Your Body Remembers Its Power in Dance

Image by Nona Limmen

As the intense appetites and indulgences of summer begin to wane and the wheel of cycles turns once more, there comes a call again to our deeper life, to a descent down under the surface, and this call feels like a hunger written not only into the cyclical body of the Earth but also into the anatomy of the female body– into its clear disposition for cyclically coming inside, for going inward into the deeper cave, the fecund dark within us.

And if you, like me, are noticing that some part of your deep-body cycle has been craving the submission of the bright Yang into the moist, shady terrains of the Yin nature, it is

BECAUSE THERE ARE SENSES DEEPER THAN THE ONES WE VALUE

There are senses deeper than the senses that feed on taste and touch and smell alone. These are senses that rise and stir deep in the womb and the heart and the dark viscera of the body, like ocean waves– and they make longing. A longing to retreat into our deeper life, to turn down social engagement and open the eyes of our bodies into the dark of our interior, to perceive, to intuit, to dream and to feel our longing desires, to be whispered to by the old bones in the ground , to travel into that world that is not visible by the naked eye, and whose hunger is never satiated by wine and good dinner!

In that deeper world, we get to remember our true stories and true powers.

In that world, we get to remember the mythic woman that lives in each body.

In that world, you are Inanna having to strip the seven garments again and bear your soul for the crossing of another threshold. You are the witch who is perfecting her craft through discipline and commitment, pulling threads from the invisible air and making medicine for the world. Here, you are the Dancing Woman whose body needs to move with the rhythm of the forest, agile, sensual, present, more powerful than she knows. Here you meet yourself as the Muse who makes it known that she won’t let go of your soul– whether by ecstasy or by torture, she will see your assignment through, and there is no way around it...

BECAUSE IN YOUR BODY LIVES A MYTHIC WOMAN

In every woman's body lives a mythic woman who has never died. She has loved in hundreds of stories, sung naked by hundreds of streams and picked herbs in many a forest, and she has danced under the full moons of eternity by a thousand different names. She is touchable right here, under your own skin, in the sensuous, agile, moving expression of your body.

She shows up most vividly in our bodies and psyches when it’s time to remember another part of our mission– to commit to a new assignment larger than your fears, or to move through a small death so you can start a new passage. She works in each of us in unique ways, but at the end of the day her duty is one and the same: To preserve and pass on the legacy of what is never-to-be-lost of the feminine psyche–the wild and the instinctual, the earthly and the cyclical, the mysterious and the lunar, the untamed erotic.

When you dance, when we dance together, there she is: She breathes in your breath and moves in your hips and takes on your arms. I love witnessing her in you.

The most reliable way to wake up the mythic woman in our deeper body, and drink from her power is... to dance. Why?

BECAUSE YOUR BODY REMEMBERS ITS POWER IN DANCE

The natural erotic and mysterious force of the fem body has always been a dangerous thing for patriarchal societies and religions, and for centuries every measure was taken to downsize its nature– to dress a tigress in a nun’s robe before she could learn anything about who she was.

But the body always remembers its power in dance. In movement. In expression.

In a culture that raises us with countless false stories of the “perfect body”, the breakthrough comes when we finally discover that it’s the real, imperfect, deeper fem body that is the keeper of untamed wisdom and wise, mythic selfhood.

And when we have finally danced freely and wildly enough- only then the corset of the social body shatters and the deeper body is free!

When you follow the primal impulse of your body to move– free, undirected, without steps to follow, wild as a shewolf– your hips find a strange freedom, your arms charge the air, you fall into a rhythm larger than your own– a calibration to wind, ocean, earth, whale-song, and heartbeat. And this shared intelligence dances in you again!

You dance, possessed by your own power, and remember yourself as the soft-hearted well maiden, the dreaming grandmother, and the wild witch that live in your blood. You return to your deep body at last– fierce, full of feeling, glorious, undulating, breathing belly breaths to the womb, in perfect symphony with the breathing earth, and you discover the only perfect body: Your body. Capable of co-creating the rhythms of life, capable of mothering the world at large.

And as you move, as we move, deeper into our ancient, vital self, our dance brings healing in the tissue of people and Earth.

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