Are you ready to face your demons?
Paola, one of our teachers, was whirling in the studio with her eyes closed. Confident as if she were sensing her surroundings with her spread fingers. As if she were tracing the circles on the floor already drawn, only she could follow. She was beaming in a white cotton linen tunic and trousers while her long hair was outlining her moves – attached but free.
It was a chilly afternoon in Manhattan. My daughter, who was one month shy of her 12th birthday, and I were looking for the Anahid Sofian Studio, which offers traditional Arabic, Turkish and North African dances and is located on West 15th Street. We finally found the ten-story building. The studio was on the sixth floor. When we entered, a woman with a warm smile greeted us before disappearing into her office. Looking around, I noticed the studio was bathed in the bright afternoon sun, reflected on the wooden floor as well as the mirrored wall. Adjacent to it was a wall made of tiny glass squares – old New York style — almost entirely covered by plants. It could have been mistaken for a greenhouse, without the rest of the studio in view.
From the posters and newspaper clips that hung on the dressing room wall, I learned that the woman who greeted us was Anahid Sofian, a living legend of Middle Eastern dance. She started dancing in New York City in the 1960s. The studio is now over 50 years old. After hanging our coats and taking off our shoes, my daughter and I sat on the floor, waiting for our instructors and absorbing the vibe of foreign and familiar surroundings. About 12 to 15 females, out of whom my daughter was the youngest, who were curious and open to new experiences, formed a circle with Lale Sayoko and Paola Garcia, UNESCO-certified Sufi dance teachers. We were ready to taste the joy of whirling together.
Our workshop was meditation in motion. We learned and practiced basic moves of dervish whirling in traditional skirts with open and closed eyes. We played the daf, a sacred Persian drum that helps Sufi dancers get into a trance.
I used to watch whirling dervishes on TV when I was a child, mesmerized by the perfection of their never-ending, recursive circles, as if they were drawing a single line with their closed eyes. They were all male. Instead of in my home country of Türkiye, where the whirling dervish (in Turkish, it’s called Semazen, coming from Persian Sama-zan – Sama meaning “listening” in Arabic, and zan meaning “doer” in Persian) originated, I was experiencing Sufi whirling in Manhattan.
I was not sure how my daughter would take this mystic experience. When I came to my knees, palms and forehead on the floor to handle the dizziness from whirling, she was turning and drawing circles on the wooden floor without stumbling into others with her eyes closed, her head tilted, her face slightly pale but in peace.
Paola, one of our teachers, was whirling in the studio with her eyes closed. Confident as if she were sensing her surroundings with her spread fingers. As if she were tracing the circles on the floor already drawn, only she could follow. She was beaming in a white cotton linen tunic and trousers while her long hair was outlining her moves – attached but free.
I met Paola a couple of months later on Zoom. Like the windows in the Manhattan studio, her image brought in the bright sun of Mexico, where she was visiting her mother, into my apartment in Istanbul, where the sun was setting, and I’d moved into a month after taking her class. Away from the cold of New York, Paola’s time at the beach was reflected on her sun-kissed skin. Like I remember her from the workshop, she was beaming in a black and white summer dress, her matching color dangling earrings were moving every time she turned her head instead of her hair which was tied in a ponytail this time.
Paola is a writer, dancer and translator. She has been living in NYC for two decades where she moved as a student after receiving her bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Texas at El Paso. She took in the depth and breadth of cultural experience the city offered right away. She loved walking the streets, hearing the people from all around the world, dancing to different music. “When I was a child, I was exposed to European culture, I didn’t know much about the richness of Mexican culture. You learn the history of colonizers, not indigenous people, at school,” she says. Living in NYC changed her exposure to and her interest in other cultures. Now she is focused on learning more about indigenous culture in her home country as well, in the same way I took her Sufi whirling workshop in Manhattan which I didn’t have any interest in when I was living in Türkiye.
