River of Guidance

The Journey of the Soul: Practices and Teachings Inspired by Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan and Murshid Samuel Lewis

with Khalif Wali van der Zwan

~ This course will be offered in English with live translation in German ~

3 Sundays: April 13, 20, 27

10:00 - 11:30 am Pacific / UTC -7

1:00 - 2:30 pm Eastern / UTC -4

6:00 - 7:30 pm UK / UTC +1

7:00 - 8:30 pm Germany / +2

Use this Time Zone Converter to find the start time where you live

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Inayat Khan asked and answered three primary life questions:

Where do we come from?

Why are we here? 

Where are we going? 

About this Class from Wali: Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan responds to these questions in The Soul, Whence and Wither, Character Building, and The Art of Personality. During this class we will draw mainly from The Art of Personality which contains a blueprint of the human spiritual path, and offers us ways to refine the personality through what Murshid SAM calls ‘the ‘alchemy of personality’. As the ego-self (the nafs) plays an important role in this process, we will focus on the three layers of the heart and the journey of the soul within the heart including the seven classical stages of the nafs.

About Wali:

Wali van der Zwan (born 1952) is a Dutch-born writer and musician. For over three decades, Wali and his partner Ariënne have been offering Sufi and DUP based workshops, training programs, and retreats under the umbrella of Peace in Motion (PIM).

Wali studied geology, philosophy of science, and sociology, and dropped out of university when asked to become manager of a theatre in his hometown Utrecht, the Netherlands. In the early 1990s, Wali started a new career as a freelance writer, first as a classical music critic and later also as a transla­tor, writer, journalist, and editor for a number of religious and spiritual magazines. 

To date, Wali has published a dozen books for Dutch publishing houses including books on Rumi, Hafiz and Kabir, an anthology of Sufi poetry, a primer on Sufism, and a number of bestselling books of spiritual stories. For Peace in Motion Publications, he wrote a series of books on classical Sufism and Inayat Khan.

More recently, he was commissioned to write In Family’s Footsteps, a book on the life and teachings of Mahmood khan Youskine, published in 2023 by the Maheboob khan Foundation, and Inayat Khan through the Eyes of his Students, on the recollections of Hazrat Inayat Khan’s students from the Smit-Kerbert Collection, published in 2024 by the Nekbakht Foundation. His biography of Murshid Hidayat Inayat-Khan, in’shallah will be published in May 2025.

Wali is a senior teacher in the Sufi Ruhaniat International. At present, he serves the legacy of the Sufism of Hazrat Inayat Khan and Samuel L. Lewis as member of the esoteric council of the Ruhaniat, and as member of the editorial committees of the Ruhaniat and the Nekbakht Foundation. 

With his life-long partner Ariënne, Wali lives in Germany, close to the Dutch border. They have two children and four grandchildren, living in India and the Netherlands. They can be contacted through their website or email