Together, they explore the powerful intersection of trauma, healing, and faith.

Dr. Aslan shares her remarkable journey—from a childhood marked by fear to a passionate spiritual seeker, to her conversion to Islam through Sufism, and into the complexities of spiritual abuse, academia, and ultimately, profound healing. Her story is one of courage, unraveling, and reclamation.

This episode dives into:

• The impact of trauma and disconnection from the body 
• Spiritual abuse and reclaiming personal agency 
• The relationship between somatics and embodiment in faith practices
• Relearning prayer (salat) as a source of presence and regulation 
• The deep wisdom embedded in Islamic ritual 
• Rahmah (divine compassion) as the heart of Islam 

Together, Habib and Rose reflect on their shared and divergent paths, exploring how embodied spirituality can open the door to deeper connection, healing, and intimacy with the Divine.

This is a conversation for anyone who has struggled with faith, questioned inherited beliefs, or longed to experience spirituality as something lived, felt, and embodied.

May this episode help you reconnect—with your body, your breath, your heart, and the compassion that flows through it 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, Hashem, Brahman, Great Spirit, Higher Power, or you're still searching for language that fits, you are welcome here.

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 self, to our source, to the light 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, Dr. Rose Aslan.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Rose is a community healing practitioner, breathwork, and somatics facilitator, podcaster, writer, explorer, and storyteller.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: She's passionate about supporting others, especially Muslims, on their healing path, and guiding spiritual seekers to reflect the rahmah, the compassion, of the Divine in their lives. She focuses on embodiment, bringing together her academic and analytical perspective with her healing-centered work to guide people to a sense of heartfulness and presence.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: She received her PhD from the University of North Carolina, her MA in Arabic and Islamic Civilizations from the American University in Cairo, and her BA in Near Eastern and Religious Studies from the University of British Columbia.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: She spent several decades studying and then teaching religious and Islamic studies. She was formerly an associate professor at California Lutheran University but quit academia to pursue a slower and more holistic way of life.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: She continues writing on topics connected to Islam, but for a more general audience. She's the author of a recently published monograph, Muslim Prayer in American Public Life, and is currently writing a book on trauma-informed and compassion-centered approaches to Islam.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: She's also currently cultivating the Center for Rahmah Connections, an organization that offers discrete, curated matchmaking grounded in Islamic and Sufi values. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: To learn more about her work, please visit compassionflow.com, and you can also find her on Substack and social media.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Dr. Rose, thank you for being here. Welcome.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: If you would ... if you would start us off by sharing your spiritual story, of course, to the extent that you're comfortable as a way of introducing yourself to our listeners.

Rose Aslan: Yeah, thank you, Habib. I really appreciate the invitation, and to be in this space that really feels a place where one can be authentic and true and to tell our story, so I appreciate the space you've opened up with your podcast.

Rose Aslan: Yeah, so my spiritual story … I'm going to try to keep it on the shorter side, because I can go long with that story, since I've been alive for a number of years.

Rose Aslan: I always go back to when I was a little girl. Because I grew up in a fairly abusive home, I wasn't always a very happy child. I was a fearful child, and I lived a life that was pretty difficult, because I had to keep myself safe.

Rose Aslan: And I don't think… because I wasn't very happy, per se, I'm sure I had moments of happiness, but it just didn't seem like a very safe world. I think that's what led me to probe deeper questions. As a very young child, I was always just so curious with the meaning of life, and… and religion.

Rose Aslan: I was the girl who didn't have any pop bands on my… posters on my walls, but I had a National Geographic subscription, and if you remember back in the days when they came with those fold-out posters from National Geographic, I had those on my wall, as well as, like, photos of the Dalai Lama, who I was, like, obsessed with during the…. 

Rose Aslan: Remember the Free Tibet movement in the 90s was very popular, so I had his picture, and all the natural geographic maps, and cultural, kind of information on my wall, that's what I was interested in.

Rose Aslan: I was interested in the world, I was just so curious.

Rose Aslan: But I was particularly interested in spirituality and the deeper questions. I remember when I was, I don't know, 11, 12, reading books by Hermann Hesse, who was a German… how do you call them? Existentialist?

Rose Aslan: But he was, like, a philosophical novelist, and he wrote books, one about, like, the story of the Buddha in novel form, and other books about spiritual journeys.

Rose Aslan: And I was really obsessed with his work when I was a young girl, and he opened my mind and my eyes up to Buddhism, for example, and from there, I started to learn about the Dalai Lama and Buddhism.

Rose Aslan: And I think it was when I was 11 years old, the Buddha, sorry, the Dalai Lama came to my city, and because I was a nerdy little girl, and I had a nice dad, my mother was the difficult one, my dad was very supportive, my parents were divorced.

Rose Aslan: He let me go to this big conference, and for a whole week, he dropped me off to go spend time with the Dalai Lama, and a number of other significant people. And I just… my whole world opened up because there's a lot of Nobel Prize laureates, and I was, actually, I was, like, speaking to them, and just… people were very nice to speak to me.

Rose Aslan: They were surprised to see this little girl there. But he had special meetings with the youth.

Rose Aslan: And so, I was just so blown away with the wisdom I was receiving and hearing from the Dalai Lama. 

Rose Aslan: So I'd say from that time on, I entered a slightly, for 11-year-old, serious spiritual path.

Rose Aslan: And all the way through middle school and high school I was studying different religions.

Rose Aslan: I grew up in San Francisco, where I basically had the whole world at my doorsteps, which was a great place. With a bus pass, I could explore different religious communities, so I would be going to different places. I was part of the youth center at the Buddhist Zen Center, for example.

Rose Aslan: I would, I took a world religions class in high school, and we got to go explore different communities, and I was just for some reason, really pushed to understanding the world around me, because it was just really hard, and I just needed to understand why I existed.

Rose Aslan: So it was that, really that one question that I always ask people, is: What is the meaning of life? What is the purpose? Like, why am I here? And I never really got a solid answer… until… until I started to encounter Islam, actually, through Sufism.

Rose Aslan: Later in high school, I had started reading Rumi because, you know, he comes through, one's lap, just when you start to read that sort of work, and I remember reading Rumi, and I didn't really understand it, but I liked it.

Rose Aslan: And I thought I probably understood it, but now I'm… have no idea what I was thinking. But I was really interested in what he had to offer, and then as I came to learn about the Whirling Dervishes, I was hooked.