Paola graduated from Columbia University and worked as a Wall Street lawyer, for a year and a half. She didn’t like her career though. “Nobody should devote their life to what they are against,” she says. “We are responsible for how we live our lives. I could not justify mine as a Wall Street lawyer.”
While her high-paying job demanded almost all of her attention and energy, Paola started longing for cultural and artistic escapes. The duller her life seemed, the more she wanted to reach for joy and enjoy her life in simple terms again, as simple as walking and dancing.
So, she went back to Columbia University, this time to focus on Islamic Studies. She received her master’s degree in 2018. She got closer to the camera with a bigger smile when she was telling me about her connection to Arabic culture and people. She converted to Islam and became a passionate student of Sufism and Islamic philosophy. She had been raised a Catholic but never defined herself religious. Her conversion was a surprise not just to her but also her parents, who started reading and discussing Islam. Her father, who never liked the idea of confession, appreciated not having a middleman between an individual and God in Islam.
Paola’s interest in Sufism extended beyond her academic studies. Her passion towards music drove her to Sufi music and dancing. She was in an ancient mosque in Cairo, Egypt in 2011 when she watched the whirling dervishes for the first time. “It was magical and hypnotizing,” she says. Paola shared her experience in an article published in Morocco World News. “There were musicians and dancers who seemed transported to a magical realm as they performed their art,” she says. “They looked as if in a profound trance, an ecstatic state I had not witnessed before. As I watched them, the nature of time changed; three hours went by, but it felt as if it had only been five minutes. I never forgot this experience and often thought about it. I fell in love with the artists or mystics. I particularly remember a gray-haired man in his late 50s, dressed entirely in white, who played the cymbals and whose face expressed pure bliss, shuttered eyes and lips perpetually lifted upward. He was beautiful.”
Several years after her first exposure to Sufi dancing, Paola enrolled in a workshop in NYC led by Rana Gorgani, the ambassador of Sufi dance in her home country of France and abroad. Paola says, “I never thought that Sufi dancing would be accessible to ordinary people, especially women.” In many societies, women have not been allowed to Sufi dance. While whirling with her eyes closed during Rana’s workshop, Paola says she felt a mystical connection she never experienced before. “I like Rana’s teaching,” says Paola. “She lets you experience it first, before paying attention to your style, before improving skills. She kept saying ‘Trust yourself’, and I trusted myself. It removed all other voices in my head.”
Paola attended more workshops led by Rana in France, and she organized several workshops in NYC with Rana throughout the years. They went to Turkiye together, to dance, pray and meditate with men and women at Yalova. Rana’s mission has become to teach this practice to everyone, male and female because, as she stated in her interview for France 24: “The soul has no gender.”
Paola started performing in public. She became a UNESCO-certified Sufi dance teacher to share the power of Sufi dancing with people around the world. But NYC continues to be her center, while the dance continues to be her inspiration for how to live her life.
“Sometimes I get a clear message after a solo practice, sometimes not,” says Paola. “In Sufism, nothing is permanent. When I perform, I need to be alert. Once I went into a trance during the performance on the stage. I missed my note to end my part and I kept whirling.” When I asked her if the audience noticed that her answer was: “No. Nobody.” and she smiled.
Paola described Sufism for Inside Arabia as “The mystical branch of Islam and, as such, one of its main aims is the purification of the heart, which facilitates an inward search for the divine and the experience of spiritual union. For a mystic, this union does not happen through the intellect or the following of orthodoxy. It is felt firsthand in body and soul. The Sufi path is often likened to a love affair whereby the seeker is the lover and God the beloved.”
Sufi dance, known as whirling, is one of the practices Sufis use to find the love within. Whirling – always to the left is a “dance of liberation” and “healing… All things in the universe, including human beings, find whirling natural: the planets, the galaxies, and our own bodies are all spirals of energy rotating on an axis. Because of this, whirling aligns us and unites us with everything else in existence.”
Paola says “Whirling can be scary at the beginning. It brings out all of our fears and demons.” Are you ready to face your demons?
