Dancing Our Way to Wholeness

 

http://www.next-culture.net/dancing-way-wholeness/

 

“Life is movement. The more life there is, the more flexibility there is. The more fluid you are, the more you are alive.” (Arnaud Desjardins)

Close your eyes and feel your breath. What do you notice? Sense your feet on the ground. 

What are you aware of? Check in with the vertical line of your spine. How is your skull situated on top of your vertebrae? How is your pelvis carrying the weight of your torso? What are you sensing through the pores of your skin? How does it feel to be inside your body right now?

We live our lives in and through our bodies. Alexander Lowen describes the body as our basic reality. We are in a constant and unavoidable relationship with the experience of embodiment. The body does not lie and our tissues reflect with unfiltered honesty the state of how we are. Our bones, muscles and organs carry our dreams, wounds and memories within the substance we are made out of. Our bodies provide us with a wealth of sensory information, a constant stream of feedback on how it feels to be where we are, do what we do and be who we are.

Structures of body originally evolved in response to the demands of the environment. Lisbeth Marcher suggests that many of our bodily patterns are leftovers from childhood, imprinted in the system as functional adaptations. Surviving in a particular context has consequences that come with a cost of compromise. 

We carry chronic tension and contraction so locked up in the body that it can no longer be felt. When areas of holding become habitual and automatic enough it no longer takes any conscious effort to keep them in place. The muscles involved in the pattern are so focused on their task of defending that they are no longer available for sensory experiences. Where we lose sensation we lose vital aspects of our experience and presence of being.

Movement is a powerful catalyst for change and transformation. Mary Starks Whitehouse thinks of movement as the great law of life. The living organism that it is, everything in the universe is always moving. It’s impossible to move the body without moving the whole being of the person. The movement of bones, muscles and nerves activates life experience and animates personal history. One body is the microcosm of the universal body. When I dance, the whole universe dances.

Letting the body move according to an inner impulse gives it the opportunity to reflect, research and release in a container of mindful attention. The body already knows how to shake off stagnation, make new choices and create new resources. You don’t have to push, force or try to make anything happen – just allow movement to unfold from within. Close your eyes in the beginning. Stay still until you feel the urge to move. Start slowly and see what happens.

I am often eager to begin and hungry to dance, yielding into the beat of the music inside my body. I go with this initial craving for action until I find a way to pause and drop everything that I am doing. I go quiet and look for a deeper initiative, seeking a more conscious and connected expression. 

I begin again, this time with more breath and patience. I allow the formless to reveal itself through the form with no hurry and no expectation. I let the flow of feeling and frequency move my body as it will. I am often surprised by the gestures, emotions and images that come up. I am often moved by the bridges of connection and the relevance they have to the unfolding events of my life.

Dancing opens the gate to a wealth of symbolic materials that show up to animate the shape of the body in motion. Not impeding upon the body’s spontaneous impulse to move utilizes the creativity of the moment to attend to the vital themes that emerge on their own. 

Dancing is inherently medicinal in a directly accessible, tangible and practical way. Dancing cleans the house of the body and reorganizes the furniture of the soul in the interest of good feng shui for the whole property. Dancing has a healing effect even when therapy is not the primary reason for moving our feet and shaking our hips.

The body already knows the way to wholeness. The universe is in a process of constant change and dancing helps us align with this current of life-forwarding motion. As Ron Kurtz points out, the body is intelligent beyond measure and its natural inclination is towards health, wellbeing and actualization of potential. 

Provide a safe container for creative motion and have faith in your body’s ability to dance its way to freedom and integrity. Trust your body to have its say, have its way, stand up for its needs and resolve what gets in the way. Form inevitably follows feeling and the shape of your body yields to the shape of your soul. See you on the dance floor.

“Dance first. Think later. It’s the natural order.” (Samuel Beckett)

References:

Kurtz, R. (1990). Body-centered psychotherapy: The Hakomi method : the integrated use of mindfulness, nonviolence, and the body. Mendocino, CA: LifeRhythm.

Lowen, A. (1995). Joy: The surrender to the body and to life. New York: Arkana.

Macnaughton, I. (2004). Body, breath & consciousness: A somatics anthology : a collection of articles on family systems, self-psychology, the bodynamics model of somatic developmental psychology, shock trauma, and breathwork. Berkeley, Calif: North Atlantic Books.

Whitehouse, M. S., Adler, J., Chodorow, J., & Pallaro, P. (1999). Authentic movement. London: Philadelphia.

