Breath became the thread that wove the diverse aspects of my Sufi apprenticeship together. Paying attention to the constant, apparently simple act of breathing had shown me how breath can carry profound meaning. In Sufi healing discourses, breathing is not merely a biological necessity but a practice of awareness, a way to align body, mind, and heart. Through lessons in “hush dar dam,” (Dari: awareness of breath) I learned to attend to each inhalation and exhalation as a form of dhikr (literally meaning: remembrance), with a steady rhythm that could calm the body, focus the mind, and open pathways to a heart-centered transformation. Breathing is both method and metaphor, sustaining life while guiding the journey toward the possibility of healing complex trauma and ensure a deepened presence.

Through the extensive periods of time I spent with Sufi healers and fellow wayfarers in Berlin (and elsewhere), I came to understand how these practices could heal wounds that are both personal and collective. Sufi healing has the ability to provide tools to navigate secular forms of alienation as well as the sociopolitical suffering carried by many in marginalized Muslim communities. In a city where Islam is usually misrepresented, Sufi gatherings became quiet acts of resistance. I experienced breathing spaces where anti-Muslim racism was countered not only with discursive critique but with lived examples of openness, compassion, and coexistence. Here, healing was as much about reimagining our shared futures as it was about easing individual and collective suffering.

That said, breathing as metaphor and practice is not just about the individual person. Breathing is about the community coming together and even the world at large. In 2020, during the height of the COVID pandemic, we had seen how breathing had “become a powerful and politically charged metaphor for the violent impact of a historically grown inequality and the resistance against it that might accumulate now in this current crisis of a literally breath-taking virus” (Schade, 2020). 

In the long aftermath of the breath taking pandemic, there are other forms of suffocation that Sufi practices may not be able to heal, auch as toxic air, rapid urban deforestation, and a persistent damage caused by late capitalist forces emboldened by genocidal and ecocidal far right politics on our planet. 

We need to draw inspiration from Sufi breath-based healing practices, among other conditions of possibilities, that make us conspire, breath together, and tell our personal and research-based stories in suffocating times.