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Day 30
- Wesleyan University Press
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Dance is embodied spirit. One of the reasons you begin dancing, and continue throughout a lifetime, is that it offers a pathway to recognizing your true nature. Expanded consciousness is implied. You remain embedded in the daily activities of life, while transported beyond—accessing unknown realms. Various words are used to describe the broad territory of spiritual experience mapped by individuals, artists, and contemplative or religious communities throughout history. In English, these states might be described as accessing the deep self, being in the flow, connecting to essence, vital force, or soul. There’s a quality of specific attention and dedication involved; a different kind of awareness about what the body is—its limits and physical experience. It’s not what you look like; there’s a larger sense of self. Mystical dancing (from the Greek μυστικόϚ or mystikos, meaning “an initiate”) engages specific aspects of consciousness. In differing cultural contexts, these aspects might manifest as possession, trance, or shamanistic rites of passage. You can access these transformative realms from any place in the body, through any body system, but there’s an element of grace. You can invite spiritual dimensions, but can’t force their arrival. Inviting spirituality involves balancing the Apollonian and Dionysian within, engaging both clarity and passion. As you can sustain focused calm in the study and practice of dancing and dance making, you expand awareness . Cultivating active receptivity and continuity of attention in dancing helps penetrate the layers of body, mind, and breath. There’s also an ecstatic dimension to dancing, including access to the sublime. The juice is flowing . The chaos inherent in rigorous dancing and in the creative process can become the root of powerful presence, rather than a destructive force. You engage this quality in classes and performance, recognizing kinesthetic states through which you gain access and return. Infinite methods can be used to evoke transportive energies, including images, movement phrasing, gesture, sequencing, rhythms, and repetition. For some, this means being less prudent, invoking more heart and flow as the body becomes a container. The moment of performance heightens possibilities through formal ritualized elements of stage, light, and audience . Resonance with energetic phenomena both challenges and supports growth. You are more than you are on your own, accessing realms beyond personality. Cultivating flow through the central channel of the body is primal. In dance, you practice connecting to this evolutionary pathway—pelvic floor through to the soft palate—every time you enter a dance studio or stage. You rehearse sustained presence, invoking it in yourself and evoking it in Concerning the Spiritual The inevitable arrives out of nowhere . . . —Henk Brandt Day 30 Day 30: The Spiritual • 235 Concerning the Spiritual As an art major in college, I was required to write a thesis to accompany my paintings . Wassily Kandinsky’s book Concerning the Spiritual in Art, published in 1911, caught my attention in the dimly lit library. His paintings were among my favorites at the Art Institute of Chicago, our home museum. And I was inspired by his discussions about vibration causing “a purely spiritual effect, by which color touches the soul itself.” We shared affinity to place as well. After spending much of his life in Munich, Germany, Kandinsky moved to Paris to escape the Nazis during World War II. There he resided in Neuilly-sur-Seine, where I lived during my junior year of college. I was sure we had walked the same streets, written in the same cafés. So I didn’t think he would mind if I borrowed his theme for my musings—then and now. 236 • living others. What you forget sometimes is that this dimension is applicable to your daily endeavors as well. Spirit has no bounds, integrating inner and outer worlds. It grows when shared and is amplified in resonance with particular people and places. Some energies need to stay within the body to be nourished. If you give everything away, there’s not enough substance to feed the spiritual core (soul). Vital force is your essence. Although energy can radiate and be shared, it must also be refreshed within each day. What feeds your essential self? Part of your intention in dancing is to enhance and cycle your life force, not to expend it. Light has often been associated with spirit. In some somatic practices, the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) in the ventricles of the brain is described as liquid light. Visual artists have represented this energy as halos around the head, or as light...