Rose Aslan: That's when I got to college, I had come across a Sufi community, in Vancouver where I was going to college, and they were… there were some whirling dervishes, and I attended dhikr or Sufi gatherings with them, and I was… just felt so comfortable and so at home.

Rose Aslan: But for my third year of university, I went to Egypt.

Rose Aslan: And there, I attended a lot of different Sufi gatherings, and it was there I decided to become Muslim.

Rose Aslan: And not because I went to become Muslim, because I wanted to become a whirling dervish, but I encountered this man, actually Shems Friedlander, who passed away a few years ago, who's a famous director who directed some films about Sufism.

Rose Aslan: He was teaching at the university where I was studying in Cairo, and I read this book by his, When You Hear Hoofbeats, Think of a Zebra. And it was such a beautiful meditation on presence and dhikr [remembrance of God, often through repeating recitations] and simplicity of being a Sufi, I think it was.

Rose Aslan: And when I found out he taught at the university I was at, I asked if I could speak with him and meet him, and he agreed, and we met numerous times. And when I asked him this question, what is the purpose of life, I felt like he gave me the answer that I was actually looking for.

Rose Aslan: And it was a Quranic verse, where God says, I only created humans and jinns to worship me.

Rose Aslan: So the purpose of existence is that so we may worship God. Now, at that time, I was like, worship means prayer, that's how I understood it, so I, like, started praying a lot.

Rose Aslan: At this age in my life, I understand worship as meaning much more than literal prayer.

Rose Aslan: But at that time… but I love the idea of, like, worship is our purpose. Because I was really into ritual. I like to practice different rituals of other… of various religious traditions. 

Rose Aslan: I… I've always been an ethnographer, and maybe since… ever since I watched Indiana Jones, I was, like, interested in I always say attribute my interest in academia and studying cultures and civilizations to Indiana Jones, because that's the only exposure we had back in those days, you know? 

Rose Aslan: But I really wanted to, want to explore the world getting ancient treasures, like, I kind of wanted to see that. I was more interested in the cultures, so I think I was always interested in anthropology and ethnography and studying human behavior.

Rose Aslan: And so, I used to participate and kind of observe a lot of different human rituals and behaviors. 

Rose Aslan: So I became Muslim not because I was interested in Islam, but because I was interested in Sufism, and he told me that the only way to be Sufi is to be Muslim as well. You can't separate Islam from Sufism.

Rose Aslan: And I was reluctant in the beginning to become Muslim, because this was the days before the internet was very, very popular, we didn't have YouTube or social media.

Rose Aslan: And my understanding of Islam was very limited to Not Without My Daughter, the film, and the regular propaganda.

Rose Aslan: I also had met a lot of mainstream, more conservative Muslims, and their way of seeing Islam as, like, a point system and a, like, a reward and punishment system was very unappealing to me. It definitely wasn't what I was looking for. 

Rose Aslan: But when I started to meet Muslims who talked about Islam as a much deeper, esoteric, metaphysical approach to following this path to God, I was really invested. 

Rose Aslan: Before that, I had gone to on a backpacking trip to Eastern Europe, and accidentally ended up in Turkey.

Rose Aslan: Istanbul, where I was looking for the whirling Dervishes, and I found them in tourist settings, and I wasn't that interested in them, because obviously it was just a tourist trap. 

Rose Aslan: But I traveled throughout Turkey and I ended up in eastern Turkey, and then I met backpackers going to Iran, and I ended up in Iran. And I was looking for my… for Sufis there. 

Rose Aslan: I don't know what I was looking for, but when I ended up in the beautiful city of Isfahan in Iran and I was asking people, do you know where I could find a Sufi?

Rose Aslan: This is me, like, going to a random city in Iran, asking people, where do I find the Sufis? And they led me to this shop in the bazaar, the gigantic bazaar of Isfahan, and it was a shop of a man who makes mirror mosaics. 

Rose Aslan: Now, if you've ever seen a mosque in Iran, they're… the interior is full of these amazing mirror mosaics, so the entire mosque looks like shimmering. So that's what he, he did, was make those mirror mosaics.

Rose Aslan: He didn't speak English, I didn't speak Persian, yet I had the most profound exchange with this man.

Rose Aslan: He took his mirror, like a little piece of a mirror, and he kind of ... put on his heart, you know, like… and he gave me this lesson about the fact that we need to have our hearts to be like this mirror, so that when it's clean, and when it can shine, it can reflect the divine light.

Rose Aslan: And I took a lot out from that exchange, and we had spent a little… quite a bit of time together, and I'm not sure how, but we were able to communicate quite well. And from that time, I’ve also been very invested in learning that kind of spirituality. So something in Sufism really spoke to me, and I was a very young woman.

Rose Aslan: But my time in Iran, and then in Egypt, and spending really…spending a lot of time in Sufi gatherings just led me on this path of spirituality.

Rose Aslan: Now, I call it the my path of spirituality, because for many years, I was on this path. I ended up, soon after, marrying a man who was Egyptian, Sufi, Muslim from a very traditional, maybe more conservative background.

Rose Aslan: And at that time, I was also studying. I ended up staying in Egypt to do my master's degree. I was studying Islam in academic context, but at the same time, I was married to someone who had a very patriarchal approach to Islam, and a very hierarchical approach to Sufism.

Rose Aslan: And so, in a way, it felt like he took away my agency, my spiritual agency.

Rose Aslan: And… I … I call it a Sufi cult, essentially, is what I entered into.

Rose Aslan: And so, although I was on a deep spiritual journey, it was also a very unhealthy one at that time, and for many years, where I was trying to develop my spiritual, my spiritual path, but it was quite difficult when someone was controlling everything in my life, and controlling my access to spiritual teachers and everything else.

Rose Aslan: So it was definitely at that time in my life, I was married for 14 years, was a difficult time, where I was at the university studying for many years academic approaches to Islam, and I was saying Sufism.

Rose Aslan: My master's thesis was about a Sufi poem.

Rose Aslan: My PhD, my whole program, I was studying Islam, I was studying Sufi text.

Rose Aslan: And I was going to Sufi gatherings, but internally, I was a wreck. I was a mess. I was so conflicted.

Rose Aslan: And it wasn't until I ended up leaving my ex-husband when my spiritual journey started to parallel with the healing journey. 

Rose Aslan: Now, I thought that spirituality could… could… so… in a sense, heal me from all the difficulty I had as a young girl. But it turns out spirituality alone can't heal you.

Rose Aslan: And I thought it could. I was waiting to meet someone who was so strong in their spiritual power that they would, like, pray over me and I'd be better.

