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Sema Collective

@sema.collective

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Turning to the Beloved ꩜
Curating devotional Sufi Sema gatherings in NY and beyond

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Peace and blessings 🌹
Welcome to Sema collective, a space for remembrance.

We gather in devotion through music, movement, and stillness, honoring the Sufi tradition of Sema while welcoming seekers from many paths. Some come to turn, some to sit, some simply to listen.

If you’ve been longing for a place to remember together, you’re welcome here.

🤍

What draws you toward devotional practice?

#sema #sufi #devotional #music #sufism by @sema.collective

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9 months ago

The Eternal Wine 🍷

Part II of our devotional songs and poems from across the Sufi world continues with Hafez, the 14th-century Persian poet of Shiraz, in a ghazal that opens “Al-minnatu lillah,” thanks be to God, that the tavern door is open. The wine vats churn and roar with their own drunkenness, and the wine inside, Hafez says, is real, not a figure of speech. From the Beloved comes nothing but intoxication and majesty; from the lover, only need.

This ghazal is sometimes attributed instead to Heydar Shirazi, a contemporary poet of Hafez’s, and appears in both of their collected works.

Swipe through the full poem. 🌹 Musically adapted by Mahsa and Marjan Vahdat
@mahsa_vahdat @marjane_vahdat by @sema.collective

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4 days ago

Tawhid. One word and somehow the whole path.

It starts simple: God is One. La ilaha illa Allah. But we can’t stop at saying it. We have to actually get there, a process Al-Ghazali compared to peeling a walnut down to the oil at its very center. Belief is just the husk, the first layer.

So how do we get to the oil? How do we embody it? This is where sufi practices come in, dhikr, sema, breath, with tawhid sitting as the center goal. Rumi has this story: a man knocks on the Beloved’s door for years. “Who is it?” “It’s me.” Door stays shut. He comes back, knocks again, and this time when he’s asked, he just says, “it’s you.” That’s when the door opens.
When the reality is One, there is no room in there for two.

Swipe through for more by @sema.collective

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5 days ago

by @sema.collective

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7 days ago

The Eternal Wine🍷

Sharing a new series of devotional songs and poems from across the Sufi world. A glimpse into how differ Sufis across time, geography and language have expressed Divine Love and what it means to drink from the Eternal wine of the Beloved.

Part I opens with Al-Shushtari, a 13th-century poet, mystic, and scholar from Andalusia. In this poem, God speaks directly to the lover: whoever is enraptured by My Beauty and leans wholly on Me sees none beside Me, even in death. Union isn’t given to anyone still carrying a remnant of self. And the wine on offer isn’t the wine of the vine. It’s eternal.

Swipe through the full poem. 🌹
Musically adapted by Al Firdaus Ensemble @alfirdausensemble by @sema.collective

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11 days ago

Ishq (عشق), a love so total it consumes the lover🔥
In Sufism, love is a method. A way of relating to God and each other that slowly transforms whoever practices it. From Rabia’s torch and water, to Rumi’s reed crying for its Source, to Hallaj’s fire that burns before it unites, the Path of Love asks for everything.

Swipe through to learn more by @sema.collective

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12 days ago

Ya Hafith — the One who Preserves & Protects

Al-Hafith is the all-encompassing protection that holds everything in the heavens and earth, down to the smallest particle. It’s what keeps the order, sequence, and timing of the universe intact.

Call on this name to guard against the pull of the egocentric “I,” against negative thought and negative action. Its protection works inward and outward, until the boundary between the two dissolves and there’s no inside or outside left to defend.

Ya Hafith 💜

Original calligraphy by Ayten Tiryaki, illumination by Esra Demir. by @sema.collective

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19 days ago

It is not ordinarymusic,
this dervish music,
it is music
you drink with your whole body,
your whole being,
and you
live this music.
- nezih uzel

🌀 whirling by @destigterlizelot by @sema.collective

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20 days ago

The closing prayer of the Sema (& other spiritual gatherings)

At the end of all of our semas, we recite al-Ikhlas, “The Sincerity / The Unity” prayer three times.

It’s one of the shortest chapters in the Qur’an, yet the Prophet ﷺ is said to have called it equivalent to one-third of the entire Qur’an.

Why? Because it holds the whole of tawḥid, the oneness of God, in its simplest form

So after the body has whirled itself past thought, and past the self, into that place of remembrance — we return to this one truth. Unity.

Sources:
- Seyyed Hossein Nasr: The Study Quran
- Kabir Helminski: Threshold Society
- Calligraphy by Fatih Özkafa by @sema.collective

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25 days ago

Sohbet, food, music, dhikr. All anchored in love for the Divine 🌹

Snippets from our last Sema community social in Brooklyn.

So often we save reverence for ceremony and prayer spaces, as if the sacred only lives behind certain doors. But what does it look like when the Divine is the center of all our gatherings?

Stay tuned for the next one. by @sema.collective

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a month ago

Whirling home 🌀 by @sema.collective

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a month ago

In Sufi teaching, the “eye of the heart” isn’t opened by learning more, but by quieting the self that keeps getting in the way. The physical eye sees forms; the heart’s eye is said to perceive the Divine signature running through everything, the secret meaning beneath forms.

Artwork by M. Qalawi by @sema.collective

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a month ago