In the Flow:  dancing your way to inner peace

 

© 2002 Martha Perez

 

When I see a child dance, a deep sense of joy emerges from my own memories of dancing in total freedom, a time when I enthusiastically allowed my body, emotions, mind, and spirit to merge with music. When they dance in that playful and joyful space, I am simply amazed at the human body, its beauty, its grace—its miracle-like effect on the human soul. When I dance today as an adult, I try to engage in the music in much the same way a child does, without a care.  Pursuing this simple yearning has brought me in touch with practices where dance is an important aspect of life, one that builds healing relationships with ourselves and our communities. It wasn’t always this way, though.  A not-so-perfect body held me back.

The journey

It was 1990. I had been training in West African dance, Capoeira (an Afro-Brazilian martial art), and Caribbean percussion. I anticipated the workshop of Haitian Dance in Santa Fe with a teacher from the Bay Area and her drummers. I had just been to Cuba where I had been exposed to the dances of the Orisha (spirits). I had no idea that the rumbling of these rhythms would completely transform my life. To date, I do not remember a step from that workshop, yet this experience altered the entire course of my life. The significance of this experience continues to unfold—the meaning lying deep, wrapped in the layers of my being.

It has taken my adult life to reclaim that child-like freedom. To my amazement, the main obstruction was not the lack of natural ability. The biggest difficulty was letting go of the internalized negative self-image as my body features are not what is accepted as beautiful.

Dance affirms life

My negative self-image started a long time ago. I was an awkward and chubby child. Dance teachers immediately told me that I needed to lose weight, and even then, I would not have the ‘right’ proportions. Another expectation was to achieve abilities that go beyond what most of us can do. This training was focused on arduous routines. Soon, it was school and hard work. How did dance get so separated from life? Dance is for life!

I always loved to dance. As a child, I was crazy about music. Whenever I heard a song that I liked— no matter where— I would start dancing all out. Dance marks time and celebrates life—baptisms to weddings. Music wraps meaningful moments and the memories that make me who I am. Cha-cha-chas, mambos, boleros are the soundscapes of my memoirs. As a kid, I would grab my friends and show off on the ballroom floors the movements we learned in the family room.

Later, I tried to recreate this joy by taking dance classes. Though I learned much technique, I soon figured out that the dance school culture would not quench my thirst. Modern dance and jazz teachers were not looking for “old” or “fat” people like me—a twenty year-old adult. In the rigor and the competitiveness of dance school training something just got lost for me. Through college, my search continued for a dance form where my joy would be simply expressed.  At this early age, this thirst was temporarily relieved with popular and folk dance forms like belly-dance and samba-school carnival.

With great inner struggle, I honored my yearning. This soul-search led me to find a most precious treasure—self-love. It all bloomed as I learned to see myself as a dancer. This process took over 10 years.

Dancing to live music revealed a new layer in my body-self-relationship. Every time I heard the drums, I knew I was on my way to recover the buried child-dancer. The more joy I derived from the rhythms, the more I understood that I had in me a capacity to share this love and give it back to the musicians and other dancers,  Joy is so contagious! The music itself became an expression of love, a micro-cosmic reflection of one-ness. These ancient rhythms taught me to see my body in a sacred way. As a child, I knew this intuitively, but it took a lifetime to re-learn this.

Transcendent movement

The walk towards embracing myself as a sacred being started when I met a Sufi teacher who used dance as movement meditation. My dervish teacher saw movement as a way to focus a meditative state and saw music as a vehicle to commune with the cosmos. It was so excited to taste oneness in dance. My body became a sacred space—a new way to hold my being. The Sufi lesson was that movement enhances a sense of flow in our lives, and that music is the transport toward experiencing the one. This is the essence of whirling into emptiness and totality—a taste of the cosmos. In this dance, the external and the visual is second stage to the inner movement. In its flow, mind, emotion, body, and spirit become integrated. A sacred presence develops and spiritual growth becomes a quiet aspect of this practice. By simply learning to be quiet in this quiet space, whirling gradually detaches ourselves from self-centeredness!

Dance has helped transmute the four layers of my being--the physical, the emotional, the mental, and the spiritual. On the physical, it creates a space of stillness and clarity, a harmonious foundation to the other layers of being. Emotionally, dance supports the pragmatic essence of self-acceptance, surrender to grace and beauty, detachment, and lightness. My emotions are lighter, which has strengthened my physical health. The lightening of the denser emotional and physical planes has an effect on the mental plane. My thoughts now tend to be harmonious and I have experienced a greater sense of peace. All this thanks to breath, movement, and dance.

Dance has integrated the flow of my physical, emotional, and mental processes into spiritual synergy. Beholding oneness, I see myself as part of a totality and this gives me a profound sense of peace and acceptance of who I am. This is all recognizably love--the force that binds all beings. Dance and music teach to no longer harbor separation. Feeling loved in this way has manifested more compassionate and kinder ways to hold myself, my loved ones, and my students. Dance is a wise teacher.