Rose Aslan: Fortunately, I never found that person. It turns out the best person to pray over me was myself, when I had the approach to really support myself in my walking and open myself up to the divine, so in my mid-30s, my spiritual path paralleled, intersected with my healing path, and that's really, I like to credit, that's when it really became much more fruitful.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: You can't stop there. 

Rose Aslan: Oh, oh, I can't stop there, okay.

Rose Aslan: Sorry.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: No! You must keep going.

Rose Aslan: Okay, okay.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: By that, I really want to hear more about this...

Rose Aslan: Okay.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: this parallel of spiritual journey and the healing journey.

Rose Aslan: Sure.

 Rose Aslan: Yeah, so my ex was from a village in Egypt, so he…. 

Rose Aslan: All those years I was married to him, I didn't have a therapist. I didn't know anything about mental health, and of course, as an older millennial, just mental health wasn't part of our vocabulary. 

Rose Aslan: And so… It wasn't until the end of my marriage when I first got a therapist. And I didn't get a therapist because I was worried about my marriage, I didn't realize my marriage was abusive. I got a therapist because I was experiencing bullying from a colleague that was really quite severe.

Rose Aslan: And when I started to meet with this therapist, she started to notice that I… when I spoke of my ex-husband, it was… it was kind of a little strange and unsettling to her, and so she started to probe me and ask questions about my marriage.

Rose Aslan: And it was during those sessions, and also some other events that happened, where I started to realize I was in a very difficult and abusive marriage.

Rose Aslan: And so slowly, the… everything, my facade of my marriage and how I saw my ex-husband started to crumble.

Rose Aslan: And I started to realize that I had a lot of work to do, a lot of healing work. 

Rose Aslan: And when I left my ex-husband, wow, that was hard, because I became a single mom overnight with a really demanding job as assistant professor on the tenure track, living in Los Angeles, a very high-cost-of-living city, with a 4-year-old. 

Rose Aslan: So, life was really hard. And I was trying to get tenure, I was trying to raise my little guy, and I definitely had many, many dark nights of the soul. Although dark nights of the soul and existential crises are something I've experienced my whole life, that was a whole other level of difficulty.

Rose Aslan: But I did start to do the work in terms of having therapy. I found a somatic therapist, and when I started to… with this somatic therapist realize and learn I had a body, I literally didn't know… I wasn't aware of my body.

Rose Aslan: I had experienced… like, I had… I didn't have interoception; I didn't have very good knowledge of what was going on within me. And that's because primarily I was disassociated from my body, and I think that was a result of growing up in an abusive home.

Rose Aslan: And so, when I started to learn I had a body, and that I could feel it, and that it could actually help me in my healing journey, that's where my growth started to happen, even though there was a lot of hard steps along the way.

Rose Aslan: And it happened not in a Muslim or Sufi setting, but just with, a lot of different women healing… I tried a lot of different healing modalities. I was so desperate. I tried everything, like, I've been to shamans, I've been to, like all the different regular healing modalities, like, you know, for physical pain, just acupuncture, a chiropractor, all kinds of retreats, all kinds of women gathering… women's gatherings.

Rose Aslan: I really found my healing among other women. Especially for the… especially for the years leading after my divorce, I had to really seek refuge with other women.

Rose Aslan: I felt a lot of pain, just from men, from the betrayal I experienced with my ex-husband and his spiritual guide.

Rose Aslan: It felt… I felt betrayed by the Muslim community in general, who didn't support me during the divorce, even though I was quite an active member of the mosque that I was participating in.

Rose Aslan: And it was during the MeToo movement when I left my ex-husband, so it just felt like a really ugly time. There's a lot of different Muslim scholar… male Muslim scholars who were being exposed at that time for various sexual misconduct.

Rose Aslan: And it felt really hard. Islam and Muslim communities did not feel like a refuge for me, so it was primarily in the company of other women that I participated and I walked this path of healing. 

Rose Aslan: There was a time when I almost was going to leave Islam, quite a few times, because it just felt so oppressive, so patriarchal, like, why am I going to stay in a religion that hates me because of my gender? Why am I going to stay in a religion that doesn't seem to want me to live a good life?

Rose Aslan: You know, I was really angry, really upset, really broken for a time.

Rose Aslan: But as I start to walk this path and get a little bit better, and then, I suppose what happened is I got tenure, COVID hit, and then I had more… more crises, as many of us did.

Rose Aslan: But I was able to get partial medical leave at that time. So it was COVID, I was working a little bit less, my son and I mainly were able to just wander around hiking trails, spend a lot of time in nature to slow down.

Rose Aslan: And I just started to find myself, again, a bit. Still quite confused, but as a result of getting tenure, I was able to go on a sabbatical, which was such an amazing reward for 6 or 7 grueling years of non-stop work and giving my entire body and soul to my university.

Rose Aslan: So as a result, even though it was during COVID, I decided to continue with my sabbatical year, and so we went to Istanbul.

Rose Aslan: And I thought, okay, we'll spend a nice year in Istanbul, and I'll return to the university, and life will go on. But when I went to Istanbul, the first months were incredibly hard, because I had spent a little bit of time in Istanbul before, but I didn't know much Turkish. 

Rose Aslan: I didn't know many people in Istanbul. It was winter. I'm from California, it was snowing. I realized… I realized that I was… there I was, a single mom in the middle of winter in Istanbul, in a very Turkish neighborhood. What the hell was I doing? What the hell was I doing?

Rose Aslan: So after, like, 6 months, I started to get to know people, started to, like, settle down, the lockdown got a little bit better. I started to realize that the time I had to rest became quite powerful.

Rose Aslan: Because on a sabbatical, I did propose to work on some research projects, but I mainly just focused on learning how to rest. Like, what does rest actually mean? Deciding that today I want to wander the city, you know, while my son does school, or today I want to just read a book on the couch, and just learning how to do that.

Rose Aslan: I didn't actually know what rest was. I didn't realize how tired, how burnt out, how exhausted I was at that point.

Rose Aslan: And being able to be in a city that, you know, is Muslim majority, I guess you could say, has a Muslim culture, where I could spend time in beautiful mosques was very healing for me at that time.

Rose Aslan: I was able to heal my connection with Islam in Istanbul through various ways.

Rose Aslan: I spent time in numerous different Sufi communities, I spent a lot of time in… they have less Sufi music gatherings, and that can be multi-day gatherings at times

Rose Aslan: I did a lot of regular healing work and a lot of spiritual work.

Rose Aslan: And it was very intense.

