“Dance is the hidden language of the Soul.” Martha Graham
As I ease into day 22 of Soul Musings the New Moon energy washes over me with new beginnings as it nears 10pm in the dark of night.
I have chosen the quote above from Martha Graham for I have often felt that moving the body in dance most certainly has to be an expression of the Soul.
A language that only you can create moment to moment by deeply listening. Words of motion without resistance.
Simply breathing into each moment and witnessing what the body creates – alone or with others.
You may not embody the energy of “dancer” however I am curious as to what would happen if we meant one day in the park and I started moving to my own inner rhythm.
Would you join me, walk away, or interpret your language into movement?
Allow me to learn your language as your being freely unfolds ….
Inspiring New Possibilities, Living From the Soul of Life While Co-creating Well Being of Body, Being, Heart and Planet….One Breath At A Time
Soul Musings is a 31-day practice for the month of December immersed in deep listening to what is emerging and unfolding day by day. Eight sentences with occasional resources to explore more deeply.
Each post, invited by Soul, allows the words to emerge unscathed from prior planning, editing, or censorship. Dwelling in uncertainty and dipping a toe into mystery this union of words is an attempt to resonate within an innate way of Being…. returning “home”.
To receive daily posts simply sign up for this blog and you will be notified through e-mail. In addition there will be daily posts on the blogs below. Thank you for being part of this practice with me!
Inspiring New Possibilities, Living From the Soul of Life While Co-creating Well Being of Body, Being, Heart and Planet….One Breath At A Time
Soul Musings is a 31-day practice for the month of December immersed in deep listening to what is emerging and unfolding day by day. Eight sentences with occasional resources to explore more deeply.
Each post, invited by Soul, allows the words to emerge unscathed from prior planning, editing, or censorship. Dwelling in uncertainty and dipping a toe into mystery this union of words is an attempt to resonate within an innate way of Being…. returning “home”.
To receive daily posts simply sign up for this blog and you will be notified through e-mail. In addition there will be daily posts on the blogs below. Thank you for being part of this practice with me!
Last Friday night my body was a mass of whirling limbs, undulating pelvis, and open hearted movement. Where was I? At one of my favorite movement pastimes. You see I, like you, have several favorite movement practices….among them swimming, yoga, making love, and ecstatic dance/contact improv. The latter is what I was involved in a few days ago.
What is so outrageously refreshing about ecstatic dance is just what the poem below by Jewel Mathieson (thank you to Kimberly Beroset!) suggests quite powerfully. There are no boundaries or constraints to adhere to. The dance movement comes from deep within and in the moment. By yourself in a room full of dancing, whirling, cavorting people….or in direct energetic contact with one or more others. It is like finding out who you are within each breath of limb, organ, skin, and fluids. It is taking the time to explore what is desiring and demanding to emerge next…while taking the risk of fully inhabiting that movement, sound, dance, emotion, relationship with self and/or other.
I have written here before that women too often apologize for everything, even their very existence. My remedy for this has been to suggest that every time a woman wants to say ” I’m sorry” (though there are truly times when that is appropriate) she should instead say “I’m so sexy!” – or at least think it…and stop the apologies in their tracks, never to emerge unconsciously again!
The poem below embodies all of what I am speaking to here and as I slip a piece of luscious dark chocolate into my mouth I say to you……We HAVE come to be danced! Let us not forget that for even one single moment! See you on the dance floor of life!!
Consciousness expresses itself through creation. This world we live in is the dance of the Creator. Dancers come and go in the twinkling of an eye but the dance lives on. On many an occasion when I am dancing, I have felt touched by something sacred. In those moments, I felt my spirit soar and become one with everything that exists. I become the stars and the moon. I become the lover and the beloved. I become the victor and the vanquished. I become the master and the slave. I become the singer and the song. I become the knower and the known. I keep on dancing and then, it is the eternal dance of creation. The Creator and the creation merge into one wholeness of joy. I keep on dancing — until there is only … the dance. ~Michael Jackson
I was rather amazed by this quote by Michael Jackson. Amazed because it captures so perfectly what dance and movement is to me in my life….and which I definitely do not do enough of !
