Integral Dance

as a path to Grow Up, Wake up and Show up in your Life

Honouring the Dance in Every Form:

5 Rhythms, Ecstatic, Somatic, Conscious - It's all a dance, regardless of the label.

Dance is this language,  a universal  Soul language that awakens and transforms;

You are being danced, yes in this very moment - how thrilling

This moment is precious a most special dance, for it is the dance that the whole of reality is dancing, with nothing left out, that you and I are dancing, that is dancing as you and me. It is a vibrant, swirling, flowing, merging and emerging unity sometimes called “emptiness,”  as the motion and sweep of the dance “empties” us of the sense of only being separate beings, and fills and reaffirms us as the whole;  Every single thought, word, and gesture, no matter how seemingly ordinary and mundane, is recognised to be sacred.

Your body as an instrument of conscious creativity and the key to embodied

Growing up, Cleaning up, Showing Up and  Waking up

Developing awareness of the feeling body can have an extraordinary effect on our cluttered emotions as we begin to attune to parts of ourselves that we may have unconsciously suppressed or avoided for years; meditation and dance practice can be powerful tools for unpacking the various energetic constrictions that our bodies accumulate. By becoming aware of these feelings more fully, we bring them to the surface. Once at the surface, we practice attuning to them and meeting them gently with kindness and compassion, treating ourselves as if we are someone we deeply respect and care about;

Yet, even after learning that the body is the starting place for meditation, I have seen many dancers/mediators struggle with how to approach a more embodied or felt practice. We want to get out of our heads, but no matter how hard we try, we just don’t know how. Instead of reinforcing the body-mind habits that are keeping us stuck in more activated nervous-system patterns, we can gently turn toward the body with inner awareness, growing our ability to know (or feel) and meet our internal experience within the body. Inner awareness is both a quality that comes naturally to us when the body is healthy and one that we can develop through meditation. But just as muscles in the body can atrophy when left unused, our interrogative awareness can weaken. Fortunately, like other skills, we can pick up our practice and re-learn it.

Awareness is something we cultivate in steps. The practice starts in the body as we work with bringing awareness to our physical form and breath. By building our practice slowly over time, the conditioned body-mind has a chance to safely catch up. As our inner awareness develops in meditation, we become skilled at meeting ever subtler sensations within the body. As this capacity deepens, we notice their changing and transparent nature and are able to approach them with a more inquisitive and compassionate heart.

The radiant, vibrant, flowing, swirling, merging, and emerging unity of the awakening view; the dynamic motion empties us of that sense of separateness, fills and reaffirms us as a whole and fully functioning; together we are each in our own ways humanizing and embodying the paradox of being and becoming, the absolute and the relative, Viewed from the spiritual heart there is nothing but wholeness and seeing this inherent completeness in all, and the dance of evolving and becoming, this is experienced with the vastness of the open heart-mind without contradiction or preference;

Your body cannot lie to the one that is sensitive to seeing and willing to listen

 all dancers absorbed in the constant flow motion of the dance; as all borders that define our sense of separate self soften and fall away, we see there is no dance outside, no me, no you, only the dance; there are scenes during our life of youth, health, love, joy, and beauty, as well as ageing, sickness, sorrow, war, all a dance, and each of us dancers, embodies through our  unique expression the all-encompassing dance of life; please don't give this to your mind to work out intellectually, instead join in, truly feel what it is to be swept up in the dance;

Your body as an instrument of conscious creativity and key to embodied awakening

- we are the dance itself dancing through us; a universe of dancers that are being danced up, in the dance that the whole universe is dancing, all beings all events, all-time, move and merge in lively interaction and while often chaotic on the surface reveal a hidden unity below of fluid form and formless, and the sacredness in all things; where this dance has come from, where it is going is not as important as the dance that is truly realized, embodied, made real, right here, right now, in your next thought, no thought, action, interaction, holding on, letting go, in your next joyous leap, next grieving gesture, in beauty and brutality - the dance is always right underfoot, so just dance without thought of any other place;