Rose Aslan: And after the year, I realized that I couldn't go back to academia.

Rose Aslan: And so part of my healing and spiritual journey was quitting a career that, on the surface, was very prestigious. I had built up all my social capital, I put all of my past 20 years into becoming a tenured professor, and I decided to blow it all up.

Rose Aslan: Because I realized that the title, while it was nice to have the prestige, wasn't worth anything if I couldn't have my health and my… and myself, and have agency over myself.

Rose Aslan: So I decided to quit with no plans specifically.

Rose Aslan: I did get training as a coach, and start to do breathwork, and all the trainings I started to do as a coach, somatics, all really helped me on my walking.

Rose Aslan: And over the many years, I had also started to help women, especially Muslim women. Even when I was a professor, I used to host women's groups, Muslim women's groups, but it just came to…to, I started to do a lot more when I obviously got certified as a coach, and realized that because I've been through a lot, a lot of women resonated with my story, a lot of other women were hurting too. 

Rose Aslan: And so that I found ways to also support women, and they started to come to me and ask for support as well. 

Rose Aslan: And so, at that point, my spiritual healing path became very powerful to the point that I was able to have enough within myself to start to flow and to allow other people to see some of that.

Rose Aslan: And so, I've been walking this path now of working on my own spirituality, my own healing, while also having enough flow in my cup.

Rose Aslan: I… again, talk about rahmah, this divine compassion. I feel that when we're open to receive this rahmah from the divine, that we're able to allow it to flow out of ourselves too. 

Rose Aslan: So when I have enough of that, then it can flow out of me, and then I can support others as well. So it's now my life journey to support other women, on their path as well.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I just had to make a note of that last one about receiving rahma so it can flow through you, because I have so many things that I want to follow up on, and you know, obviously, we're not going to spend 12 hours.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So we'll see what… we'll see what comes up. So, I wanted to in some respects, go back to the beginning, in that… I really resonated personally with what you said about your childhood.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And I remember my own experience of not feeling safe, and… and, and living in fear, which is some of the same words that you use, and I… and I remembered for myself, one of the outcomes of being terrified all the time and one of the outcomes of… other childhood experiences was checking out and disassociating from my body.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And you specifically mentioned the same thing, being disassociated from your body. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And in many ways, not having any sort of intelligence around mental health, emotional intelligence. If you asked… had asked me, if you were like, what are you feeling, I'd have been like, uhhhh uhhhhhh, you know, like…. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So… And yet I love the fact that in your bio, you specifically mention embodiment.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And, and I feel a kinship in terms of… although our story is not the same, obviously, but I do feel, like, for me through the path of Sufism, it was as if faith snuck up on me.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Like, I didn't… I had turned away from anything to do with religion, because of my childhood experiences, and part of those childhood experiences involved the church that…that my family attended.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So I had turned away from anything to do with God or religion, but through Sufism and Sufi practices, it was like faith and strength got built up in me without me even really aware, being aware of it.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And because of that, it was as if that was what enabled me, that newfound strength and that newfound faith is what enabled me to face things about myself that I've never faced before. It's what enabled me to learn how to identify what I was experiencing emotionally. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: It's the faith and the strength that came through that, through the experience of calm, or the experience of peace, like, all these new things that I experienced through spirituality that enabled me to begin to address, like, to even learn what is abuse, what is not abuse? Like, what…

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And so on. So… all of which to say is, I so much want to hear more about what embodied spirituality means to you given...

Rose Aslan: That's a great question. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: given this journey that…

Rose Aslan: Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: you have been on…

Rose Aslan: Thank you for asking and for reflecting on it. It's interesting to hear about your… the parallels in your own experience as well.

Rose Aslan: You know, when you were talking, I was like, oh, I'm so jealous that you got to find a healthy Sufi community in the early years. Like, for me, I had to go on a very circuitous journey where I had met good communities in Vancouver, I actually had met good people in Egypt, but unfortunately, because I fell in with my ex and his Sufi guide, unfortunately, my… even though I always loved going to the dhikrs, to Sufi gatherings, I just loved the peace I felt, I couldn't name it. I didn't have that embodied intelligence at that time.

Rose Aslan: So when I entered into their way of being Sufi, it was not a healthy way of being Sufi. So I can't say that my experience was the same when I entered Sufism or entered the path with them specifically because it was not a healthy way.

Rose Aslan: It was, unfortunately, my ex-husband, and his… his sheikh were very involved with, like, magic, and he was always writing talismans, and he and his sheikh were doing exorcisms all the time, and he had a big book of, they called it “Asrar of Secrets” that I was never allowed to have access to, because I was never good enough to access to.

Rose Aslan: And it was always, like, I was never good enough to kind of up to, go up in my spiritual journey, because there was always something wrong with me and what I was doing, so it was a very, unfortunately, spiritually abusive and religiously abusive environment in many ways. 

Rose Aslan: So it wasn't until much later when I was able to, to learn more about this healthy embodied spirituality.

Rose Aslan: It didn't happen in those early years.

Rose Aslan: Even though I was exposed to good communities, because of the psychological hold my ex and his sheikh had, I couldn't open up to them, you could say.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Hmm.

Rose Aslan: And I… well, actually, those years, I didn't have a lot of friends, I was very closed off in general, because of that.

Rose Aslan: So, it wasn't until… well, you know, towards the end of my marriage, I had, gone to the land in Pope Valley [the former Shadhiliyya Sufi Center], and I had taken hand with Sidi [Shaykh Muhammad al-Jamal], and it felt, like, almost like a rebellion against my ex.

Rose Aslan: He didn't like it, but he didn't… he didn't, refuse, or didn't prevent me from doing that, because ... other Sufi and Muslims, right? ... 

Rose Aslan: I started to do more things that were against his, you know, way of being Sufi. So being part of that community was much more healing, but I didn't go through the Sufi school, I was just part of the community and would visit, and I just loved being part of the community. 

Rose Aslan: But really when I found that embodiment was not through Sufis or Muslims at all, which is interesting.

Rose Aslan: It was really through that Jewish somatic therapist who told me that, you know that in your tradition, you can pray, and if you read the Quran, it'll actually help regulate your nervous system. I was like, really? Like, what are you talking about? So she was, like, telling me to pray.

Rose Aslan: And then I had gone to a clinic at UCLA, it was like the East West, it was a regular doctor, he was also a Jewish doctor, and he's like, oh, you're Muslim, right? I was like, yeah.