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to wake up and dance into the beginning of your day, even for just a few minutes? We often forget in our very complex, over stimulated, busy lives that there is a simple remedy to remind us of these magnificent bodies that we inhabit. Not only a reminder, but a “wake up call” to breathe deeply and to move in a way that brings us back home to the moment – to our aliveness!
“17 seconds of focused pleasurable visualization is stronger than 2000 hours of working to obtain a goal.” – Esther Hicks
What if you combine words, breath, and visualization with movement to start your day? What if you shimmied into that beautiful body of yours (it is the only one you will ever have!) and felt that feminine power express and energize. Wonder what the day would be like starting out that way??
Sometime this week I invite you to start your day with your favorite music and dance your way into your day….or, try out Tonya Freeman’s Shift to Bliss: Dancing Meditations and Visualizations. By clicking on this link you can listen to some of her tracks and see if they fit for this earthy morning ritual.
“In ancient times, woman as Priestess, as Goddess, danced the Sacred Dance in the beauty of her nakedness. She danced in the temples, on the hills, in the valley, by the ocean, in caves and in the desert. The Sacred Dancer connected herself to the entire universe. She was one with all things. The dance was not only a way of telling the story of life it was a celebration of life itself. Uni-Verse. One Song. The Song of Love. Women knew the magic and the healing power of the Sacred Dance. They knew that by dancing together and for one another that they were doing the work of the Great Mother Goddess. They enjoyed a direct connection to the Divine Femi9 Energy. “
– Diva Mama Tonya
I say, we don’t dance and move enough from our sense-filled- self in our Western culture. It is about time we started to – daily!!
The Dance does live on…… and is a creation from our own uniqueness and creativity – a prayer for the day. Shake it up, clear it out, strut your stuff, and…..get to movin sistah!
There is a extremely contracted template for aging in our Western culture…and I, for one, am here to expand and redefine it – or possibly not to define it at all, but to say let us live our days/our years in a celebratory way! After all, if we weren’t aging, we would be dead!
When I come across examples of women who are living their passion well into their later years, I pay attention. These women are inspirations for us. They awaken possibility within our hearts, minds and bodies, and remind us that each moment of this precious life is here for exploring and living with all the passion we can possibly express and create. These possibilities are actually unlimited.
There is a lot of “press” these days about “letting go” of the constructs and habitual patterns that have kept us locked into an oftentimes “deadly” repetitive replay of a safe way of living, while resisting the changes that are mounting around us and the whispers of our heart and soul that beckon us to “please come out and play!” Sometimes this work seems daunting and we struggle with the back and forth between an assumed “safety” (most often conjured up by our rational minds) – and heart and soul freedom. In fact this is my passage and that of many others right now.
What if it was easier? What if we just merely accepted that we hold within us the Divine spark already and that we were meant to be full expressions of our deepest creative, sensual, and soulful natures. In that case all we would need to do is say YES! This is a YES! with no rational mind limitations. This is a YES! that says I am deeply interconnected and an important part of the whole. This is a YES! that says NOW is my time….and the next moment, and the next, and the next. The path may be strewn with unusual and sometimes challenging experiences…but they all can be seen and accepted as an invitation to live and breathe with the fullest expression that we are capable of in the moment.
Growing up I loved to watch the passion and art of dancing, and still love it…as well as dancing myself whenever I can. A couple of years ago now I took Cuban Salsa lessons for a year and even though I found myself going the wrong direction in the rueda (circle) at times under the Spanish verbal and hand sign direction of the teacher – my body, heart and soul sang with pleasure in every step and shake of my body.