Posted by Anna Seva

Benefits of Early Morning Dancing

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https://websitelaura.wordpress.com/2013/07/16/10-benefits-of-early-morning-dancing/

10 Benefits of Early Morning Dancing

Posted by aclauravanderzee

 

Last week I’ve come up with this light bulb plan to start teaching dance classes early in the morning, very early actually. And then I remembered something a clearvoyant person once told me: you know you are too old to be a ballerina but you can still dance every day. She is so right and I bet this goes for many people out there. Dancing is such a blessing, we human beings just love it. There is no reason not to dance and if you think there is, start dancing on it right now!

So, I called it The Moves, starting with The Morning Moves. Forget steps or routines in front of a mirror, instead we will go on a journey of the body, mind and soul, opening up to oneness and awareness, loving the fact that we are here, alive, in our bodies. Yes, let’s hear it for the body. She is left out too often, exposed to toxins, stress and other signs of neglectance.

Moving the body around, creating inner and outer space, eyes closed or wide open, swaying like a tree, moving the earth with a single breath: most people become instant wall flowers when they encounter free dancers. O dear Lord, you hear them think while backing away, God gave us steps, use them! But let’s be honest: wouldn’t you just die for a crazy dance like that? To feel the freedom of motion and obviously the freedom of mind, getting into it ‘like no one is watching’? To become a fool?

This wall flower thing is exactly why I will be in the studio 5 times a week and I invite you. Let’s be fools and, like David Bowie once chanted: let’s dance! Yesterday morning was the first of The Morning Moves and it was complete bliss. Not to mention selecting the music. People or no people, I will be there, available to you and to the heart beat, dancing my ass off. Because if anything, opening up to the gift of dance everyday is a present on its own.

For those who have experienced the healing and energizing effects of dance at some point in their life, The Moves may be a long awaited morning workout opportunity. And they’re right: you will get fit and in better shape. But let’s take a look at other benefits:

1. You will forget you are tired. Feeling heavy and done with after waking up? You. Will. Rise. During an hour of pure dancing, while connecting to the inner body and attuning to healing frequencies, tiredness will proof just a state of mind, your attention is elsewhere, in the now.
2. You develop a sense of inner rhythm. Knowing life flow and how it expresses through your body works miracles in daily life. You get to know your rhythms and how to move with them. High energy becomes your friend, just as low energy. Through dance we don’t fight anything, we bring everything to awareness.
3. Dancing provides you a sense of musicality. You will know music from the heart. Whatever party you attend, you know how to let the music guide you deeper into the dance. People will watch you, yes. They might think you are crazy, yes. And you, you will be dancing.
4. You will know masculine and feminine polarities within yourself and others. How these unique qualities of life feel and move can be explored through dance. Feel how the feminine opens and how strong the masculine enters space.
5. Stress can be located and vaporized, by you. While dancing with stress, as if it were your dancingpartner, you take it into the Now, again, into awareness. You localize the stress and know it. Bring attention, dance with the stress and say farewell.
6. Dancing in awareness creates a higher frequency. The strong magnetic field around everybody’s heart creates an even stronger collective heart that illuminates and transforms everything around and in it.
7. Dancing brings joy and awareness to yourself, others and the planet. While dancing freely, you open the heart so it is able to connect to the hearts of all sentient beings (Life, to make it short).
8. Dancing is the smile of the body. How? You inhabit your body and this radiates out. You will inspire others by transfering information (body language, skin radiance, life oozing from your whole being).
9. Anything you did not want to feel, anything you pushed away comes into light. Because dancing is something very physical, you will feel where stress and other emotions manifest. Movement allows you to literaly put stuff in motion.
10. The foremost benefit is that you are aware. From there life is dance and dance is life!

Make Love to Life

This message is a gem of a recording that I received in my inbox from one of my teachers, don Oscar,  today.  It is so rich in its message, and in its simplicity, that I took the time to sit down and transcribe it.  Enjoy!~*

It's simple.  It involves being an artist.  It is an anthropology of the Soul... not to be studied, to be memorized, to be with great effort and deliberation... to be contained in any manner.  It is to be danced.  It is to be made love to.  That is why it's appeal is so great.  It does not require a rigorous practice of meditation.  

On the contrary... it requires an open, effortless giving of oneself to the blessing of the perfection of the moment, and engaging in the game of life with the awe inspiring freedom and curiosity of a child.  It also allows for great creativity and great spontaneity and great integration of your own medicine ways, your own meditative practice, your own pagan experience, your own earth honoring ceremonial artistry. 

