Dance is not just movement, it is movement that has the power to be a language. It has its own dynamics of time, space, weight and shape that, when understood in their fullness, allows us to manifest meaning and expression far beyond the capacity of verbal languages. In its most expansive expressions, like ritual dance, dance functions as embodied symbols that connect us across space and time, and through this awakens timelessness and fleshes the Divine. Ritual dance renders the Divine intimate.

Read More

Nature is experienced as “Rasa”, the taste beyond the performance, the sensation that is invoked by the dancer and which is equally experienced by the “spectators” of the performance. Rasa unites dancer and spectator, dissolving duality in a shared domain of sensation. In this union, all dualities dissolve. The mind dissolves into the Rasa and becomes one with Nature Consciousness.

Read More

The creative dimension of co-creation is something we overlook in our times when creativity is considered “non-essential”. The nature of moving with the Divine is dance because the movement is not of a functional nature as the mind would propose, but is an aesthetic manifestation. This is almost impossible for us to consider in these times when we have separated the functional from the creative and prioritized the functional as more essential to life than artistic manifestations. And this is the tragedy of the times we live in.

Read More

Very often in my classes and individual sessions I hear from women how they are already practising embodied spiritual traditions but still feel disconnected from their bodies. It takes some unraveling for them to experience the difference between simply embodying a practice and a body-led inquiry as life.

Read More

The mind’s mastery is to keep us incomplete and seeking. In fact for many of us this becomes our consciousness. I often invite the women I dance with to reflect on the label “seeker” because seeking is a never ending activity that keeps us busy for lifetimes. Indeed we even have narratives around needing millions of lifetimes to experience the Divine!

Read More

The ancient practice of Deception in the form of Divinities who were bandits and rogues (Skanda, Rudra) held more depth than meets the eye—like Deception itself! The purpose of this practice was manifold and one of the most important teachings was to encounter the multi-dimensional nature of Reality.

Read More

In ancient traditions, a multi-sensorial, embodied presence in Reality was the foundation of perception. Skills, competence and “knowledge” were built on this foundation. The archetypes that signalled this approach included hunter and robber. Ancient ancestors of Shiva included Rudra as the hunter-robber and other earlier forms as the deceiver or rogue. We cannot come to these archetypes with our usual ideas of logic, which call for linear thinking and conventional lenses such as morality. Neither is it true to say that these archetypes are therefore illogical and immoral—it simply means that we have to approach them through embodied traditions.

Read More

Tonight is the long night of Shiva, the invitation to return to the intimacy of our body without any distractions of the day of the mind. On a moonless night, we are asked to dance His Tandava, the dance that is at once the devolution of the mind and the emergence of the manifestation of action that is beyond division and fragmentation. The creative and destructive polarity is in the same movement and both are intrinsic to the manifestation of a being that is beyond that polarity.

Read More

Women in my individual program often share with me how they aspire to hold the Goddess sensation all the time, but it seems as if they fall out of it, sometimes even without them realising that this is what has happened. However, this remembering and forgetting, or “knowing” and falling out of it, is the very heart of the dance in the Goddess tradition.

Read More

Dance in many ancient cultures is the original prophecy, the original revelation of our interconnectedness to Earth Consciousness. Dance connects the dots through sensation, that cosmos that lies deeper than thought, in the intimacy of the embodied consciousness that pre-exists the mind. This cosmos is revealed through the Deities that dance through our bodies when we approach them in freedom from everything we know.

Read More