Rumi believed passionately in the use of music, poetry and dancing as a path for reaching God. For Rumi, music helped devotees to focus their whole being on the divine, and to do this so intensely that the soul was both destroyed and resurrected. It was from these ideas that the practice of Whirling Dervishes developed into a ritual form. He inspired the order of the Mevlevi, the "whirling" dervishes, and created the "Sema", their turning", sacred dance.    In the Mevlevi tradition, Sema represents a mystical journey of spiritual ascent.

In this journey the seeker symbolically turns towards
the truth, grows through love, abandons the ego, finds the truth, and experiences Divine
Perfection;  then returns from this spiritual journey with greater maturity, so as to love
and to be of service to the whole of creation without discrimination against beliefs,
races, classes and nations.

egg-tempera painting by Murshid Khabir Kitz