Breaking the Tomb: A Journey into Love, Integration, and Social Justice
In this deeply moving episode of Beyond Names, Dr. Habib Boerger is joined by Abdullah Pat Aylward—board chair of the Shadhiliyya Sufi Communities and founding leader of the Sufi Center Minnesota—for a wide-ranging and heartfelt conversation about spiritual seeking, transformation, and embodied love.
Pat shares his remarkable spiritual journey, beginning with a Catholic childhood and early yearning for meaning, through decades of study and practice across traditions including Vedanta, Hinduism, Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, mystical Christianity, and ultimately Sufism. Along the way, he reflects on the teachers and saints who shaped him—Krishnamurti, Ramana Maharshi, Dr. Usharbudh Arya, Dr. Ibrahim Jaffe, and Sidi Muhammad al-Jamal—and the ways presence, not concepts, became his true guide.
At the heart of this episode is Pat’s honest account of “breaking the tomb”: a profound period of personal collapse that stripped away identity, image, and certainty, and opened him to a deeper integration of love, humility, and compassion. From this breaking emerged a seamlessness between inner spiritual life and outer engagement in the world—work, relationships, leadership, and service.
Together, Dr. Habib and Pat explore:
What it means to love ourselves without needing to fix or perfect ourselves
How spiritual practice becomes real in everyday life
The deep unity of spirituality and social justice
Why compassion, inclusion, and joy are not ideals, but lived realities
How suffering can become a doorway into freedom and belonging
This episode is an invitation to rest in the truth that there is only one heart, one life, and one love—expressing itself through us all.