For this open ended organic participative approach to walking the earth in shamanic service is the dynamism behind evolution.  Evolution itself is really the same as mindful growing of a Soul.  By growing of a Soul just as you would grow a crop of medicinal plants, or edible flowers, simply involves paying attention to the seasons, to the cycles, to the pulses, to the rhythms, and ordering expressions of the natural world... both that witnessed in sky and that witnessed on Earth.  To understand that our mother, Pachamama, is the greatest scholar and University that there is.  It is the sanctuary, the highest temple of learning, the uber Alexandrian library. 

And by learning to observe her ways, and then, when the time is right, to lift your sight to the heavens and take in the movements and prescribed orders of that canopy of stars, will allow you as a two-legged to be the bridge between the worlds of Spirit and Matter, between the Above and the Below.  And all that you experience Within, through that Connectivity, through that inextricable solidarity with the mirroring that takes place in the natural world with a self regulating aesthetic that one can observe in Mother Nature is the great work... is the Rite of Passage... is the becoming.

Dancing Inside

Today, for the first time in many months, I was child-free in dance class.  This was thanks to my very gracious and intuitive babysitter, whom I believe could feel how run off my feet I was becoming with one babe in arms and two at my side all summer long.

There is a very fine line between being run off of one's feet, and dancing into one's feet.  There it is.  The key.  When things seem to get crazy, chaotic or out of control, my medicine is to dance my energy.  Dance it back inside.

Once I got into the dance studio, I didn't quite know what to do with my free hands.  They felt almost 'too' free after having them continually filled.  (To be true, I am typing this one-handed as we 'speak' ;)  Deciding to explore this new space, after the first wave of movement I decided to really take my time getting into the second wave of movement.

I wanted to ooze lusciously into the floor, to feel cradled by the earth and fully use the gift of gravity to give my body a complete stretch over and a deep release. This also happened to be one of those fine days where the music I had  chosen for class fit the freedom bill perfectly, it was a groovy and relaxing sound massage. 

When I finally came out of my deep breathing and stillness, everyone else was already standing and moving, deeply entranced in their own journeys and flowing with their dance.  It was so beautiful to see.  Despite the fact that the studio is surrounded by wall to wall mirrors, everyone had eyes closed.

Though mirrors can also at times serve a good purpose in observing, accepting and loving the natural movements we are each gifted with, I do enjoy it immensely when the existence of the mirrors is dropped from mind and all we are left with is free movement.

Free movement, directed only by our joy and gratitude for the gifts of our body vehicles.  I am filled once again with awe at the power and beauty of this medicine.  The entire room was electric and pulsed by that which holds all things as One.  Cohesive. 

At the completion of this one particular dance journey, the sense of community and bonding was both blissful and grounding.

And I was able to go home, arms free and expanded, scoop up my babes and feel them close while I showered them with butterfly kisses.  Still.  Free.

The Spirit of Give and Take

“Only after the last tree has been cut down, only after the last fish has been caught, only after the last river has been poisoned, only then will you realize that money cannot be eaten.” - Cree Proverb


Lately there have been plenty of childhood memories surfacing for me.  The other night I watched a show about a man who is travelling the globe to take part in the lifestyles, ceremonies and rituals of indigenous cultures.  He is doing so in the hopes of learning their ancient ways and telling their stories before they die out for good.  Brilliant, I thought - absolutely brilliant.  This brought me to recall the time I was preparing to move to Ireland, and over a cup of fresh organic coffee I said to a friend that it was part of my plan to attempt to learn some Irish Gaelic; this was just something I always knew in my heart and my soul that I would do.  “Well“, he said, “Now why would you do that?  There’s a dying language.”  A bit surprised, as to me it was obvious … “Well that’s precisely why“, I replied.  

Reflecting upon this I remembered the ‘tests’ I would put myself through as I was growing up.  Even though we never had much in the first place, I was always getting rid of things.  I refused to accept or play with dolls, opting instead for one well loved stuffed bear.  Along with that, my music collection, clothes and a bed, my room was filled to what I was content with. 