Rose Aslan: So he's like, you know that if you actually engage in your regular ritual practices, it can really help you and get better wellness, because I was just… my body was also broken at that time, too, because I was just so… in such a difficult place. 

Rose Aslan: So I had these two Jewish mental health… mental health and medical professionals telling me to go pray and read the Quran, and I was so confused, because I was kind of angry at, you know, Islam in general, and then these.

Rose Aslan: It’s not Muslim professionals telling me to go do this, and so I… I was just like confused but intrigued as to that.

Rose Aslan: And when it was, like, not Muslims telling me to do something, I was more willing to do it.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

Rose Aslan: Because I was also really fed up within the mainstream, and most mainstream Muslims are pretty conservative, the mainstream Muslim community is this function of how shame works, right? Of, if you're not doing all these things you’ve got to do to be a good Muslim, then you're just going to end up in hellfire, right?

Rose Aslan: So if you're not reading the Quran, if you're not praying all your prayers, it's not going to go well for you, basically. 

Rose Aslan: So I was very angry at Islam and the patriarchy because of that, so I wasn't…I…. At that point, when I had… was… left my ex-husband, I was very broken, I, stopped praying for a while, just to see what would happen. I was just trying to experiment, like, what am I doing?

Rose Aslan: But when my somatic therapists kept on recommending me to, like, try praying and try reading the Quran I realized that I needed to, like, reprogram myself.

Rose Aslan: I realized that my associations with prayer, Islamic prayer, were really negative. My ex-husband probably has some kind of weird religious OCD, and the way that he taught me about it just wasn't very healthy, so I had to make new intentions about prayer.

Rose Aslan: And also not… I realized that I was praying because I was scared of the consequences, you know, of the punishment that you'll receive if you don't pray.

Rose Aslan: So I completely reprogram and say, I'm going to pray because I want to feel that connection to God. I'm praying because I have a longing for God, not because I'm scared that God will punish me. 

Rose Aslan: So coming back to my prayer practice took a long time. 

Rose Aslan: It helped in Istanbul, where…unlike in the American Muslim community, where people kind of… if you're a part of a community, people know you, you're kind of being, you're being watched. 

Rose Aslan: And it's like a different… A mosque is very anonymous in Turkey. No one knows you, it's not a community space, you can just go and pray. So I think I healed my connection to prayer when I was in Istanbul, just because it was a very normal thing to do. 

Rose Aslan: And also, just because Islamophobia can be really hard in the United States, and getting a break from just having to be a Muslim, and I was a professional Muslim as a professor of Islam, and I was a Muslim, and I was an interfaith activist, and I was always giving talks about Islam and interfaith events.

Rose Aslan: When I went to Turkey, I finally got a break from all that, so I can say… so I can ask myself, what does it mean to be a Muslim without being a professional Muslim and scholar of Islam who's teaching about Islam every single day?

Rose Aslan: I just got to turn that side off and just figure out what it means to be a Muslim. And so my path to embodiment was both just this kind of secular approach to learning interoception, which I found magical, because I really didn't know anything about my body, and then combining that with reconnecting with prayer, with salat.

Rose Aslan: And it's something I still continue to work on, because finding that presence, that khushua, that awe, that connection to God and prayer is something that every Muslim strives for, and a lot of us struggle to achieve.

Rose Aslan: And so for me, first, it was becoming grounded in this idea of embodiment, like, overcoming this disassociation, which still can happen to me every so often when I get triggered, when something difficult happens. 

Rose Aslan: I'd rather just scroll on social media, rather than, like, feel what's going on, but I do know now that it's much better to feel what's going on than to scroll social media, you know? And then, adding upon it.

Rose Aslan: So, with my knowledge and my studying and training and very somatic and breathwork practices, I slowly realized that the rituals we have in Islam are incredibly wise and enriching.

Rose Aslan: So I started to realize that they're not only there because we’ve got to do them, it's an annoying chore that we’ve got to do, but I start to realize through my secular training that, oh, well, when we go to Sufi gatherings, we're doing dhikr together, we're actually doing breathwork. The teacher just doesn't mention it.

Rose Aslan: When we're doing prayer, well, it actually kind of looks like yoga. We're actually doing these amazing five times a day, this amazing physical movement that is incredibly grounding for the body, and that's why we feel better after we pray. And when we do what we do, for example, we're using water to cleanse ourselves, to really renew our intentions, to get into the mindset of prayer.

Rose Aslan: So, over the years, as I've combined, I guess you could say, my secular study of embodiment, somatics, breathwork, and then applying it to my knowledge of Islam and Islamic rituals, and Islamic rituals were my academic focus in Islam, I studied sacred space and ritual as an academic. 

Rose Aslan: And bringing all that together has been really powerful for me, to realize that Islamic prayers and all the practices we have are not this annoying obligation that Muslims talk about, but they're this amazing gift given to us to help us calm our nervous system, to stay balanced and in harmony with ourselves, and with nature and with the Earth around us. So now I see them in really different ways than I used to because of that.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Well, thank you so much for sharing all of that. 

Rose Aslan: Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: It's always fascinating and also inspiring to find parallels and commonalities in our different journeys.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And I'm… I love hearing about, you know, your renewed relationship with salat, you know, with this ritual Islamic prayer, and… and so… and because I am…

Dr. Habīb Boerger: You know, it's a journey, it's not like… it's not like I had awareness of such and such an issue, and then suddenly it was gone, you know? Like, I was done with it, you know? I still work… like, my own journey with embodiment is still ongoing, you know?

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And a perfect example of that is, you know, like, if I'm doing…

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I think you're aware that I'm a co-trainer of compassion-based spiritual direction, and… which is the…an integration of Internal Family Systems therapy, of the compassion practice, and also more contemplative spiritual direction.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And so many folks will often approach that with a question of, especially with IFS, like, like, where do you feel, or what do you feel in your body, or where do you feel such and such a part in your body, or where did, you know…?

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And if somebody asks me that kind of question, I just, like, shut down immediately. Like, I mean, it's as if someone lowered the curtain, turned off the lights, like, we're done here.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And yet… So then I have to, like, access… I have to work on something that helps me soften and open my heart, and then I can approach awareness of what's happening with my body once I have attended to and gone through the doorway of my heart.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So when you were talking about the ritual prayer, salat, I was like, oh, well, is that embodied spirituality? Is that embodied spirituality?

