Under Shiva’s Gaze

Shiva graces our Dancing
As we enter the Great Temple of the Body.

Little do we know what will Unfold.
We just know we will be the Unfolding.

Flowing into Spontaneous Combustion,
I become Whole HOLY from the Dance.

And I taste the Freedom of Pure Bliss
Which is Love Incarnate.

My beautiful Earth Body becomes
Heaven on Earth.

My psychic aches and pains melt away
And there is only the Spaciousness of Becoming.

The Emptiness I have feared all my Life
Is now the Opening.

May I continue the Practice of Drinking
From the Sacred Chalice of my Longing for the Divine.

(c) 2011 Loretta Armer
November 15, 2011, Dancemeditation™ Spiritual Bellydance
at Kripalu Center for Yoga

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.

All times melt into Present.
This gift, this Present, doesn’t erase other times; she is All Time.
Large. Full. Beyond thought.

This Present is Truth on our whirling Earth. When are we ever not turning?

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.

I 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.

Along About Reality
(for everyone – and you know who you are!)

So, I’m listening to a 40 year old sonic reality
–the Beatles to be exact. So many people and things
have left their trace
between my neurons,
deep in the synaptic pathways that have become

who I am. 40 years ago I sat on a swing
in Germany
singing Help, Ticket to Ride,
All You Need is Love. My parents and brother
were alive. All was not well with the world.
The Vietnam war bled away the lives of a generation
but we had hope, we wanted to

give peace a chance. We wanted to believe
Love was all we needed. Well,
we need food too, don’t we, and water,
fresh air, people we love, a world to stand on
that we don’t shake, rattle and roll
with our hate. Today I study neuroscience,
try to understand how reality is created in us
by DNA, culture, all the things pressing into
the wet clay of our minds
that presses back, shapes as much as it is shaped. Yeah,

Life is the miracle we have been waiting for,
this messy tangling up
of everything into

the only thing that matters
within which we could find
everything we think it is we want, if only we could just

stand back
and let it happen.

©2008 Teresa Dunyati-Long