Home › Forum Online Discussion › Practice › Gabrielle Roth on What is the Dance?
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May 17, 2011 at 1:28 am #37338Michael WinnKeymaster
note: I play each week with an Ecstatic Dance Tribe in Asheville that is inspired by Gabrielle Roth’s 5 Rhythms model (basically Chinese 5 elements applied to movement). I consider it community Spontaneous Qigong.
What she describes in this article is a good start for describing what the Energy Body of a qigong adept could be. Although the form of any particular qigong style might feel more limiting than physical free-form dance, energetically I find qigong more freeing. The form gives the discipline, gently and inexorably “driving” (displacing?) the spontaneity into one’s Energy Body.
That is more difficult than surrendering to someone else’s music beat, but also more spiritually rewarding for me. I go to Sweat Your Prayers each week mostly for the community feeling of dancing together. And I felt I might eventually find a body-centered Lover there, which i recently did. Praise the Tao!
Grateful to Gabrielle for popularizing Body Movement as Spiritual Path.
🙂 MichaelBy Gabrielle Roth
Each of us is a moving center, a space of divine mystery. And though we spend most of our time on the surface in the daily details of ordinary existence, most us hunger to connect to this space within, to break through to bliss, to be swept away into something bigger than us.
As a young dancer, I made the transition from the world of steps and structures to the world of transformation and trance by exposure to live drumming. The beats, the patterns, the rhythms kept calling me deeper and deeper into my dance.
Being young, wild and free, it didn’t dawn on me that in order to go into deep ecstatic places, I would have to be willing to transform absolutely everything that got in my way. That included every form of inertia: the physical inertia of tight and stressed muscles; the emotional baggage of depressed, repressed feelings; the mental baggage of dogmas, attitudes and philosophies. In other words, I’d have to let it all go — everything.
At the time, I was teaching movement to tens of thousands of people and, in them, I began to witness my own body/spirit split. Between the head and feet of any given person is a billion miles of unexplored wilderness. I yearned to know what was going on in that wilderness, not only in me, but in everyone else as well.
And so, movement became both my medicine and my meditation. Having found and healed myself in its wild embrace, I became a mapmaker for others to follow, but not in my footsteps, in their own. Many of us are looking for a beat, something solid and rooted where we can take refuge and begin to explore the fluidity of being alive, to investigate why we often feel stuck, numb, spaced-out, tense, inert, and unable to stand up or sit down or unscramble the screens that reflect our collective insanity.
The question I ask myself and everyone else is, “Do you have the discipline to be a free spirit?” Can we be free of all that binds and bends us into a shape of consciousness that has nothing to do with who we are from moment to moment, from breath to breath?
Dance is the fastest, most direct route to the truth — not some big truth that belongs to everybody, but the get down and personal kind, the what’s-happening-in-me-right-now kind of truth. We dance to reclaim our brilliant ability to disappear in something bigger, something safe, a space without a critic or a judge or an analyst.
We dance to fall in love with the spirit in all things, to wipe out memory or transform it into moves that nobody else can make because they didn’t live it. We dance to hook up to the true genius lurking behind all the bullshit — to seek refuge in our originality and our power to reinvent ourselves; to shed the past, forget the future and fall into the moment feet first. Remember being fifteen, possessed by the beat, by the thrill of music pumping loud enough to drown out everything you’d ever known?
The beat is a lover that never disappoints and, like all lovers, it demands 100% surrender. It has the power to seduce moves we couldn’t dream. It grabs us by the belly, turns us inside out and leaves us abruptly begging for more. We love beats that move faster than we can think, beats that drive us ever deeper inside, that rock our worlds, break down walls and make us sweat our prayers. Prayer is moving. Prayer is offering our bones back to the dance. Prayer is letting go of everything that impedes our inner silence. God is the dance and the dance is the way to freedom and freedom is our holy work.
We dance to survive, and the beat offers a yellow brick road to make it through the chaos that is the tempo of our times. We dance to shed skins, tear off masks, crack molds, and experience the breakdown — the shattering of borders between body, heart and mind, between genders and generations, between nations and nomads. We are the transitional generation.
This is our dance.
May 21, 2011 at 3:35 am #37339Chris WreedeParticipantI think that “surrendering to someone else’s music beat” depends on how you look at it. You have a choice to dance or not and if you choose to do so, your movements belong to you. I think that is why people dance out of free will, because they enjoy contributing to the group qi field, and stop when they aren’t feeling it. Though, I agree that doing qigong or neidan is most enjoyable when listening to the spirit singing inside rather than outside.
On that note, I just wanted to mention this:
I know there is much discussion in esoteric circles about the worlds origin of people, their degree of ancientness (Michael, have you published that book yet?), which star system they came from etc. But I still find it ineteresting that the !Kung San of what is now Botswana, thought by modern science to be the worlds oldest ancestors (and interestingly with the most Asian characteristics of all Africans) have a very sophisticated neidan system centered around a group activity of sacred dance.
They sometimes would hold all night events where people dance in concentric rings: a circle of dancers rhythmically pounding the earth around people sitting around a fire singing (fire and water!), of which certain songs ignite the qi body in the dancers, sending out boiling energy from the lower dan tien that allows them to climb up into the stars, talk with the greater and lesser god as well as deceased ancestors, see objects of illness in their fellow people and pull it out, turn into lions, and travel great distances in the blink of an eye. Likely that this tradition is fading (or already gone) with the disappearance of traditional life. If you ever get the chance to hear recordings of these healing dances, the music is extremely high vibration, almost unearthly, or inner-earthly. Very cool.
Also interesting that there is not more discussion about it in spiritual circles. I guess it is so rooted in the communal activity that it cannot be reproduced elsewhere like individual practice of neidan can.
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