I was quite happy also with a tall round Tupperware container filled with clothespins, and I would spend lots of time clipping the pins around the upper edge of this container.  By the end I was very happy with the completed ‘fan’ look.  As the years progressed for me, it became a game of “What can I do without?  How minimally can I live?”  I could never quite understand why I did this, why I had such a repulsion to most things I felt were frivolous or unnecessarily technological.  I later realized that subconsciously, I wanted to be prepared to live out my life comfortably even if all things as we knew them were taken away.  There was a sort of deep seated thought pattern that said “This, as it is, won’t last … be ready… “

I knew this idea could also be a bit extreme.  Until I lived with a girl who really WAS extreme.  And I realized I wasn’t alone in my quest for the minimal.  She would keep the heating down in the house to such an extent that the pipes would freeze while it was colder than forty below outside, and you could see your breath inside.  We would wear layer upon layer inside of the house, with hats and scarves, and I would have to sleep in fleece outerwear just to sleep comfortably. 

She later admitted to me that she was testing herself, to see how cold she could stand it.  I would be going to teach classes, already so frozen by the time I got there, that I still wouldn’t feel warm by the end of class.  So I thought, there needs to be a balance.  I realized, there is no need to be harsh to myself any longer in order to understand how to “live without”.  And this balance comes down to that which I learned in so many of my energy work and spiritual healing classes - absolutely everything is about the give and take.

This is a concept forgotten by many for so long, but one which I believe is re-awakening.  If you take something, give something back.  And as has been the way with indigenous communities, and as we all inherently know and remember somewhere within our psyches, this doesn’t need to be a material exchange.  There are subtle exchanges as well, exchanges of thought and sentiment, exchanges of good deeds, exchanges of energy. 

If someone wishes you well, it is a natural response to wish them well in return.  Relationships are wonderful practice rooms for healthy exchange.  It takes all one can muster not to respond in kind to a negative word or action.  On another level, the earth is giving to us continually, sustaining us and nurturing us.  We drink of her blood (water), walk on her body (soil), are kept warm by her vital energy (fire) and are supported by her essence (air).  It is the indigenous cultures and those practising indigenous ways that have kept the exchange and the gratitude alive.

Giving thanks every single day is empowering.  Being aware of one’s surroundings is empowering.  We need to come back to our natural and innate connection to our elements, animals, and negative space; ie, that which we cannot “see” with our eyes alone.  Increase our collective awareness.  The ways of greed, anger, selfishness, and violence are not innate to the human condition.  It took a long time for these programs to be bred into the human vein, and we are now at a time in our planet’s cycle where these programs are being triggered, challenged, and preparing to be disseminated.  As with any cleansing of the old, it is initially a painful process but will be so rewarded in the end.  Many cultures believe that it is in fact the heart which is the mind.  And most shamanic teachings tell us that it is with the heart that we “see”. 

I am now reminded of a wonderful teacher of mine.  We met at a time of great transition in my life, and I don’t believe in coincidences.  He was a Native elder, true to form, living in the forest straight off of the land and performing healing work with medicinal herbs and plants.  When we first met he triggered me greatly, as I knew what he had come across my path to do.  So naturally, I closed off to him, out of fear and my mind telling me “I’m not prepared”.  But we’re never really prepared, are we?  Knowing what was going on with me, he looked me straight in the eye and said “I AM a true shaman”.

I blinked, my resolve struck for a moment.  Then my cheeky aspect of self replied, “Sorry, I wasn’t expecting you.  I don’t have any tobacco”.  He blinked.  Then he chuckled.  I then broke down and began to divulge to him what I hadn’t told anyone in many, many years … the dreams I’d had, the visions I’d been having, some about the past, some seeming to be future, but all with a common thread and with the idea that “time” is simultaneous. 

He calmed me down and gave me basic instructions on what to do next.  I became his student for a time, and one thing he showed me involved being able to “see” a blood clot within the chest of a friend of mine.  He then proceeded to draw the clot out and to my amazement, a dark red spot appeared on the back of his hand as he worked.  It grew in size until he had finished.

Appalled, and in the spirit of give-and-take, I asked him, “What on earth will you do with that now?  You can’t keep it!”  With a smirk of patience, he replied, “I will take it home and give it to a tree”.  Again creaked my cheekiness, “But how do you know the tree wants it?”.  Chuckles, chuckles, and more chuckles … but no reply.  Fair enough, I thought.  I clearly have much more to learn!  Much time has passed since then, and I am so grateful.  The balance of give and take, an easy concept, but a not so easy practice.  We are getting there.  All of us.

“They will start as fires that burn within us, and we will burn up with desires and conflict if we do not remember the original teachings, and return to the peaceful way of life.”