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.
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
Oct 14
In an earlier post I wrote about coming home from retreat and, with all that new juice, getting involved in lots of projects and using the energy lavishly though often unwisely. I remember those words as I return to NYC with recharged batteries, as if the New Mexico sun had charged my soul. I am aware that all the cleansing breaths I’ve taken on the mesa have been healing. The light has been healing. And my cells feel wonderful. Alive!
Back in NYC I focus on business. I sit in front of my computer and type away. I’m on the phone. I email. I organize Dancemeditation sessions and ‘run the store’. But as I do, I feel what I am doing. Inside my apartment, I inhale EMFs. As I walk along the street, I inhale heavy metals. With every breath comes poison.
NYC is a stimulant — caffeine or speed. It’s a great jolt, useful in creative tasks and for un-spooling complex ideas. The mesa is nourishment. Direct inspiration. I make the two sound very black and white. Who wouldn’t prefer the mesa? But the mesa has its rigors. Its austerity is a large part of its ability to heal, and that must be gotten used to. New York is materially cushy. Lots of water. Lots of electricity. Anything you could possibly want — for a price.
The power of NYC for me has always been its raw energy. If I can transform it with my practice I have a dynamic resource, but I have to transform it, not get lost in it, or follow its whims and tides which easily chew up a soul.
I feel almost as if I need to get all my business work done quickly before I lose my juice. But then I realize that the healing that took place on the mesa is changing how I am working. I breathe as I type. I tend toward balance. I don’t teeter on an edge. I am all here, and being all here is far less crazy, less volatile, less self- destructive than past ways I’ve lived in NYC. 
I stopped in at Grace Church on 10th and Broadway to listen to the noon organ concert. That was a nice break. The cool colored light. The smell of wooden pews and leather prayer books. Timelessness, to breathe and be bathed in music.
Sep 23
My night reading of Koran verses was surprisingly refreshing. I used to find them judgmental—all that ‘do the right thing or be in hell’—but with a new perusing and the leavening of age and experience, that they are right. They just are. The question is understanding what the ‘right thing’ is. Each sura drops a tiny clue in its bed of poetry to what a right thing is. Most of these clues point to finding and stepping onto the Path. This can be religion. This can also be Sufi. The Path means doing the practices. There is no Path without regular engagement in practices. None. Not for anyone of us. Practices, which constitute Path, are given, are learned, passed down, and proffered as solace for the pain of being human. They free us from the hell of personality—our own and others. All that ‘patting on the head’, competition, reaching for stardom—the fruitless ways we try to wring love out of the world.
The mesa naturally loves. Trees, air, rocks abundantly give. The sky is slow movement. The sky is slow movement. It takes only slowing and opening to receive.
Slowing and opening. Isn’t that truly what most of our Sufi Dancemeditation practices turn toward? Time—Asr—comes then, sits inside us displaying the diamonds in her pouch. It doesn’t require Ravenrock to receive this largesse, though Path will certainly accelerate here. No. Any small undisturbed room will do.
The words tumble out. Al hamdu lillah.
Breath sinks in. Al hamdu lillah.
What is Allah?
A word. A breath.
What is this Word? The Heart knows.
What is this breath? Life.
Late night. The crickets sings. I don’t sleep. I wake, light a candle, and read beautiful Hafiz poems and Koran. My cabin is a cranium, the door a mouth, and the deck its tongue. I walk out of the head, through the mouth, onto the tongue, and fall into space as a song. Quiet settles in me. It grows too cold for the cricket. I close the window and lean toward the candle. Read more
Apr 13
Five Ruby Women
(written after Thursday class)
My hands climb the air slowly on their own.
The canyon floor spread around me,
the pale green trees lacy along the river.
A dense hiss then
a blast of pitting sand folding me before
shooting off like a big air serpent disgusted
by its marbled morsel of me.
And the world halted.
My hands halted.
There was nowhere else.
A silvery kanoun hangs the icicles of plucked tones on a sparse branch.
My heart beat.
The canyon still.
