my body practice to The Beloved
I have been playing with the feelings of hot to sensuality to deep mystery as they show up in my devotional dance practice.
Most days I go down to the 50 year old community hall next door to the kids school. It needs a paint job and on rainy days the smell of septic tank and mould residue wafts through the place. I have my trusty Warfdale stereo trundled out on the shaky tea trolley over the stained wooden floor. I never know how I am going to move or what will show up. I begin by feeling my internal space and selecting music that will move me. This morning it was freezing cold and I screwed my nose at the thought of taking my shoes off, let alone moving my stiff joints. I began right under the big fan heater, my back against the wall, slowly to flowing sounds, trying to warm, restless, changing music to faster beats till my body could begin to let go of myself.
The sun shafted through to a 3 by 4 square and I gravitated to it, braving taking my black socks off and tenatatively skimming the floor only to put them back on. The hall is rectangular. I look downward to the South wall. I always feel like God is watching from here or the North wall when I turn the 180 degrees. I don’t know why this presence is stronger on these walls, just one of those strange things. I continue to move, slowly, hip sways and swings to the Arabic Latin sounds. I swing into a looping bellydancing figure 8, round and round near the walls, warming and loosening.
I feel the happiness of moving and the enclosure of this little hall. I have danced here for months now and its getting lighter. Today I can feel my happy bliss movement infiltrating under the beige paint and entering the splintering wood fibres of the wall structures. There is an intimacy here that is more tangible by the day. In an entirely insane way I feel in love and loved by the space that is created here.
I still myself and wander to the feeling of hot. How ‘hot’ would I want to be for God today. I don’t feel the sacred desire for hot. Something in me calls for what is beyond the enticement of ‘hot’. I am narrowed by the feel of its limitations as a current offering. These days have been more filled with the deeper pull of sensuality. All that is slower and fully felt through undualtions and touch. A sway that is long or a contaction that is pulled in and released in an exquisite pullout of time. In sensuality I begin to be entered by the fullness of the space.
I don’t stop although my body grows stiller. I place my hands on my low belly, bent knees, head tilted slighty down at my belly, a posture of reverence maybe. I begin to roll my belly, only low, snake like waking up. This is beginning the trace of deep exquisite well of my womanhood. As my pelvis is a slow ripple I feel my heart quaking open and my husbands love enter the room. God is infiltrating me in a bath of graceful light that rains as sweet neverending tears of the blissful kind.