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About Our Past Guides and Teachers
Our Guides from the past and Present
We invite deep and experienced leaders to share and guide our spiritual retreats. Here are some who have joined us in the past and also some currently.
Murshida Leilah Be
In 1985, a very strong vision of and inner direction from Murshid Samuel Lewis guided Leilah to receive Bayat with one of his direct disciples, Pir Moineddin Jablonski. She then experienced the blessing stream of the lineage more fully opening to her.
Leilah began leading the Dances of Universal Peace and the practice of Zikr (Remembrance of God) in the early 80’s. She has composed many beautiful circle dances and Zikrs, danced the world over, and is appreciated for her depth of devotion.
She lives on the Island of Maui with her husband, Bodhi. They are the parents of five grown children and one grandchild. Leilah and Bodhi live a rural home life with gardens and an orchard and serve the local community as counselors, cherags/ministers, and also help educate and serve in the field of death and dying. They also travel widely, sharing the fruits of their practice in retreats worldwide.
Sheikh Gayan Gregory Long
Gayan is an acclaimed drummer, composer, leader of the Dances of Universal Peace, spiritual mentor, retreat leader, and storyteller. He has dedicated his life to awakening human potential through music, devotional practices, pithy teachings, and community celebration.
Gayan is a direct disciple of Pir Shabda Kahn, the lead teacher of the Sufi Ruhaniat International’s school of western Sufism.
He has shared the Dances world wide and and led retreats with some of the foremost spiritual leaders of our time.
Sheikha Amara Karuna
Amara has been leading the Dances of Universal Peace since 1985 and is a Senior Dance Leader, and has been involved in mentoring new Dance leaders.
She has been on teaching staff for five NW Sufi Camps has led many weekend retreats, zikrs and rituals which included the Dances.
She served as Secretary, and then President, on the Core of the International Council for the Dances of Universal Peace, working as a volunteer to oversee the organization for several years.
She specializes in Dances from the Goddess and Earth traditions, and leads with lively humor and devotion. She is a Sheikha in the SRI lineage of Sufism.
Murshid Bodhi Be
Bodhi is the founder and executive director of a nonprofit in the fields of conscious dying and the care of the dying. He is a funeral director, an end-of-life and bereavement counselor and educator; a hospice volunteer; a teacher and trainer of death doulas; a speaker and workshop leader. He has trained hundreds of doctors, nurses, hospice staff, social workers, ministers, chaplains, therapists, artists and lay people in the spiritual, psychological, emotional and logistical care of the dying and care of the dead, and for five years has taken dozens through a certification program for death doulas. As a ceremonial guide Bodhi leads memorial and funeral services and community grief rituals.
Born in New York City in 1951 to a Jewish family, his life took a major turn in my senior year of high school with the sudden death of his father, the possibility of being drafted to shoot people in Vietnam and being introduced to LSD, and then 2 years later encountering the Dances for the first time at Lama Foundation in 1971.
Initiated by Pir Moineddin Jablonski in 1983, he draws from the baraka stream flowing through Murshid Sam and Inayat Khan, Jesus and Crazy Horse.