When this video came to me I knew that it must be shared with you. Here is Sarah “Paddy” Jones, a 75 year old British lady who is still living her passion! Wonder if you will shed tears as I did witnessing her come to radical aliveness on stage??! Is this how alive you would like to be at this age – any age?? I know that I would!!!! If not NOW, when???
The video below is misnamed on top, so please disregard the title of Ginger Rogers who died when she was 83. Sarah “Paddy” Jones is British and living in Spain. She took up dancing 5 years ago after the death of her husband. She has seven grandchildren.
This second video is less performance oriented and more into the heart and soul of “Paddy”!
“In a world where everything is sexualized instead of humanized, I worry that we’ve lost touch with the sweet eroticism in life. To me, being human, life itself is erotic. It’s a being alive to the magical, pulsating, ecstatic body and universe we live and experience through. It’s a way of being in the world in a sensory and tactile way, leading and relating to others with your energy awareness and senses.
…in its highest sense, our sexuality is a gateway to spirit, to the place where humanity meets divinity, and as such it is sacred. It offers us a readily available opportunity to experience the ecstatic union we all long for. If… that is… we dare surrender so deeply to the erotic dance, with ourselves, with each other.”
Starting off with this quote sets the stage for the focus of this post, as the Divine Feminine is coming full force into our awareness across the globe. There is a reason for that. Our planet needs us to re-balance – and quickly! Yet, what exactly is the Divine Feminine or the Feminine Principle to you?
For women and men this is where humanity meets Divinity – the ecstatic union of the
interconnection that plays out constantly – seen and unseen, felt and not felt. It is about collaboration, connection, listening, and flow. There is an immense intelligence in life that is begging us to pay attention. It can be seen and felt all around us if we will only pay attention. A friend of mine in the UK found this in nature on one of his daily walks. This spiral serpent encased in ice can also be seen as this erotic dance that is being played out in a very elemental way.
Bringing the Shakti energy back to the drawing table of life in our present time means that each of us as women (and men) are being invited to step up to the plate of our lives, heal whatever needs healing within ourselves, and be sensuously present to life as an “erotic sacred dance”.
Someone who invited this dance to play out in her life was Georgia O’Keefe, and it wasn’t always an easy path for her to take. Her statement, “I have been absolutely terrified my entire life, and I have never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do”, challenges us to live our lives from the inner urgings, that if not heeded leave us living half of a life instead of the whole one we were meant to play out.
As women, when we walk into a room, into a new situation, or launch an innovative creation we can embody this energy by being fully in our belly – our pelvis – and of course do this with grounded passionate presence. This sensory way of being in the deepest feminine parts of ourselves creates an opportunity to confidently stride into the moments of our lives because we courageously trust that we will always have the wholeness of who we are – and no one can take that away from us.
When we understand that we no longer need to puff up our chests and be “strong” in a masculine energy sort of way, make prose more important than poetic, or come from logic and rational left brained thinking to be taken seriously….. leaving our deepest feminine parts behind on the shelf in a dark room….then we will be heard, seen, and acknowledged for the gifts that we bring – and the Earth that gives us life will breathe a huge sigh of relief!
Shiva/Shakti
It is the Divine erotic dance between masculine and feminine energy inside and outside each of us (we are literally surrounded by it!) that keeps life juicy, creative, and leads to a gateway of embodied sensual living from body, mind, heart and soul.
Discover the pathways of erotic living this week that you are already embodying, or can surrender into more, and ignite in your body, heart and soul. Make love to life….your life!
on How to Increase your Personal Presence, Financial Flow, and Make a Greater Impact on those around you with the Power of your “Feminine.”. This is #2 in a series of 4 – Great!
There is no ’supposed to be’ in bodies. The question is not size of shape or years of age, or even having two of everything, for some do not. But the wild issue is, does this body feel, does it have right connection to pleasure, to heart, to soul, to the wild? Does it have happiness, joy? Can it in its own way move, dance, jiggle, sway, thrust? Nothing else matters. ~ Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes
So much attention has been put on women’s bodies and whether they are “right” or not. The fall out from that, which has come from our culture, and to which women have bought into, is that almost no woman is happy with the way that she looks.
