A bit about me and dance and the journey of awakening

I came to circle dance in the late 80's when a friend sent me a flyer for a dance weekend. I'd been involved in spiritual search, which had fruited such that I no longer felt to be seeking in private, but growing by sharing from a willingness to join. I didn't know what this dancing was - but felt it had a spiritual aspect - and that we could go as a family.
I couldn't dance - a helpless grin on discoordinated spaghetti legs! But the atmospheric was tangibly open and inclusive - and curiously from the outset- I 'knew' something was offerered me to share through. A path and a tool. A song at the time summed it up: “From you I receive, to you I give, together we share, by this we live”. Yet the dance itself didn't need even such few words to be potent in opening the heart.

I use the word heart here simply as our truth sense. Living with and from the heart is closer to the life of us - though in opening we also uncover the 'human conditionings' that tend to self-protection and denial of life rather than its giving and living. Grounded guidance is found within the music and the flow of our present - yet as long as there is an attempt to control from a mentality of self protection, this will not be felt or recognised. 'Knowing ourself' is not a collecting of data for developing a new self presentation - but simply growing a capacity for trust based on self honesty. Trust is the bedrock on which all sanity rests and it is not a matter of thinking or analyzing so much as feeling our way. Safety, is an inside job.

Immediately after the weekend, I saw on tv some Arab guerillas dancing preparing to fight, and Hitler youth folk dancing. I saw joined dancing carries an invitation or expectation to join a form - which may not mean what it presents itself as - and a response - which is the faith and intention of those who respond. Dance is a tool or a vehicle that serves the purpose for which we employ it. This is a fundamental truth of mind: All things serve the purpose accorded them.

My early dancing years were an incredible time for me. A living path is like as to where the inspiration within is alive and life aligns with learning in joy and an unfoldment in grace. From the early 90s I shared the dance and hosted network events from my home as well as connecting at Easter meets and Dance Camp. I worked a self employed craft candlemaker with 4 children - and Emily - our second - was handicapped. The care of Emily and family life meant I had to cut back on my dancing path - though I kept local groups. This became a sense of stillborn child in my own heart - but I felt a duty of priority and we had very little support around us.

Camps came into my life as a deeper golden thread - again our whole family could participate, again I was sharing of a freedom to be. Joy is the light that the heart shines whenever it knows its freedom. I don't dance to get something - but to be restored to a presence of giving and receiving - and dancing is an extension of living. So I became involved in running camps and that became my creative path or focus. I didn't want circle dance to be the invitation of my camps - but to be a tool within a more inclusive invitation - that expressed a community spirit in our whole camp.

When I last wrote to Grapevine it was with news of loss of my firstborn, Elanor. That was 1995. My response to that event was to let all that I was, be brought to renewal at the most fundamental level, for I had squandered an enlightenment in trying to make 'my life' work. I'd got it back to front. But I let go of teaching dance outside camp in 2000 amidst a dichotomy of the atheist and the martyr; either feeling juke-boxed by my own liability to 'give without joy' - or overstretched in giving all when leaning out into raw new creativity using live song and music (often found in the moment with whoever joined in). They both seemed to cost too much - though in opposite ways. I had a few more years to come to the point of choosing life and letting the fears go - in which my livelihood was lost to cheap imports, my marriage failed, my camps were lost and I was 'in the wilderness'. But for all the dramas and the stuff of it, I have come to a calmer and clearer abiding in life and letting it abide in me. Allowing 'new wine into new bottles'. Releasing old thinking that essentially made the script by which I forgot what life is.

To 'come out' again in teaching dance and singing for dance was extremely hard because it involved opening up an area where I had lost trust. It wasn't an issue of ability - but of true intent and dedication. When the very heart's desire seems to die or fail it is a loss of communication. Self unworthyness is so deeply embedded in our minds that it has become normal currency. But it is joyless.
For the core of what I felt moved to stand in and support was and is joy. Survival to me is all about living in truth and spirit, which is less about mentality of fear and more about trusting to live this day well, to feel the music of the day and move with it in gratitude. The call to joy is innate but often hidden, and works in mysterious ways that I don't have to know about or control - but I do have to heed the call in my own heart to know the gift by which I live.

The songs and music I sing and play for dance are the song of the human heart in all its cadences of yearning and delight, and they are each exactly felt and brought present such as I can 'get out of the way' and let the song live through me. This is the same for dancers: Relax of the world we carry in our head and feel the quality of whatever this dance is - in its unique setting in this place in our lives - becoming simply present where the flow of experience is alive and no one needs to try and say it or grasp it. Be found in such a grace and all facets will be uncovered in due course and take their place in a dance like a tapestry of threads that are distinct and yet express relation to the whole.

It's deeply fun - a moving experience - it's joined up and alive! - and runs as deep as our willingness to receive - which cant be separated from a willingness to share. To hold a welcome in one's heart for others is not to be a doormat - but to be consciously receptive.

If something alive isn't made into a 'Solution' it can be free of the problem - and a wellspring of sanity for all who come to drink. For sure when we have regained a healed perspective we are encouraged and more able to discern practical solutions where before seemed unworkable and dispiriting.
When we grow trust within our own being - it shares out, our armourings become automatically obsolete and we can share life in depth and subtlety without a word.

When I look at the world and see so many who share so little - I am glad to realize that they have such discovery awaiting them. But for me I have come to see that giving is not the cost I cant afford to keep making - but is the only way to remember the love in which I am whole. And so whatever it seems to 'cost me' is not to be weighed and measured. But that I find a willingness to share the dance I love is true cause for gratitude.

(This was written as a draft for a Grapevine article but something else I wrote was used instead so I put it here).