Frida Waterhouse

Frida Waterhouse (October 12, 1907 – November 18, 1987) was born in Gloversville, New York, to Jewish parents. Her early childhood was marked by economic hardship and painful separations from her family; after a stay in Denver, the family settled in Los Angeles when she was about five. Her household was politically minded and avowedly anti-religious, placing its faith instead in "good conversation, music and books, and especially on discussions of the important events of the times." From the age of nine she took part in the Young People's Socialist League, leaving it at nineteen — by her own account, a rebel from the start.

Her adult life included two marriages, and it was the dissolution of the second that became her doorway inward: in her anguish she opened to what she called her first spiritual awakening of this lifetime, "an illumination that brought the presence of the Divine into her life." Following inner guidance, she moved from Los Angeles to San Francisco in July 1963, returning to Los Angeles in February 1966 to be present at her mother's death, then moving back to San Francisco for good in March 1967. For roughly four and a half years she declined eye surgery at spiritual direction, becoming blind to all but light and darkness — a period she understood as a deepening of inner sight — before acute glaucoma led to a successful operation.

In May 1970 she was introduced to Murshid Samuel Lewis through one of his disciples whom she had been counseling, and was invited to dinner at the Mentorgarten, his San Francisco home. Though she later recalled, "I only knew him from May to December of 1970. In January 1971 he was dead," the recognition between them was mutual — each, as she later put it, recognizing the other as a spiritual instrument. Murshid Sam began sending her his young students — many of them struggling with the confusions of that era — and she took their emotional and psychological burdens onto her own capable shoulders. With characteristic humor she said, "I considered myself a giant garbage disposal for the Sufi Order," work that freed Murshid to give himself to teaching and to his peace work. Of him she said simply, "I felt very much Divine Mother-ish about him, trying to protect him."

After Murshid Sam's passing in January 1971, Frida remained a steady, motherly presence for the grieving young community, continuing to counsel his students for many years. She worked with many different spiritual groups in the Bay Area from 1970 onward, "offering confirmation, encouragement and counseling to all on the path." She described her own work as providing a practical springboard others could use to work through compulsive, reactive emotional patterns toward self-mastery. She self-published several small books of her teachings, including Why Me? (1974), Who Me? (1976), Life/Death Motifs (1977), and Tomorrow Never Comes (1978); a later volume, Aspects of Spiritual Astrology, was published by Firefly Press of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Murshida Halima Sussman counted her among her mentors — "seer and spiritual counselor, godmother to her four children" — and she is honored today as a Godparent of both the Sufi Ruhaniat lineage and the Dervish Healing Order.

Her deepest legacy in the Ruhaniat lives on in SoulWork, the path of spiritual psychology developed by Pir Moineddin Jablonski "from the roots of Murshid Samuel Lewis, Frida Waterhouse, and Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan." Pir Moineddin's SoulWork training was inspired by Frida and is continued today under the guidance of Murshida Mariam Baker. Her student Murshida Khadija Goforth remembered the heart of her teaching in her emphatic refrain: "Your only spiritual path is how you live your life every moment of every day." Frida Waterhouse passed away on November 18, 1987, at the age of eighty.