Following a Calling

This is from a letter I wrote recently to a potential venue for holding gatherings or weekend events and I publish it here.


I am following a calling with dance – in that I am alive with the sharing of folk and circle dance as a community expression of shared humanity amidst an opening experience of oneness of being. This is always by invitation and never imposition. Dancers discover for themselves as they are willing.

This is something I have been involved with for many years along with co-organising Dance Camp East and running my own Mayflower Camps. The Camp scene has been (for me) a process of flowering, fruiting and apparent death into seed – yet much of what was opened within the community camp process remains altogether alive in me and is now growing within the larger world. This for me has been a ‘coming out’ and yet also a step by step process where I am accepting the way of willingness rather than the way of self-will. A guided way rather than an imposed vision.

In the dancing that I offer – we use songs and music from many lands – including contemporary songs of our own land and times – that have expression in dances that are shared in an intention to join. An experience of inclusion in a common inspiration.

One can approach such dances on the level of learning steps and applying them. But this is a liability of the mind which separates and thus sees all things separate. Of course as a teacher I communicate the dance movements – but I do so in relationship – in a spirit of welcome and trust – and use mime and music as well as verbal and mental mappings of step or pattern. This invites a greater participation that is itself an invitation to live from a different place than ‘thinker’ - such that the ‘what of it’ is an expression of the ‘way of it’.

The principle of dance is that of expression of spirit in and through form. The mind can short circuit this by mimicking the form as a presentation without connecting the spirit but this cuts out the source of inspiration and is essentially joyless – no matter how much effort or energy is applied or invested to the form.

We easily forget what joy is when we associate it with conditional self satisfactions. When we forget what it is we are, we become self involved in empty presentations. There is a need – I feel – for gentle ways of releasing the mentality by which we misidentify in ungrounded and unfulfilling behaviours of thought and intention.

Circle dancing is a form or structure that can be pitched at any level – fun, recreational, breaking the ice and allowing us to actually join in a simple movement. Such a willingness opens avenues of relationship that tend to be hidden from the normal modes of socially connecting – allowing a heartfelt sense of presence to rise in awareness.

We also dance meditational movements, as well as in the yearnings and prayers - or expressions of our spirit - that rise from suffering loss and limitation.

The music and dance express our humanity because music is originally a language of the heart – or Soul – the feeling dimension that is meaning. The presence of which in our day is our true wealth – for without it the world profits us not.

In this writing I have ventured to express verbally what I feel is inspired nonverbally in the dance as I share it. Sometimes some words may come in – in context of a particular moment – but the dancing is a connected attention that is more about a flow in being and not an explanation.

Living out from being – rather than living out from one’s own thinking – is the necessary path when we realize that our best thinking has only served to bring us to a sense of relationship with life in which we are to embody trust rather than exert control from an experience of distrust.

The times we live in are a call for help and there is need. But the help that meets the need must express a grounded sanity.
Whatever tasks we take on, we are all in need of ways to come together as well as ways to come to rest in our own being.

I feel that what I am growing is part of fulfilling such a desire and that it may resonate with your own vision.

In Peace

Brian