Reshad Feild

Reshad Feild
Born	Richard Timothy Feild (1934-04-15) April 15, 1934 Hascombe, Surrey, England
Nationality	English
Alma mater	Eton College
Occupation(s)	author, musician
Known for	books on Sufism, musician of The Springfields
Children	JJ Feild (son)

Reshad Feild (born Richard Timothy Feild; 15 April 1934) is an English mystic, Islamist author, spiritual teacher, and musician. He is the author of more than a dozen books about spirituality and Sufism in particular.

Life and career

As a young, upper-class Englishman, Feild was educated at Eton and served in the Royal Navy, where he had a particularly undistinguished career. In the early 1960s, Feild was a founding member of the British folk trio The Springfields.

Feild was influenced by the spiritual teachings of G. I. Gurdjieff, P. D. Ouspensky, and others. He studied spiritual healing, and was involved with the Alice Bailey community. In the late 1960s, he was initiated as a sheikh in the Sufi Order International by Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan. Feild studied with Bulent Rauf, a Turkish author and translator descended from a line of Sufi masters going back to the Andalusian mystic Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi (1165–1240). He established the Beshara Centre at Swyre Farm in Aldsworth, England, in 1970. A description of events at this center is given in the books I, Wabenzi and Beshara and Ibn 'Arabi: A Movement of Sufi Spirituality in the Modern World, by Rafi Zabor.

In December 1971, he and a group of students went to Konya, Turkey, to meet Bulent and the sema of the Mevlevi order of Dervishes. While there, he met former sheikh, Suleiman Dede. In 1972 Feild resigned his role in the Sufi Order. In 1973, he resigned his role leading the Beshara Centre and went to Los Angeles, Tepoztlan, Mexico, and Vancouver Island, BC, where he taught on his own. In 1976, he was made a sheikh in the Mevlevi order by Suleiman Dede, and moved to Boulder, Colorado, where he started a small centre. In Boulder Reshad assisted in introducing the sema ceremony – which was declared a cultural world heritage activity by UNESCO in 2004 – to America and Europe, and made it available to women for the first time in recent history, as well as non-Muslim participants (i.e. students).

Since then, Feild has taught the essence of the universality of Sufi teachings, making them available to people of all religious and spiritual backgrounds. He has published more than a dozen books, some of which have been translated into many languages. In his autobiographical novel The Last Barrier, he gives a fictionalized account of how he met Bulent Rauf.

He is the father of the actor JJ Feild.

Published works

• The Last Barrier – A True Story of a Journey into Ultimate Reality (autobiographical trilogy part I) ISBN 978-3-942914-03-1
• To Know We're Loved – The Invisible Way (autobiographical trilogy part II) ISBN 978-3-942914-07-9
• Going Home – The Journey of a Travelling Man (Autobiographical trilogy part III) ISBN 1-85230-878-8
• The Alchemy of the Heart ISBN 1-4208-3110-0
• Steps to Freedom: Discourses on the Essential Knowledge of the Heart ISBN 0-9625412-1-4
• Here to Heal ISBN 978-0-89556-157-2
• Reason Is Powerless in the Expression of Love ISBN 0-9625412-0-6
• Footprints in the Sand ISBN 1-85230-027-2
• A Travelling People's Feild Guide ISBN 1-85230-003-5
• Breathing Alive – A Guide to Conscious Living ISBN 1-85230-050-7
• The Inner Work (3 volumes) ISBN 978-3-905272-21-5, ISBN 978-3-905272-22-2 and ISBN 978-3-942914-01-7
• Breathe for God's Sake! Discourses on the Mystical Art and Science of Breath ISBN 978-3-942914-08-6

External links

• Biography at Chalice Publishing
• Videos of Reshad Feild
• Chalice: A Living School - Reshad Feild's Esoteric School, Chalice Foundation