Workshop participant Guy Crittenden shares beautiful insight into Sufi Dance of Oneness® at Menla Retreat Center last month. Original post can be found here.
Over the weekend of November 4 to 5, 2017 I was privileged to attend a workshop in Sufi whirling dance with renowned international teacher Banafsheh Sayyad. It’s not an overstatement to say the experience was life changing.
And why it is the perfect place for our healing sacred dance!
375 million years ago, a half-mile-wide meteor crashed here, creating the oldest known meteor impact crater on Earth, equivalent of several hundred million tons of TNT and pulverized the bedrock, leaving a 6-mile-wide crater.
Back from my trip to Kaua’i, I find it more urgent than ever that we stand up to what is needed for us to be better stewards of the planet. It is more than obvious that as a whole, humanity is not contributing constructively, neither to the homeostasis of the Earth nor to the universe.
Many of us are terrified of embodiment. We can’t face our broken hearts, the chaos in our minds or the pain in our bodies. We yearn instead for transcendental bliss. Every chance we get, we go off into the beautiful light instead of choosing to face the continually unnerving yet miraculous experience of living that light in our bodies. In this way we continue to separate the realm of the soul from the body.
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Sacred Dance as a return to the root of our Self
Have you ever considered dance as a practice that can support your living at your highest potential and a tool for coming to know yourself, remembering who you truly are?
Dance today is experienced anywhere from fun, sexy and a way to keep fit to entertainment, forcing oneself into a certain popular image, and high art. It’s deeper spiritual dimensions call out to us and can be tapped regardless of the means if we choose to listen, if we believe, if we long for it. (more…)