The Morning After

I awoke this morning with a new awareness of the dance of the mystical and the real...the sacred and the active. I heard the universal call that has been issued -- we are being called to dance the True Dance...to listen to the music of our bodies as sanctuaries of authenticity and to move to the rhythms of our Souls. As I look back on my experience at ecstatic dance last night I see how easy it would have been to dance someone else's dance to try to be in joy or in primacy or in rapture...how alluring the call to disregard the truth of my experience to be in someone else's can be. How can we stay in the Honest-to-God Truth of our Souls and source our movements, our decisions, our communications moment to moment from that Sacred Source of "WHATISNESS"?

This is the path of Ahimsa...of nonviolence that Yeshua has been speaking to me about since the onset of my 40 day advance and it requires that I/we develop a discipline of listening and of slowing the pace to my/our native beat (which, in my opinion is at least half the speed most of travel these days). This is what it means to move at the pace of guidance. To slow the adrenaline rushing pace of fear and frenzy to the endorphomatic wave of love and truth.

Last night was a new experience for me...the internal music of my body, my heart, my soul was what I danced to...even when the beat grew strong I stood and swayed my belly to the left and right in a very slow lullabye. To the eyes of a bystander they may have thought I was deaf or didn't understand the "point" of the dance. For me it was a dance of integrity...it was not big, it was not lyrical or poetic, it was not sexy or sensual...but it was real and true and in integrity with the swirl of the poles dancing inside me. And in that dance I was able to observe my compulsion to fuse with one or the other -- mystical or maddening, sacred or profane, present or disassociated, beautiful or ugly, powerful or weak, agressive or submissive and I made a new choice. I sat in the inbetween...in the swirl of it all...I became to present to the range of experiences, feelings, thoughts and sensations inside of me. This is progress for me...to be fully present in the inbetween, in the whatisness and to dance that dance with its inate beauty and tenderness.

I am aware of how freeing and simultaneously vulnerable it is to write like this...with a naked heart, revealing my naked experience...and this becomes the practice of the ecstatic heart...to be created each moment anew as I sit fully present in the inbetween.

In the beauty and the nakedness of the ecstatic heart,

Anakha