Have you ever heard your heart beat its passion in your belly?
Have you felt the kindness of the breeze caressing your skin?
Have you ever revered the land you walk upon?
Have you met the unconditional love of the ocean as you float?
All aspects of the same unfathomable force, that beats your heart, creates and renews, grows, divides, multiplies, breathes, folds and unfolds, stretches and contracts…dances its jig of Life inside you, interconnected with all that surrounds you and beyond, unbeknownst to your conscious self.
I heard my gut echo the passionate beat of my heart a few days ago during a beautiful dancing ceremony called the Winter Dream Dance.
Itself a dream manifested by two wonderfully inspiring co-creators, Susannah and Ya’Acov Darling Khan, the founders of the Devon-based School of Movement Medicine, this 48 hour dance journey explores and deepens our connection with oneself, another, community, ancestors and Spirit.
As if replicating and reflecting another multidimensional holding, we all became at once holders and held, the weavers of a tapestry that grew and interlaced its own threads into a majestic and delightfully diverse canvas.
Like in a biodynamic craniosacral session as the fragments gradually converge and echo one another harmoniously while holding others that need more time, protection, releasing before joining the whole.
When the whole emerges, it is as if the space holder disappears into pure surrender, being held by forces and fields beyond one's understanding.
From a war-torn Guernica-like scape to a whole person, organisms as we dive deeper, connecting with the health that sustains and underlies all, connecting with the ‘unbroken self’, enlivening, re-inhabiting and adjusting, balancing to become interconnected parts of this exquisite universal Life dance.
I can sense this awakening, a concomitant rising and deepening when holding the field and contacting the parts that need support during a biodynamic craniosacral session.
The inter-relating that takes place tells of a similarly gradual journey towards the whole, the unfettered and powerful presence of a human being supported and nourished by the Breath of Life.
Ya’Acov and Susannah speak of the indigenous meaning for prayer: “to be in relation with” and refer to the phrase “to own our territory” which means to care for.
Contrary to the western social and cultural paradigm, we do not function at our best as individuals separated from the whole. Learning to pray, to be in relation with is walking the path towards wholeness, towards 'owning our territory" and ultimately caring for all that sustains our beings into existence on planet Earth.
We are but one feather in the magnificent peacock’s wheel.
We are made of the same elements and life forces that breathe the Earth and the cosmos.
As the first spark of life ignites us into being, the initial Life-giving primal streak, the notochord rises that lays the path for our spine to shape into form, this amazing axis, aerial, antennae…around which we spin, just like planet Earth.
David Abram talks about a “dynamic alliance between an animal and the animate orb that gives it breath?” to relate the extraordinary migratory paths of salmon and sandhill cranes.
He adds: “Are not these cyclical pilgrimages—these huge, creaturely hejiras—also pulsations within the broad body of Earth? Are they not ways that divergent places or ecosystems communicate with one another, trading vital qualities essential to their continued flourishing?
(…)
This circulation, this systole and diastole, is one of the surest signs that this Earth is alive—a rhythmic pulse of silvery, glacier-fed brilliance pouring through various arteries into the wide body of the ocean, circulating and growing there, only to return by various veins to the beating heart of the forest, gravid with new life.” ( David Abram, Creaturely migrations on a breathing planet, Emergence magazine, https://emergencemagazine.org/story/creaturely-migrations-breathing-planet/)
As I listen to my heart beat in my belly while witnessing fellow dancers moving to the rhythms of the drums, all the possibilities are at play in the empty spaces: the threads between all, this sacred ‘alliance’, the fields that hold us all together, that allow the 'we' to emerge and then surrender to Source as our edges expand.
To feel at one with the vessel of our common soul.
To fall in total, utter and complete Love and let our lighter, unloaded beings beat in full concord with Mother Earth’s.
