To Serve Is Better than To Be Served

By Dr Amir Farid Isahak - The Star - Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Saturday, August 11, 2007

Some people talk about love and kindness, but real masters walk the talk. They are embodiments of what they teach.

I have mentioned many masters in my articles, and in my search for knowledge, healing and wisdom, I continue to meet many more.

This weekend I will be involved in a Spiritual Transformation & Healing workshop conducted by two Sufi teachers: Dr Suriyakhatun Osman and Professor Alan Godlas.

Professor Alan Godlas is from the Department of Religion at the University of Georgia, US. He is a scholar of Arabic, Islam, Sufism and comparative religion. He embraced Islam in 1974 and entered the Sufi spiritual path soon after, and is now the co-moderator of the most comprehensive websites on Sufism.

He has written many papers on Islam and Sufism, and is the preferred expert by many governments and organisations when they need advice or inputs on Islam. He will be teaching us spiritual transformation in our daily lives by means of gratitude, remembrance and love.

Dr Suriyakhatun Osman is a medical colleague who has also ventured beyond the restrictive borders of medical science. She is a Reiki master, a homoeopathic practitioner and a Sufi-healing teacher, among other things.

Seeing some similarities in the energy concepts of Reiki and Sufi-healing, she and several other Sufis who also practice Reiki have blended the two into Sufi-Reiki. She is an authorised teacher of the Sufi Healing Order, a branch of the Sufi Order of North America, which was started by Pyir Inayat Khan, a well-known and well-respected Sufi shaykh who was entrusted to bring Sufism to America.

Perhaps the most famous Sufi-healing master is Shaykh Moinuddin Chishti, author of The Book of Sufi Healing. He is a friend of my shaykhs, and, like many other Sufi masters, is based in the US.

It is apparent that the Sufis are all over the US, and Sufism is partly responsible for the rise of Islam there. For example, through my Naqshbandi Order shaykh, Shaykh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani Al-Haqqani, more than 10,000 Americans have embraced Islam after accepting the Sufi teaching of love, compassion and gratitude.

It is no wonder that even presidential-hopeful Hillary Clinton acknowledges that Islam is the fastest growing religion in the US.

If Islam is the misunderstood religion, then Sufis are the misunderstood Muslims. All Sufi masters preach love, compassion and gratitude as healing for the soul, but the physical body cannot be ignored even by those who seek only spiritual fulfilment.

To have a healthy body is a spiritual requirement, because much of the religious and spiritual duties require a healthy body for them to be executed to the best possible level. To serve is better than to be served.

A healthy body means you can help others. A sick body means you need help.

My grandshaykh is Shaykh Muhammad Nazim Al-Haqqani, the grandmufti of Northern Cyprus, and father-in-law of Shaykh Muhammad Hisham. He was the one who described the qi or life-force that I was gifted with when I had my first audience with him over 15 years ago.

And his description matched what my wife could see (she is gifted with the ability to see energy and auras), and that of the aura photograph taken of me by Reiki Master Yongi (a Malaysian based in Australia). All the other aura photographs taken at crystal shops were not accurate.

Here is the teaching of Shaykh Muhammad Nazim about healing:
“In the name of GOD, Most Merciful, Most Compassionate.

“Real healing is to be able to send rays of power through your hands to the body of the patients who must be ready to receive the healing. Most people are closed and it is impossible even for prophets to reach them. A closed socket cannot transport electricity. On a patient like that you must try to crack open a weak point of their shell where you can enter.

“Since the beginning of time people have been in need of healing, physically and spiritually. Authorised healers will always be on earth. Many of them are totally hidden and you would never imagine them having such powers. If someone is seriously looking for them, they will find. It is not something you will find in books...”
Shaykh Nazim al-Haqqani an-Naqshbandiyya

The healing of the soul and the healing of the body are very much intertwined. Thus it is common to see many natural healers becoming inclined to spiritual practices. Conversely, many seekers on the spiritual path find that they are given the gift of healing for the physical body.

In both, the most important organ is the heart. On the physical plane, heart disease is the most common chronic, debilitating disease (even though cancer is gradually taking over as the top killer because of poor success in treatment, while heart disease can be managed by modern medicine).

On the spiritual plane, the diseases of the spiritual heart are what rob us of inner peace, which in turns translates to fear, worry, uncertainty, pride, greed, ingratitude, apathy and stressful living.

So to those of you who are not yet on the healing path, of spirituality or physical health, I would encourage you to consider starting the journey, so that you may start healing yourselves, and hopefully help heal the world too.

May your lives be filled with inner peace, happiness and good health.

[About the Author: Dr Amir Farid Isahak is a medical specialist who practises holistic, aesthetic and anti-ageing medicine. He is a qigong master and founder of SuperQigong
http://www.superqigong.com/ ]

[Visit Dr Suriyakhatun Osman's website:
http://holisticleaders.com/]