"Ego force is the greatest resistance to your Life force"

Movement never lies, the body never lies, it is the barometer of our inner climate and constantly changing, one moment sunny the next in roll storm clouds, down comes the rain, outcomes the rainbow: this is life in all its mighty unpredictability and through free movement, we learn to trust the bodies expressions of what is passing through: Instead of running for shelter and wait for the storm to pass we learn to dance in the rain, dance with life as it is, not hang around the edge waiting for a rainbow to appear: we learn to surf the waves not be drowned by them.

 A caterpillar has the possibility to transform itself into a butterfly, yet till that occurs a caterpillar is a ground dweller: they can climb a tree, but are fundamentally limited to the horizontal domain: A butterfly can fly in the air its sense of reality totally different but a caterpillar can only imagine what it is like to fly, it cannot experience the truth of flight until it undergoes that transformation; To make this transformation you must be ready to transcend your old shape and embody the new order of being:

 When life force is free to move through you every moment is fresh, alive, bursting with hope, possibility, compassion, fear, courage, fury, stillness, tenderness, peace, potential, creativity, fierce grace, nothingness, and everything, all of life's rich flavours rise and fall in the day to day ebb and flow of movement, we fill and empty: an ocean of life flowing through us and we need to learn to direct the force of life moving toward and through us. If we are unable to let go and empty out of the day, the month, the year, our life, vitality becomes blocked, we feel overwhelmed, overstressed, overtired, over-stretch and our inner climate may become a little dull, grey, cloudy, drizzly, interspersed with a few light showers and not so many bright patches: For some, there is much turbulence, storm clouds with heavy thunder in the background and a few lightning bolts that jolt our sense of containment and shake us to the core:~ much of our vital force has fallen asleep under a mind-blanket of inertia, ambivalence, ambiguity, suppression, judgment, doubt, fear, cynism, mistrust, self-consciousness, and control:

As we mature from child to adult we form our sense of self around impressions, stories, and experiences. during our formative years, these stories become our structure of identity. This process of identity is very natural, and most part un-conciseness, yet it causes us to wander through life assuming that these core stories we tell ourselves are true without questioning, we believe falsehoods, inaccuracies, and lies to be who we are. I'm not good enough: I don't belong: I always get it wrong: I don't deserve: I'm not worthy: any story we tell, that describes who we think we are is simply not the truth,

We are not the shape of our mind

These falsehoods that we believe to be true create patterns in the physical body and our flesh and bones slowly over time become the manifest shape of our mind. Our shoulders lock, hand clench, joints stiffen, jaw tense, and our body grows from flexible child to lock-in or locked-out adult and we call it the ageing process yet in my experience it has nothing to do with age, it is mind-made: The mind sees everything below the neck as dangerous, emotion, love, sensuality, sexuality because it cannot be fully in control: though it has a very good attempt at working everything out analyzing love, processing life, dealing with feeling: Numbness became the antidote to life pains and numbness is where we stopped feeling and gave the mind full power to reign in our kingdom:

Ingrained in limited egoic consciousness are the stories that justify: "keeping everything button up, in control, predictable and secure, " the problem is life is not like that, life is chaos, sometimes unjust and unfair always unpredictable, unknown and insecure: So it's as if we have been hypnotized to go against the grain of how everything is naturally, organically moving, changing, shifting and we need a language that embodies this point of view and set the body free to regenerate again and again.

Dance is this language, a universal language that awakens and transforms

Relaxing our conceptual mind toward, letting go, getting it right, being the best, standing back from trying so hard something miraculous happens, we empty out and find a way through to the heart of understanding and everything quietens downs, lightens -up, the moment becomes infused by grace, stillness, immersed in the mystery, emerged into one:~ deeper spirit-filled questions come alive in the dance they invoke wisdom and help us discover what is real , what is true true,

5 Rhythms Dance