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Like, I was just thinking about the different ways that I experience, and so I'll share some of those, and we can… you can give me your… share your wisdom and your expertise. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: But, so, like, one of the things that I do, I don't… I don't know how common this is, but I think in our particular order of Sufism, you know, one of the things that is a practice is just to look at the name of God, and to visualize that, like, written in your heart, or visualize it in front of you.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So I will often pray salat in a space where I have the name of God, and, and I don't quite have the words for this, but it's as if I imagine, and again, I don't have quite the… I don't quite have the words, but it's like, so… I'm going to say, as if I imagine light, love, energy, like, something coming from my heart to the Name, in the heavens to the Name, like, you know, there's no space, there's no place, but, you know, it's like… and… and I've… it's, like, there's an umbilical cord, like, like in the praying, like, there's this umbilical cord of energy, of love, of light, of something that happens.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And if I actually focus on that during my salat, like, my experience totally, like, it totally changes, you know?

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Like, I can go through the motions, but then if I go through the motions and I add this particular component to it, I can feel the difference in my body.

Rose Aslan: Hmm…

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I can feel the difference in my heart, like, just even mentioning it.

Rose Aslan: That's really beautiful Habib.

Rose Aslan: Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I told you earlier, I was a softie, that I might cry, so here we go.

Rose Aslan: What a beautiful thing to cry about is thinking about your connection with Allah when you're in salat, you know, that's a… that's a beautiful thing to think about.

Rose Aslan: If we could all cry when we think about that, it's powerful because a lot of Muslims pray in a mechanical way. You know, they… especially ones who are born and raised Muslim, they just pray because they've been taught that way. I don't know how much presence they're finding.

Rose Aslan: And present just means, are you aware of what's going on within you, your thoughts, your feelings, your bodily experiences and perception, right? Are you aware of that? Are you just doing it and you're not even paying attention? 

Rose Aslan: Like, sometimes, like I'll be driving somewhere, and then I get to that place, I'm like, did I just drive here? Like, I wasn't aware of driving, and I think we all can all relate to that, like, because we do things robotically, and I think that happens a lot with prayer as well.

Rose Aslan: It's so easy, because we do it all the time, if we're trying to practice, right? And so, to really pause, and to really find that presence, and I think what you're talking about is khashua, is that that state of being in this connection with the divine. It's such a beautiful thing that I'd say most of us don't experience every prayer.

Rose Aslan: But something we strive for, right? And that it's… we're having this full experience. Prayer is not supposed to be just, I recite, and then I'm done.

Rose Aslan: It's… what's interesting about Islamic prayer versus, like, Christian prayers, like, they pray like this, and they're saying something, but it's not really with the body, per se. Our prayer is very specifically designed to be a full embodied experience. 

Rose Aslan: You have to move every part of your body. First of all, you have to wash your limbs with water before you pray, and then you have to move every limb and every part of your body, including all the way prostrating to the ground, which before I became Muslim, I was like, I'm never going to do that. I'm not going to, like, pray to the ground. It's a very weird thing for Americans to, like, prostrate to the ground.

Rose Aslan: But when I started to experience it, and I started to experience that humility, and the only entity I'll experience humility to is to the divine, not to another human. Right?

Rose Aslan: I'm just like, I am your servant, I am nothing, and that prostration that's subdued to the ground really helps us feel what humility is like. To humble ourselves before God, we feel that in that prostration position, right? If we just stood up and prayed, we're not going to feel it.

Rose Aslan: So our practice is literally designed to integrate our body, our mind, and our soul into one.

Rose Aslan: And it's an incredibly beautiful practice that if we're present in this practice, it's a way to keep us safe and protected and connected as often as possible, right?

Rose Aslan: We're supposed to keep dhikr on our tongue, on our heart at all times, and we have five times a day prayer in order to keep that connection, because we know that once we forget, once we get neglectful, once we start getting distracted, it’s so easy to forget, and that's why we've been given 5 times a day, because we're so forgetful as human beings.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yes, I'm so glad you brought up.

Rose Aslan: Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I’m sorry what?

Rose Aslan: There's so much wisdom in each one of the practices that we have. You know, reciting the Quran, for example, and the way you recite the Quran, if you're trained to read with Tajweed, the correct pronunciation, the way that Tajweed is actually a form of breathwork. So people who are professional or training to become good Qur’anic reciters are actually learning very controlled breathwork.

Rose Aslan: So it's actually, like, calming your nervous system as you recite it, because there's certain letters and words that really, like, work your entire throat and even parts of your chest, right? And, like, have your tongue do different things, like saying the Ayn, like, some of the letters of Arabic are, like, really deep in your throat. And then to listen to the Quran is also an experience that's very calming for us, right.

Rose Aslan: So all parts of our religion actually have so much divine embodied wisdom, if we reframe it. 

Rose Aslan: So that's actually… I'm developing a workshop with a friend of mine on supporting Muslims who feel disconnected from prayer, but really want to get back to prayer.

Rose Aslan: Like, we have to reframe and relearn what prayer is, because I think a lot of Muslims have negative associations, they have stories about prayer that can be very negative.

Rose Aslan: I've met a lot of Muslims who were, as children, beaten by their family if they didn't pray. I mean, they were told that they're bad people if they don't pray, and so they just stopped praying, and some people are like, I'm not pure enough, so I'm just not going to pray.

Rose Aslan: So a lot of Muslims have very negative and harsh stories about prayer, so that makes it very hard for them to pray. It makes it very hard for them to keep praying or feel presence in prayer.

Rose Aslan: So there needs to be a lot of work to support Muslims to return to prayer, completely, from scratch, they have to tell themselves and create a new story of prayer, essentially.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Hmm.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: It makes me think of your comment earlier about, excuse me, I forget exactly how you phrased it, but something along the lines of my initial exposure to Sufism and Islam coming through such a beautiful Sufi community, and it is such a privilege, and it was such a privilege to come to Islam and Sufism through the community that I came through, because I think I experienced, and I've said this on previous episodes, but I think it's okay to say it again, like, my experience of the Sufi sheikh was as if he was saying, here, would you like a taste of love?

Rose Aslan: Mmm.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And then, would you like more? Would you like more than that? You know?

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And that's how I experienced Sufism and Islam. And, I mean, it was as if I was just getting increasingly greater tastes of love.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And I was so shocked the first time I was in a Muslim community, and I realized that I was surrounded by a bunch of Muslims who their experience of the mosque, or of Islam, or of cultural Islam, or of their family's relationship to Islam, was very much like my childhood experience of Christianity, of the culture of the church that I went to, and I was so shocked by that, because in my mind, it was love.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: What is Islam? I would have said love.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I mean, at that point, I don't know that I would have even talked about surrender or peace, I would have just been love, love, you know, love! 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And so, it's so interesting in terms of our journeys, and I, of course, like, oh yeah, I was very naive at that point, wasn't I? And it took so much for me to go, oh, people are people.

