Last weekend, I attended Celebrate Your Life, an annual conference featuring top speakers on matters of mind, body, and spirit. Actually, following the great experience I had volunteering last year, I offered my services a second time. My assignment was to support Andrew Harvey, one of the conference speakers, for the weekend.

Beyond an impressive career writing and teaching on spirituality and mysticism, Andrew Harvey’s recent work has focused on what he calls Sacred Activism. Sacred Activism is a global movement that emphasizes the necessity for people to marry their quest to experience their indwelling divinity with their responsibility, as aware human beings, to be a force of compassion in action; to help heal our planet and our collective lives. At some intuitive level, the concept makes a lot of sense to me. The time has come to be genuinely loving stewards of our natural world and do the necessary inner work to heal our own souls.

My duties as Mr. Harvey’s assistant for the weekend involved getting him to conference venues on time, helping him with book signings, and making sure he had everything he needed in the room where he was speaking. As a perk, I got to listen to both of his talks.

His first talk of the weekend was directly about Sacred Activism. As he spoke, he would wring his hands at times, almost pleading people to hear the wake-up call, as he had, for a radical transformation in consciousness, He paced the length of the room like a tiger sporting non-camouflaging stripes. He wanted to be seen…and heard. An experienced speaker under the influence of his own highest calling, he channeled his love and fury into every phrase rather than present talking points of information.

His second talk, delivered the following day, was on Rumi. I had been a fan of Rumi’s poetry for many years, mostly his “love poetry,” which I felt could be interpreted equally as being about romantic union or union with God. I was secretly hoping to hear Harvey recite some of my favorite lines.

“I don’t do Rosebud Rumi,” he announced. His talk on Rumi, it turned out, was also about Sacred Activism. Rumi’s life and words were to act as a sort of summer thunderstorm to flash drench the seeds of our passions, to motivate everyone to understand the immense possibilities, the duty and joy, in knowing our own divinity and stepping up to be part of the transformation the world needs. Everyone in the room could not help but be moved as he invoked the words of the master.

The grapes of my body can only become wine
After the winemaker tramples me.
I surrender my spirit like grapes to his trampling
So my inmost heart can blaze and dance with joy….

Early in his talk, Harvey told a story about how Jelaluddin Rumi met his spiritual guide and teacher Shams Tabrizi, a nomadic holy man. Both had been yearning for what the other had to offer, Shams yearned for someone to whom he could impart his rare wisdom and Rumi longed to go beyond the book knowledge on theology that he had mastered and actually experience the ecstasy of divine love.

Harvey described the unlikely and mysterious circumstances of their first meeting, building up to the simple fact of the event, telling us that on November 29th 1244, as each man recognized they were looking at what they most longed for, Rumi fell off his horse. Very clearly, his life was completely changed. By meeting and then developing the most unique bonds of creativity and mystical understanding, Rumi was re-born. Following this incident, he shed his persona as a conventional scholar and became an impassioned seeker and messenger of sacred union.

I shuddered when I heard this story. Initially, I allowed myself to get intoxicated when I heard this date. My birthday is November 29th. Wow, I thought to myself. I was born the day Rumi fell off his horse.

Then I thought about the greater magnificence of what it means to be re-born to yourself; to be re-born to your most authentic purpose and passion. I watched Andrew Harvey shake his hands towards the ceiling. His voice was near cracking. His glasses were slipping down his nose and his forehead was beaded with sweat. The world is waiting, he reminded us, for each of us to be re-born to ourselves, and if enough of us are willing to be mother and midwife, we could give birth to a genuinely new way of living that is more fully integrated and aligned with our best selves as human beings.

I know Harvey’s talk will stay with me. I am not yet sure how his message will continue in its unfolding.

Being reminded of your power to be born again, for your own sense of fulfillment but also because the world needs what you have to give, is no small thing.