Dance as community

“Heal yourself and you will heal the world,” said my dervish teacher.  A step at a time, my relationships became kinder and more loving ones. With this renewed self-orientation came a new community. The great gift –a deepening of my relationships with others, a healing one. When I set out in pursuit of this yearning, I had no idea that I would also find so much happiness. I no longer hold shame toward my body when I share my joy through this vehicle—just like a child I was once. 

With the years, dance helped me detach from self-centeredness. I felt  for the first time the web of life around me, through the spatial intelligence of dance, I realized that who I am  exists in relationship to everything else. Stillness brought forth my true presence. With every class I feel I am letting go of that which is not me. Every step moves me closer toward becoming and loving my true self.

Movers and shakers of the world unite!

It makes so much sense that dance is such an important aspect of ritual and healing earth-based traditions. Dance systems like the Sufi, Chinese, Native American Indian, Buddhist, Hindu, and African (among a few) cultivate this connection to the “all that is.”  This envisioning of our body-maps and worldview supports communities that celebrate life. Sacred rhythms, chants, music, and all the energies enhance this space of love.[1]  A community is elevated when it comes together to celebrate one-ness—dancing our love is an essential aspect of this aperture. The gift is healing for individuals and their communities in turn.

The teachings of the whirling were only the beginning. Later, I discovered the complex rhythms of African traditions in the Americas, and the sophisticated study of Chi-Gong.

The door opened to the privilege of working with extraordinary teachers in New York and the Bay Area, and to travels to Cuba and Haiti to further my understanding of these traditional healing systems.

My teachers have touched me in profound ways. Among many fun remembrances, one comes to mind:  Pierre Cheriza, a master drummer born in Port-au-Prince; a man of fiery and effusive eyes to whom I owe the realization of the beauty in human creative energy. One class, we were unable to perform a rhythm. Frustrated, he stopped the lesson, paused, and sighed. Then he yelled, “Look at your hands!” and exclaimed, “That is the mystery ... the miracle!” As I looked at my hands, it took several seconds to realize how extraordinary his guidance was. It has taken me a decade to cultivate this mindfulness in everything I do. Pierre was seeding in us the ability to see sacredness in ordinary things; invisible to others, but not to a drummer.

It took time to digest dance in its traditional healing context. Over time, I came to realize the material that I was working with (dances of Haitian Vodoun) was having unforeseen beneficial effects on my students. I then realized that I was forging a space for healing, a dance community, and a powerful circle to support the healing of its members.

In the early 90s, affirmations of this came to light. A friend taught me just how powerful this can be. Joanne, a massage therapist who came regularly to dance class approached me and asked if she could trade dance classes for massages. I gladly accepted. In one session, she told me that she had been struggling with cancer for a year; that she had a cyst that grew to close to five pounds. It took a year to find a doctor who would just take out the cyst. Through this fearful time, she came to dance devotedly. Dance helped her “move life” into her womb-space. It also helped her keep the faith, to stay in touch with her body, and not give up. She said that non-verbal connection to her body inspired her courage to cope. Joanne’s story made me reflect. I realized I had to re-conceive my teaching for dance as a vehicle to reclaim the sacredness in our lives—lost in my Western translation of this tradition as I adapted it to our worldview.

Ethnic art-forms support alternative ways to understand our selves in relationship to our communities. Stories of teachers like Pierre and students like Joanne demand we ponder on the mysterious beauty of our bodies.

It seems that the most familiar aspect of our self is our body. It is the vessel of our being on this earth. Dance is a path to know ourselves.

I have witnessed great shifts in my students toward grace and relaxation in their lives as they work through the dances of the sacred pantheon of African deities. Love, air, fire, earth, water... archetypal dances and sacred rhythms have been passed through oral tradition from Africa on to the Americas. As students emulate and embody these forces, their being transcends their self.

In these moments our bodies reveal the mystery of our beings. Joseph Campbell called this the inner reach. In the midst of these ancient rhythms, the dancer reaches inward into the silence of the soul. Enraptured, his/her capacity to engage in multi-layered and complex movements expands perception onto a holistic plane aided by the ritual music. It is a moving experience to observe others surrender to their sacredness. Not only have I found joy, but I have built a community of healing around dance. I am so grateful.

Communities of healing

Movement, meditation, and dance serve to slow us down and cultivate a sense of stillness. These are ways to recover a sense of wholeness in a world that compels us to move at an increasingly faster pace, like cars in a race without end.

The sense of the sacred is disappearing from our communities. The secular has transformed the world around us. The modern scientific ethos has slowly supplanted a mystical attunement to the earth that our ancestors once embodied.

To live life fully is the purpose of human existence.[2] Jung sees that in the cycle of death and rebirth, the human life is a vehicle to become more complete, or to become free of all “illusion of genesis and decay.”[3] In this sense, life is a search. We seek out our inner truth as we move through time. The truth of dance is that we can taste one-ness through our bodies. But participation in communities of healing is not a privilege of a few. Dance is for everyone.

Take a chance

It is likely that there are teachers around you who practice movement meditation, martial arts, or ethnic dance forms that can reveal to you a new aspect of your self. If you feel a profound love for music or movement, all you have to do is look in the daily paper for a teacher who will inspire the first step into what could be a journey toward awakening. As Jones puts it, “...take a chance to live vibrantly.”