Let’s face it, aging is wonderful because it means that we are still here to enjoy life’s moments – but there are changes that come with that naturally and always! I love Clarissa Pinkola Estes quote above because it reminds us as women that we have these wonderful feminine bodies to enjoy, create life with, have pleasure within, love with, move down our path with, and “move, dance, sway, jiggle, and thrust” into the wildness of our lives.
Here is a video that made me smile – and start moving and swaying myself. The singer is obviously having a marvelous time in her body with multiple colors adorning it…. and singing her heart out. I challenge you to stay still on this one and not smile at least once!
Look at every path closely and deliberately, then ask ourselves this crucial question: Does this path have a heart? If it does, then the path is good. If it doesn’t, it is of no use. – Carlos Castaneda
Here is the cast for this post, for without each one this awareness would not have been birthed:
Shakti-Samtosha (Peace-Contentment) yoga practice
Carl, representing Health and Wellness coaching
Jan, who is unraveling the grief around the death of her beloved husband after many years of illness
Ron, who is facing an activation of the cancer that he has been living with for the past year
Adam, who is caught in his own world of mental illness, but does not know it
Lea and her personal story on returning to a state of ease
Unexpected income – who shall henceforth be named “Wealth”
Now that the stage is set, the story can be told. Have you been told that in order to succeed, or get unstuck you need to leap off of the cliff, precipice or ledge and trust that you will fly? Well I have, and in fact guided others in this free flight as well. In fact I have done it many times in my life – leaping, flying, and sometimes falling on my face – with great lessons to be learned. The question is – are you leaping away or towards yourself?
What if it is true that all the events in our life are personally orchestrated by us in order to come “home” …and without each event, each person, each experience we would not understand why we are here, and certainly wouldn’t be able to make those choices that serve our highest well being, and that of everyone and everything we touch.
This awareness may not help when we are in the midst of unbearable grief, full on fear for our lives, intense worry about financial well being, distorted thinking and a feeling of utter abandonment, or uncertainty about what our next step will be.
Yet, it is here in this rich territory of choice and head-on life that we find that it may not be as dramatic as jumping off of a cliff, but instead, like a powerful dream of mine several years ago. A realization that as you are standing on the edge trying to think your way down to “safety” or the next leap – a path suddenly appears as you turn your head to look at what is around you. A path that is uniquely yours and leads in an easeful and clear (although sometimes not seeming to) way to your next destination. All you have to do is listen, feel, and start walking…
So, here is the story. There is an older woman that has done many things in her life that she feels good about. She has given birth to and nurtured 3 boys into manhood; spent many, many years in the healing professions bringing people into embodiment through touch, breath, energy, listening, guiding, and love; has created 3 businesses on her own and enjoyed the creative process of each one; spent a total of 21 years in living relationships with men who taught her a great deal; owned houses; taught yoga; traveled to far away places, had adventures, and learned from shamans and healers; called dolphins to her in the wilds of the ocean; continues to act on her passion for writing; and adores the creative and uninhibited joy of dance and art.
This woman feels she is now at a crossroads – a pivotal point. Many options and possibilities are open to her. Does she start another business in health and wellness coaching, join a community of evolutionary visionaries, write her book, or stay where she is which is out-of-alignment with who she knows she is and what she has to bring?
In this only two day journey, the beginning is marked by a yoga practice focused on peace and contentment. A yoga practice that she has put on the shelf for a period of time. Falling into her body, breath, and surrendering her tight and contracted body she cries. The waking up has begun.
She receives an e-mail from one of her readers, Jan, that shares the fragile place she finds herself in the aftermath of her husbands death, and the knowing that she did everything she could to help him. The reader reports that she can hardly find her way to reach out to what she may need at this time. This honesty touches this woman reminding her that everyone is doing the best they can with what they have – including her, and that sometimes it is not right timing to reach out – that each person’s journey can only be chosen by them.
