Jan 19
I want [my veil] to unfurl so I toss her but don’t drop her. I let her billow. I wrap a wide arc of space in her skin. Soon she has seduced me into her world. My legs and feet have forgotten their clay and I am in the small sky that inhabits my NYC apartment. Air is always a morsel of sky, yes? Breath is always a morsel of sky.
Jessica Iscah Tkach Paquin, ITCert*
I did my practice this morning. I felt my sacrum get very heavy on the floor and spread out, towards the end the energy had moved towards my crown, but I still had this heavy spreading sensation.
Here is some of what I wrote in my journal afterwards: As I chant Ya Shafi an image of a crane forms in my mind. Read more
At the recent Kripalu Intensive, on the last day, Loretta read this stunningly beautiful poem to all of us. It captured our state but took us beyond as well. She has kindly let me share it here.
Under Shiva’s Gaze
Shiva graces our Dancing
As we enter the Great Temple of the Body.
Here is a wonderful string from a Facebook conversation amongst Dancemeditation™ practitioners. Our goal with this conversation is to inspire and support a daily practice or teaching of Dancemeditation. Each month we work on a suggested topic.
Sanctuary
November 1 Dunya McPherson, Principal Teacher
Please describe in excruciating detail exactly where and when you do your daily practice. Where is the space? What time of day? What do you wear? What do you sit on? What music have you been using? How long have your practice sessions been? How many each week for the past two weeks?
November 1 Jessica Iscah Tkach Paquin
In the last two week I have practices 2-3x a week. I have a dance/meditation room. It has teal walls and big bright windows. Read more
There is a big idea is Sufism known as Nafs. Resistance to practice is entwined there. Nafs, in brief, are self-destruction. More gently put, they are the aspects of self that undermine core soul hungers of Self. They can show up as fear, doubt, or lack of self respect. Read more
May 20
Lisa Michaels, VP of Sacred Dance Guild interviews Dunya May 19, 2011.
The Sacred Dance Guild and Natural Rhythms offers an exciting tele-interview series focused on exploring the many ways people express spirituality in dance, hosted by life long dancer and current SDG Vice-President Lisa Michaels.
Dec 3
Pissed. 
I was pissed before I put on the beads. And though beads were pretty and glittery, they didn’t stop me from being pissed.
I swung my head and I wasn’t lost in a trance, I was screaming a big body scream against having to be pretty, stupid, servant-like. You name it. All the things feminism was releasing me into. When I shimmied, I worked up to being a motor that was past alluring. It was a hard driver. It was earthquake. I might plow around the stage or restaurant aisles, smiling, but I was a snake. I had poison fangs. If you handle me wrong, I’ll kill you.
I found belly dance vocabulary perfect for rage. Before, as a modern dancer, the movement choices were too abstract, too huge or spatial. I could storm around, slicing the air. I could stand rigid. I couldn’t reve up. I really wanted a catharsis and there it was in belly dance, built right in. Belly dance allowed me to get underneath my rage into my power. All women need this, but particularly my generation who lived on the cusp. Those of us birthed and raised in the conservative 50′s had to fight the repression inculcated in us in early childhood. Militant feminism of the 60′s and 70′s was in full swing. We really couldn’t become housewives. Like it or not, women’s roles were changing and we had to go forward. In my head I wanted this, but inside, I’d been raised to be ‘less than’ a man, to obey. Modern dance was all political posturing, very intellectual, and still very proper. It didn’t allow catharsis and it didn’t get right into the sexual crux of gender inequality. Belly dance let rage and frustration out of my system. Beautifully. Dangerously.
I loved that the costume was heavy. The beads weighed a lot and this seemed to hold me down, to keep me from spinning off and splatting into the walls or all over the patrons. I also loved that the costume, with its revealing-ness and sensuality, gave an initial illusion of female availability. I could be a big, horrible trick. A set up. Or I could back off and smile, waiting behind the costume’s typical assumptions for a good moment to strike.