Rose Aslan: Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: It doesn't matter, it doesn't matter what religion you're in, what culture you're in, what tradition, people are people. And you're going to find that in every place, there are people who are going to approach something through the lens of love. And they are going to bring love, and kindness, and compassion, and mercy.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And there are other people that are going to be challenged in doing that, so, and approaching that. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: But there's a point I'm… there's a point here. It's that because of that approach, like, when I was first on a prayer mat, and I learned how to pray salat by a friend doing little stick figures on post-it notes.

Rose Aslan: I love it.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And then another friend, who was not Muslim, but whose father had traveled in, you know, some Muslim-majority countries had brought back prayer rugs, gave me… so another friend gave me a prayer rug, you know, so, like, it was this kind of… I got my post-it notes, I got my prayer rug…

Dr. Habīb Boerger: But when I was on the prayer rug, I felt like I'd come home...

Rose Aslan: Hmm.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: in a way that I had not experienced before. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Like, I just felt like, oh… In a place of deep, beyond words, soul, I'm home, you know? 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: That was my experience of the prayer rug, and I think that in coming through the lens of… through the doorway of love, it was accessible. That sense of home, of coming home, was accessible.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And… And since then, you know, years later, I have that sense of sujud, you used the word sujud, prostration, you know, like, for me, that's home.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: There… there is really, there isn't another place where I feel as at home as I do in prostration on the prayer rug.

Rose Aslan: That's really beautiful, and it's amazing you were able to learn about it in such a way that you weren't I guess, corrupted or, you know, like, harmed by external forces.

Rose Aslan: You know, in my beginning of being a Muslim, I also had the most beautiful prayer experiences before I kind of learned from conventional Muslims. 

Rose Aslan: When I meet Muslims who, like, are untouched by what I've seen, like, I still see them as, you know, I often say, ignorance is bliss. I wish that I didn't see and learn as much as I did, because it would be much easier to just, like, have learned that beautiful type of Islam and stop there. 

Rose Aslan: But no, I had to go get two more degrees, spent 20 years deconstructing Islam in Western Academy in graduate school as a professor.

Rose Aslan: And it completely ruined my approach to religion, really. I would say my PhD program, which was at Chapel Hill, which is a very secular program, in the study of religion was not a good place to be a practicing Muslim and to study Islam, and I didn't realize it at the time.

Rose Aslan: It wasn't until I went to a… teach at a Lutheran university where all my colleagues, most of them were actually ordained pastors in various denominations, and it was a religion and theology department, and I was able to heal from what being in a secular religious studies department did to me in terms of my faith and my approach to Islam. 

Rose Aslan: So I not only had the Western academic approach to religion, Islam, that was quite harmful for my own faith as a Muslim, because when you deconstruct something to the point where, like, where's the meaning? What's the purpose? Like, what's under this? It's all just human-made, and you start to take things apart until it loses meaning.

Rose Aslan: So I had that challenge of Western academia, of the… in Arabic, we say the shaitan, the whispers of Satan were in my ears daily, through Western academic studies of Islam.

Rose Aslan: And then, I was studying Islam, and I was studying all the different patriarchal interpretations, and I was teaching about, you know, I was teaching about Islam post-9-11 in the United States, mainly we're talking about terrorism, it seems.

Rose Aslan: And I encountered… and I always wanted to be part of Muslim community, so I was going to mosque, and most mosques were conservative, and I was, like, treated not always in the best way, because my gender, stuck into back rooms, treated like shit because I'm a woman, and disrespected because I'm a woman, and so many negative experiences, even though I've had many positive ones, they ate at me. 

Rose Aslan: They ate at me and made it so difficult, and I was like, ugh. If only I hadn't, like, gone through all that.

Rose Aslan: I didn't have to learn so much. I could have just stopped at the love. That would have been really wonderful. But I… my curiosity… they say curiosity killed the cat? It's like, darn it, could I have just stopped and, like, not kept on going? 

Rose Aslan: It would have been easier, but Allah designed me to be very, very curious, and to pursue a path that's quite difficult, in that my curiosity, but also my need to keep learning is both beautiful and generous, but also could be harmful at the same time.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Hmm, hmm.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I will say that I… 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Now, I was very fortunate in where I went to school, and there is something about academic environments that's hard on the heart?

Rose Aslan: You were at GTU, right? So…

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I was at… I did my Islamic studies portion at Bayan Islamic Graduate School.

Rose Aslan: Okay, yeah, that's right.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And I did my Christian part of my studies at Claremont School of Theology.

Rose Aslan: Sorry, it's Claremont School of Theology, yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah. Which is across the street, or at the time, it was across the street from GTU.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And so, there was and still are amazing people at Bayan and Claremont School of Theology, and still, if, like, coming from the environment that I had come from before, the University, the University of Sufism environment, and the retreat center in Pope Valley, like, that was so rich and heartful kind of, like, in a continuous stream...

Rose Aslan: Yeah

Dr. Habīb Boerger: that being in an academic environment was like being in a desert, you know?

Rose Aslan: Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So I can relate to some extent.

Rose Aslan: Yeah, and of course, being a seminary was, like, I would say 100 times better than being in a secular… 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Right. 

Rose Aslan: public university, so imagine, yeah, what it might have been like in a public university.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah, I don't want to.

Rose Aslan: You don't want to, I…

Rose Aslan: I was led there, but in retrospect, I wouldn't have studied there if I had known what it would have done to my imam and my faith, yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Right, right. Yeah, there's certainly something about academia that, and this is cross-tradition, and it's cross-school, and it doesn't… and I think that even with amazing faculty members, that there's something where there's something in academia that encourages an overemphasis on the mind and an under-emphasis on the heart.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And I was very fortunate to have, Dr. Alane Daugherty, who wrote the book From Mindfulness to Heartfulness.

Rose Aslan: Beautiful.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I was able to find people at Bayan and at CST that had heartfulness.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And without it, I don't think I could have made it through, you know? I don't think I could have gotten the PhD had I been in a purely academic environment.

Rose Aslan: Yes.

Rose Aslan: That's amazing, and that's exactly why it was such a struggle, and why I never was able to gain more, like, body intelligence through academia, because I was in an environment that encouraged me to cultivate my mind, which was a good thing, but never encouraged to look below the mind. So I only focused on my head, and my entire rest of the body was neglected throughout all those years, and never knew.