This is emphasized even more by her brother Rons quest for health and life in his journey with cancer, having to deal with some very difficult treatment choices – and her son Adams mental illness that has him locked within his own mind unable to accept the fact, or even be aware, that he needs loving assistance to come back to life – his life.
Waves of energy hit her and clarity begins to filter through. There doesn’t have to be a leap, free fall, or soaring as the case may be. It isn’t fear or uncertainty that make the decision not to pursue the health and wellness coaching with the large training company. An e-mail is written to Carl, the director of marketing. She now knows that it is alignment with beauty, peace, essential nature, and ease that has been calling for days now – not the path to growing yet another business, no matter how qualified she is.
On the second day of this awakening a friend Lea (www.ReplenishYourSoul.com) writes of her journey back towards ease in her life, having seen the effects of struggle and pushing patterns in body, mind and relationship over this last year. Just a gentle walk to another location inside that says here – here is where you are to be. Trust and honor what you know.
Guidance is coming in many forms now as the waking up – speeds up. A letter arrives in the P.O. box which says in the window – Pay To The Order Of – with her name on it. Unexpected income. Flow of Wealth. The message – honor your path and the flow returns.
Not making a choice because it might be “good for her to take yet another leap” – but acknowledging and honoring the place inside that says TRUST – it will be shown to you. There are many ways to return to and know your path. Listen in to your bodies messages. Just turn your head and start walking. Leaps are sometimes necessary, but always optional…
Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence. – Henry David Thoreau
What if there was nothing in the way of you expressing exactly what you wanted to in the moment. Have you ever thought of that? A multitude of examples have placed themselves in my path this week…so here are a couple of them.
I adore dancing in most all of it’s forms for to me it sets the body free to explore the boundaries of timing, space, limitations (or not!) and freedom of expression in our finite bodies expressing from an infinite source. Besides that it can be fun! For all of those non-dancers out there, do not despair…this video may entice you to wiggle just a little. Just try to stay still! I can see those toes moving! For all of you dancers out there I am certain this will delight you…and I wish I had a video cam focused on you right now as I just know that you are movin and groovin – footloose!
Thank you to Cheryl Richardson’s weekly newsletter for this video. I often find bits of wisdom from her newsletters and would recommend that you sign up to receive it. Just click here: www.cherylrichardson.com to subscribe and go to “Newsletter”.
Columbia River Gorge
The Columbia Gorge in Oregon is breathtaking (or should I say breath giving) especially this time of year in the transition season of Fall soon to come. I am fortunate to be able to be in the heart of it within a couple of hours, and this past weekend found me there.
Being the wind surfing capitol of the world, Hood River is a spectacular place to have the experience of sailing along the water propelled by the ever present wind – or to merely watch from on shore and vicariously enjoy this “cutting loose” sport.
This is the sport
After being taken captive by a beautiful older woman (looking to be in her 70’s!) who was busily instructing a man about 20 years younger than her on “how to do it”, I decided that this was an experience that I just had to try (next season mind you). Usually going up to people to connect with them I held back this time being content to watch this wildly free woman in action. She was the “queen bee” of this particular area and seemed to have admirers everywhere….and what was she doing? She was expressing every bit of herself and seemed to be savoring every moment of it. She delighted and entranced me – a real life WildlyFreeWoman cutting loose.
And...this is the woman, earrings and all!
So…ask yourself this question one more time. What if there was nothing in the way of you expressing yourself exactly the way you want in the moment. Julia Cameron has you finish this sentence using your imagination: If the best of all possible worlds were reality…….
Examples:
*My writing would be published and have an appreciative global readership
*I would be dancing with indigenous people all over the world
*I would have a home in Bali where I would spend part of my time each year
Now take this a step further and begin to make the best a reality by doing things a little bit differently every day. Have fun!! Cut Loose!
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