Jul 7
I was raising my front window, the sort that opens down so you can wash the outside easily, which has a faulty latch. It swung down and bonked me on the head. It’s heavy. I felt my neck crunch.
So there were three options:
~ Follow my body.
~ After checking Google to to learn that I should see if my pupils are unevenly sized (they weren’t — a good thing), I could go to the hospital emergency room where I would sit for a few hours under fluorescent lights
~ I could ignore it, push on, then wonder days later, why I feel wonky-blinky
I did the first. I lay on the floor and — this is why I’m sharing this tale — my body did not want to rock. She went right into that slow roll we did one day in Summer Movement Monastery. My skull rolled very slowly along the floor into gravity, the cervical spine quietly extending and realigning. From time to time my spine wanted to gently twist rather than extend and contract, the head blow having come at an angle. My spine unwound. My cerebrospinal fluid had a chance to distribute itself (I could actually feel this pulse underneath the top layer of sensation), and whatever chemistry was happening inside my cranium could stabilize.
Nausea subsided. The light-headedness and weirdness around my eye sockets muted. I sat up, gently. All those sensations rose then subsided as well. Mostly.
I move around delicately. Keeping an eye on things, I lie down from time to time and let my body do what she needs. It brings me immediately back to the acute level of awareness I cultivated during retreat. Why does it take a blow on the head to get there?
“Action expresses priorities.”
– Mahatma Gandhi
To change anything takes practice. Addictions — they’re bad habits. Very bad. Beyond our reach, we say to ourselves. Beyond our will power. Breaking them takes more than wishful thinking, more than a few days of intentionality. If you’re hooked on addictive substances, you’re dug in deep; you need a 12-step or more. But if you’re in a self-destructive rut, retreat works.
One part of Summer Movement Monastery is training out of self-destructive habits. The body needs time and repetition — more than once or twice. Two weeks of preparing and eating cleansing food isn’t only a yearly retreat clean-out; it’s a springboard to taking care of oneself by preparing and eating good food daily throughout the year. Two weeks gives our bodies enough time to retain the new experience, to develop a comfort with it, and a preference for it.
Amazing to think that many of us live on crap, dead food, predominantly cooked by slave labor of others, but we’re so busy, etc., blah-blah-blah. At Summer Movement Monastery, we get rid of blah-blah-blah for two weeks. We prepare and eat good food, envision how we will implement this at home, then prioritize this action.
We also practice Dancemeditation. Why didn’t I say this first? Because its more obvious. We know we are in session 7 hours a day, and we can imagine, or know from experience in other retreats, that we retain a craving, at least for a while, to do practice at home.
The most important thing about the 7 hours of Dancemeditation daily in retreat is what I call the Operation. Our time in retreat makes a permanent spiritual change. After, we return to our world in a changed condition. Yes, it’s possible to forget that this happened, possible to bury the change under dark choices, but why? A Path has called us. All we have to do is open to it, spend time with the Guide and group, and then not forget. Retreat is a spiritual rip in time. We enter Timeless Time concerned with our spiritual evolution. Permanent change — the Operation — happens because our Deepest Being needs Communion with the Deep, All-Pervasive Subtle. We need what is beyond the daily world of cars and screens and din.
There is plenty of discourse about whether or not a Path should be socially useful. Should spirituality be politically active to be relevant? Are our choices to make a better world a result of how evolved we are? Is positive change possible, and can we even effect positive change without changing our condition? Or is the world a mirage and all that matters is the internal spiritual struggle? Does activism distract from spiritual path?
No matter how you consider your own role in the world, or the role of spiritual path in your life, retreat is where the most accelerated growth happens. Looking at retreat from the most mundane perspective regardless of your philosophical stance, cultivating positive habits is, at the very least, good for you and the world.
Nov 20
During the recent NYC Intensive, I wrote:
I entered the Black Velvet Inner-ness where breaths float as jewels.
Breath is the activator and lens of subtlety. In the realm of subtlety we can dissolve into that which is most infinite and most intimate. For Sufis, the court of love is found inside the subtlety inside the breath. Read more
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