Rose Aslan: We even… I had colleagues who studied, like, embodiment in Islam, the body Islam. I had a colleague who studied breathwork in Islam, and they've never tried those practices themselves. 

Rose Aslan: They've only intellectualized them, and I, I couldn't believe it.

Rose Aslan: I met people who study this, and they've never tried an embodiment practice, but they've spent 3 years writing about it, researching it. It's unbelievable.

Rose Aslan: What academia does in terms of distancing the scholar from the subject, and from even to study embodiment from an intellectual perspective blows my mind, you know, to not actually try it yourself. 

Rose Aslan: So it… There's good things about academia, but they no longer are good for me.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Right. It reminds me of a teaching… excuse me, a saying from one of my teachers, and I'm going to obviously paraphrase to the extent that I, I can, but that true intellect requires the light of the soul coming through the doorway of the heart to the mind, and informing the mind. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So that if the mind is not, if the mind is not in relationship with the heart and the soul, then that's… that's not true intellect, you know? 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: The mind needs the light of the, of the soul, and the light of the heart.

Rose Aslan: I agree, that's beautiful.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And I… This has been a wonderful conversation.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: To wrap things up, I want to emphasize the rahmah, the mercy, the compassion, and I know that that's a big part of what you're, what your focus is on, your website is compassionflow.com, you're obviously wanting to approach....

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Any last thing that you might offer in terms of bringing together embodied spirituality and rahmah, bringing compassion, that you might offer to our listeners?

Rose Aslan: Yeah, I mean, the main thing is that when people think about Islam, and this is Muslims themselves thinking about Islam, it's not the first thing that comes to mind, Rahmah. Lots of other things will come to mind.

Rose Aslan: But, for me, I realized that when I read the Quran, Rahmah is all over the Qur'an. I mean, literally, we say Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim, calling upon the most compassionate qualities of Allah more than any other names.

Rose Aslan: Like, I'm like, why are we saying Rahman Rahim, the most compassionate, the tenderly merciful? Why are we saying these names more than other names? There must be a reason, and then how many times does this word, forms of this word, show up in the Quran?

Rose Aslan: Allah talks about forgiveness and mercy and compassion more than the punishment, right? The punishment needs to be there in Islam to motivate people to be good, but people often forget that the concept… I really think rahmah is a core value of Islam, and a core concept that is really overlooked by a lot of Muslims.

Rose Aslan: And so, you know, I'm writing this book, and I'm creating this idea of… we're asking these questions of Muslims of what would it be like if we approach Islam in the way we teach about Islam, and interact with other Muslims, with Rahmah as our touchpoint.

Rose Aslan: You know, if Rahmah is the way we interact with people, if Rahmah is the way we teach about Islam, how would that change things? 

Rose Aslan: Because with the way that scholars and religious leaders nowadays, I'm talking about North America primarily, but this can definitely go beyond that, there's not much Rahma in what a lot of people are teaching.

Rose Aslan: There's examples of good teachers who focus on that, but we need so much more of this compassion in our religion, because we're really weighing too heavily on the more negative aspects, on the fear-based motivation to religion, where I really think we need to take this approach of being connected and being motivated by this idea of rahmah, by love and compassion, they really are good motivators for many of us, and especially as we mature, they can be good motivators.

Rose Aslan: Maybe for children, they need a little bit of this fear to motivate them, but as we mature and walk this path.

Rose Aslan: I really can't imagine a way that's not focused and centered around Rahmah, so it really is what Islam is.

Rose Aslan: Yeah, so it means being trauma-informed, it means teaching about Islam in a way that is kind and generous.

Rose Aslan: And the thing is, Muslims are already like that. It's not like I'm teaching something that's different or against Islam. It's just that to the very core from which we should talk about Islam, from which we teach about Islam, I believe should be focused on that.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I agree, and I'll just offer that, I've mentioned before, that I feel like anybody on the planet and everybody on the planet who could possibly do so should study with, Dr. Rosina… Rosina Falzia-A-Rawi. 

Rose Aslan: Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: One of the practices that she gave me when I was on retreat with her was to recite this Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim 21 times between every ayat [verse] of the… of the chapter that I was reading.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So I would read, like, you know, one verse and then recite Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim. So, for our listeners, non-Arabic-speaking listeners, in the name of God, the universally merciful, the singularly compassionate, the most merciful, the most compassionate, the most gracious, the bestower of grace, there's…

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So, that was the practice that she gave me to help clear my misconceptions about God.

Rose Aslan: Mmm.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And so it was a way for me to begin to embody a relationship to God as the most merciful and the most compassionate and the loving.

Rose Aslan: Yeah, we need many more teachers like her, and we need the way she and others teach, like, to become more mainstream, because her teaching is quite uncommon, unfortunately, and I would like to see the way she teaches as becoming a normal way to teach about Islam, rather than a little niched approach, inshallah [God willing].

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yes, God willing. You know, yes. I… I… so many times where I've… I've been in a mosque, or I've listened to a khutbah [sermon], or I've listened to a speaker, and I've thought they… it's as if they have studied only the qualities of majesty and severity, and none of the divine names of love and mercy and kindness and, you know…

Rose Aslan: Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And… and I feel like… It comes back to, for me, Sidi Muhammad al-Jamal saying, if a person who is Jewish, if a person who is Christian, if a person who is Muslim knows their religion well, they know that there's only one religion, and that's the religion of love, and peace, and mercy.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So may we all know that there is only one religion, and that's the religion of the Rahmah, the religion of mercy and compassion and love and peace and justice and freedom for all without separation.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So, on that note, thank you so much for a great conversation.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I appreciate your being here.

Rose Aslan: Yeah, it's been an absolute pleasure. It's so fun to talk about these subjects with you.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Likewise. And thank you to all listeners for joining us on Beyond Names. Before we go, briefly, if you would please take one breath, pause and reflect for just a moment on anything that stays with you from this conversation.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Thank you. The conversation inspires in me a renewed commitment to do those things that I know through which I experience salat as the… as a time of intimacy, the time of loving connection.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So, thank you for your conversation, for inspiring that.

Rose Aslan: Alhamdulillah [Praise God].

Dr. Habīb Boerger: May you… Excuse me.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: May something you heard today help you reconnect with the light in your own heart. May you grow in compassion and clarity and courage.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: May you find your way again and again, back home to yourself, back home to the divine, however you name it. If today's conversation spoke to you, please like, share, and comment on this episode, and 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.