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Posts tagged ‘healing dance’

Dec 3

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My Life as a Mad Bellydancer

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

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Head Smack

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?

Apr 17

Why Retreat?

“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

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Breaths as Jewels

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

Jul 4

Theory & Experience in Sufism

Sufis never try to make experience fit theory. Instead, let theory fall around the shoulders of your experience like a well-fitted coat.

One’s experience in mysticism is direct. It belongs to the mystic. Reading the words of other Sufis is a support, a confirmation.

It is up to practitioners to reflect on their Inner Communion, decipher, and perceive. The longer I go on in this Path, the more patient I’ve become. In the past, my snap assessments have frequently been shallow or emotionally reactive. It takes a while for deep layers of myself to let their bits of information rise to the surface. I respect this now. Giving time to reflection about my experience brings healing clarity. It is my responsibility to myself and to the whole to take this time.

Jan 11

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Morning Dance

In the land of false flowers, there is a mirror.
Stop gaping there.

Turns your eyes in,
where Gaze has heat running under the skin,
and marbles of pulses roll
along the canals between the eyeballs and toes.

Sensation is the first way of Knowing who we are.
This Dance is not what you think.
This Dance is what you don’t think.

We are incarnated, blood everywhere,
in and out.

Don’t turn from these flowers,
these carnations.
On Earth, hearts forever pray such blooms,
gratitude for what’s Real.

Nov 21

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Unhurried

My recent practice has been silky. Not the muscles and bones so much. In fact they have been balking, heavy or weary or sluggish. But despite my lack of physical vitality, connection to my body and movement has been richer than ever. I find it easy to watch the inside of my forehead as I move. I have no resistance, and that inner gaze quickly transports the initial recalcitrance in my limbs. Moving inside the meditative state is, currently, an imperative for me. Inside this deeper state, my perceptions are clean, precise, unhurried, surprisingly content — all qualities that have always been so difficult for me. Now it seems I begin there.

But this is coming about because I turned inside myself this fall. I turned toward my Path in my heart. Instead of leaving everything, I wanted to take this turn right in my own world, in my apartment, in my family, in my city, and in my teachings. It was an imperceptible inner motion which has very likely made no difference to those outside me. I haven’t had to abandon anything or to radically alter anything. But it is radically altering me.

During the NYC Intensive, someone made a comment about about feeling safe in my workshop. What came to me, and I spoke about it, was that Dancemeditation at its greatest depth reaches below personality, below early formations of ‘self’, and settles in the Unified Plane. This is where we all belong, where we are safe because we are not separate, and therefor cannot be obliterated or opposed. This is one of the qualities of One-ness. Of Unity. We are safe.

My daily practice doesn’t take me that deep, but the depth where I silkily move touches the edge of that black velvet. Brushes against it. Softly.

May 18

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May Day-ly Practice 10

My practice goes along, mostly daily. This is really easy, now that I have it rolling. I am a happy creature of habit. In a world of desparate hyper-stimulation, habitual-ness & repetition give me space.

I went to my neighbor Andrea Evan’s studio yesterday and was astonished–an exquisite world of color. Evans makes wall-sized sequences of grid-based paintings; the components’ progression was orderly and well-rooted in gradual repetition. These were visual chants, visual mantras. They were daily practice caught on the wall. I felt peace. Joy.

dunyabigweb.jpg

photo by Janet Morgan of Dunya dancing at St. Bart’s

 

May 10

May Day-ly Practice 7

Your dance will heal you.
- from my mentor, Phoebe Neville

It was utterly gloomy here this morning. When I first woke, in my leaden lower body I remembered Grandmother. She lurched slightly as she walked, her bowed legs, which eventually gave at the knees, wrapped in a kilt or wool skirt. She loved to walk in the woods, stop and watch the birds which she knew well––all their names, male and female colors, and their songs. Her lower body, to my child-eyes, was a vast, tipless pyramid. I never saw her thighs. Ever. Not in pants. Not in a swimsuit. Not naked by chance. This morning my legs felt like that.

Then I slept. Sleep, like rain, melts away the crusty points of pain. I repeatedly forget that sleep is not only about psychic rest but also about mending torn bits. My legs are back again with all their distinctions.

I will performing a dance dedicated to grandmothers this Mother’s Day as part of Echo’s Mother’s Day Celebration in NYC. So perhaps this sleep gathered my own Grandmother to me. Or let her out of me.

My dance will heal me. It will. It does.

Apr 27

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Kripalu Notes: Dance Healing

I woke this morning from dancing hard, and hard and long, for six days in a row, and though I’m sore, I feel as full of intense energy as the busy spring birds.

I was at Kripalu, teaching, the past five days. Five hours of focused moving each day, plus tramping speedily down the very long halls to get to the excellent food before the meal hour ended. (At home my food is a the end of a very short walk from one room to another.) This year the Kripalu work was shockingly intense. The group who attended went through the whole gamut of transformation. Amazing. Strangers coming to the fun bellydance party and being willing to stumble, for most part, uncomplainingly, into the maelstrom of Sufism.

I watched one young woman have a heart opening. Not a nice blossoming under the breastbone. Not that. But the scary kind, where your identity dissolves and energy charges all through you so you think perhaps you are having a heart attack, or will explode, or maybe are some kind of weird sick that you should go to the hospital about even though you know it is isn’t really that…She was shaking for a day and a half. And when she could put words to it said she could see the inner lives of everyone. She could see too much. This is what saints and prophets from centuries past mean when they say that Truth and Enlightenment are not for the unprepared. It is extraordinary to see it all, but then the window closes. It is like getting home from the Grand Canyon––you remember the images as photographs, but your breath is back in your lungs. I was happy I could reassure her, as I lead us all out of the intensity, that she would have normal days soon again.

tent-rock-woman17-00522614.jpgI remembered my early time in Sufism and am surprised at how normal I feel now. I used to hang in thin strips all over the ceiling and walls––Straw Woman after the monkeys were done––and now I’m fine, conducting the ceremony, and actually enjoying my own experience of the deepening inner quietude, of fana. I feel about this as though I have been ascending a steep slope and, stopping for a breath, turn to look out to see that I’m miles up. Base camp is a tiny speck. How did I get this high? I still feel, in the center of my climb, as if I’ve just started out, but I’m far from the beginning. I adjust to thinning air, the vast view. Its a long way down; I might not have time to descend again, might have to cross to an adjacent country, or live with mountain goats.

I danced every day. It didn’t hurt. It healed me, healed my body discombobulated by a long sojourn in the Injury Land. I danced back into self-harmony. All the little crannies yawned, stretched their stiff edges, saying ‘come in, come in’. Then last night, leading the Boogie in NYC (this was a delightful honor!), I was jumping and hopping; I was almost entirely back. I wonder, as years in dance pass, if the return will be so, or if the last injury is it: if I might never find my way out of the pit of aging. But there I was, my spine completely mobile, and my legs swirling and striding and bounding. My legs reacquainting. My legs grabbing the ground rather than mincing. (I had a great dance with Stuart and Marjie!)

I just have to put in right here this line from Mary Oliver, which is my credo:
“I am sensual in order to be spiritual.” I guess Mary Oliver is my guru now.

tent-rock-woman17-00522319.jpg

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