In a room with a red floor five women
with five wombs, five hearts, ten hands
and ten thousand pulses
are still.
A silvery kanoun hangs plucked tones.
Pale green branches eyelash cheeks.
The river of thoughts or no thoughts winds
her water, ruffled by fish, stones, breaths
of five ruby women.
*****
During Dancemeditation my body combines times. The sense of dual realities – not so much recollection – is montage or pentimento. In this poem, the stillness combines all times. During the class, this was so palpable to me. I also felt that there was no particular importance to the specific scenes other than their stillness. I had no urge to analyze the ‘meaning’ of place, or action, or who. The value was ‘stillness’.
Yet there was place. There were occupants. And these aspects were beautiful to me. It was a limpid, awake dream-like perception – not a day-dream or memory. The exactitude of the experience had the detail of Persian miniature, though not particularly visual so much as a full-range awareness. An other-worldly awareness.
Stepping beyond ordinary awareness is an interesting cultivation. These perceptions are not accidental. They aren’t easy to find. Like a coming across a tiny brook with perfect green moss, undisturbed, pure, with a small bird flipping its head in a shaft of light, and you know, never having taken that path before just at that time of day, you might never see that exact scene ever again.
It is so delicate…
In the year’s turning, I dance my way back into the many strands of Truth that escape my tight self.
My hair falls free. Truth.
Into my heart comes a gush of clean Truth, a flame, a song, a wind, and I can move (and we can all move) beyond my “I”, my “my”.
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?
Mar 27
I’ve been feeling lately that time, or the moving time that whirls the hands on the clock face, is a thick, cement-y porridge filling any crack in my existence. I live bricked up inside a solid wall of time. My practice––it inexplicably fetches me when I’m truly overwhelmed (I cannot explain why I am able to do it now; no resistance, but instead docility, even gratitude)––digs a chink in the odd hour where I can slide through and unwind.
I prepared new visual film poem for my book‘s premier party. The film titled ‘Collections’ is a series of still life images. And I thought how odd it was to use still images in a video when the whole point of video is motion. As I edited, I saw the attraction––stopped time. Still life. Then, even better, I could surge time, sforzando, then stretch or chop it by how I transitioned from one image to another. Such pleasurable control. And the final joy was seeing the structure of the whole piece express classical lineaments. Themes returning. Themes developing. Beauty. Eternity. This sort of time.
Here are a few images from Collections.
Mar 3
Thinking about friend Karleen’s (Koen––a marvelous writer!!) comment on the frustration of making time for practice. I know this is THE most difficult aspect of Personal Practice––just shoe-horning it into the day. I don’t even think the word ‘resistance’ applies any more, the way it might have two decades ago when there really was a slightly calmer lifestyle––I’m not imagining this; life is more hectic––but internal resistance is greatly abbetted by our current hyper pace. I remember my friend Lori from Atlanta saying how she didn’t like to be too busy. That was five years ago, and it sounded revolutionary to me; everyone else complained proudly of being so busy. Now I look around and see people numb & crazed; its level of busy verging on insanity.
Amidst a bombardment of desire-mongering , making time to practice seems faintly absurd. Practice is slowing. It is simplifying the monkey mind, watching as neurotransmitters turn edginess to silk. Naturally this sounds appealing, but it is dissonant with modern life. Desire-mongering is the culprit. That’s the spot where I grab myself…Do I really want all the things? The interactions, the clothes, the food, the gizmos, the ambitions, the specious obligations, the perfections? No. I mostly don’t. I need a few things. A very few things. Mostly I need time, which means removing the clutter of acquisition. I need time for timeless-ness.
Here’s what Casita (Negron Wild) wrote me after the 2008 Cape Cod Winter Weekend:
“There are times when god stops the clock and I am suspended––frozen in time. There is something about the suspension that provides a neccessary contrast to the relentless motion of everyday life. Thank you for helping me be in stillness in motion, and watching the body’s intelligence emerge and communicate through the mind. These times are golden, as they are so hard to find, yet they tower over the details of everyday life––large and expansive.”
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