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Dance Temple Moments: The Primal Wisdom of Body
Posted on: Nov 25, 2016 @ 10:00 Posted in: Everyday Magic, Path Basics, Pathwork
The air is hot and moist, charged with the moving forms of fifty plus fully-embodied, dancing human-creatures. I remove my glasses; with my compromised vision, the outer world becomes a soft-edged, fluid sensuality woven of sound, scent, energy and the minutia of muscle, bone, breath and sweat.
This is Dance Temple, a place of free-form, authentic movement. Our brilliant, inspired priestess-facilitators lightly guide our process, setting our shared focus and helping us to inhabit this moment together. The rules are simple: move however you want, don’t talk on the dance floor, and respect yourself and each other.
What is deep, deep inside rises to the surface and speaks in the spiraling of my spine, the rotating of my shoulder blades, the gyrating of my hips, the reaching and extension of my limbs, and the fluttering of my fingers. I am liquid me, joyfully, ecstatically, powerfully present and free.
I cannot speak for the inner process of others, but what I witness around me are exquisitely beautiful people, of different ages, shapes, colors and gender options, totally giving themselves over to the music and the moment. This is diversity in motion — a kaleidoscope of swaying, bopping, twirling, grooving bodies, each with a dance as unique as their fingerprints.
I cannot tell you how or why, just that I feel an exquisite rightness inside of me and in our togetherness, a kind of collective homecoming within our moving, inspired flesh. Whatever emerges from this fusion is pure love, pure joy and pure magic, the very stuff that can heal our souls and transform our world.
We need more Dance Temple moments in our lives, where we stop talking, start grooving and let our body do its unique, delicious thing, speaking in its sensate language of movement and dance. Our bodies know what we need to heal, grow and flourish. Our bodies know how to be with other bodies in a place of self-expression and respect. Our bodies know how to cultivate joy, make love and weave beauty.
Maybe, just maybe, the thing that can change our world is as simple as embracing the dance temple which is our own sacred body, with its unique form of expressive movement and profound range of sensate knowing. Alone and with our dancing tribe, we can move and groove, waking and shaking things up, and finding our way home together.
Related Post: The Dance Temple Habit: An Exercise in Full-Bodied Dance Magic
Photo Credit: Christopher Campbell on Unsplash
Tale of the Lost Daughter: The Spell of Dance
Posted on: Nov 23, 2016 @ 10:00 Posted in: From the Tale
Photo Credit: William Randles on Unsplash
Tale of the Lost Daughter: Tale of the Shining
Posted on: Nov 16, 2016 @ 10:00 Posted in: From the Tale
Tale of the Lost Daughter: The Lost Daughter
Posted on: Nov 9, 2016 @ 10:00 Posted in: From the Tale
A Modern Goddess Tale: From Lost Daughter to Goddess Queen
Posted on: Nov 7, 2016 @ 10:00 Posted in: Goddess
Two dreams, thirty years apart — a modern Goddess tale for these times.
I’m in my mid-twenties, with a business degree and a promising career in a blue chip company. My desires are purely materialistic — I want power and success in a man’s world. I don’t know any better, and I’ve no idea how immensely unhappy I am.
I have a dream that I don’t remember until many years later, yet my life is changed forever.
It’s a Winter Solstice eve, in the darkest hours of the night. Outside my apartment window, the world nestles down under a crystalline blanket of fresh-fallen snow. I dream of a silver shining path, as if hewn of moonlight, that leads me down, down, down to Hecate’s realm — the Goddess who is the Mistress of the crossroads, and guardian of our human destiny.
Deep in the belly of the Earth, Hecate directs me to Her magic cauldron and shows me the raw, naked truth of my life story — the beauty and the wounding — all that I’ve forgotten and denied, the very things I’ve been running hard from, and undreamed of possibilities sleeping just below the veneer of my waking reality.
Hecate gifts me with this crossroads moment, with my life laid bare before me, and asks me to choose how I will live for the rest of my days. I make a vow: to wake up, to remember, and to find my way home to my Self, my womanhood, and Her sacred ways.
By my choice, my destiny is woven.
Now, thirty years later, I’m lost no more. I’ve found my way home to my Self and the Goddess. I live nestled in the forest on a magical island with my beloved family and community, writing and teaching the life-changing ways of the Goddess that are now as natural to me as breathing.
I have another dream, within days of co-priestessing a community Samhain ritual to honor the beloved dead and the blessed newborn.