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=================== In this Issue --->Quote of the Month
--->Seminar: DANCEMEDITATION Oklahoma City * OcT 15 & 16
--->Course: NYC FALL INTENSIVE * Oct 25 – Dec 7
--->Announcement: Reschedule of Ft. Walton Beach FL
--->Reflections on Sema, Sufi Trance Dance Practice
--->Reading Recommendation
--->Writings from Teacher Training ======================= Quote of the Month “Wherever the lover touches the ground with dancing feet, the water of life will spring out of the darkness and when the name of the beloved is uttered, even the dead start dancing in their shrouds.”
--- Jalaluddin Rumi, Sufi mystic ======================= Seminar: DANCEMEDITATION with DUNYA
OCT 15TH & 16TH
Windsong Dojo \"Inner Space\", 2201 NW I-44 Service Rd., Oklahoma City, OK
www.windsongdojo.com Fluid Yoga, Dancemeditation, Spiritual Bellydance, Sufi Healing REGISTRATION:
$225 weekend; $125 single day
Call or email: Celeste
405-615-3886 or
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
======================= NYC FALL INTENSIVE
October 25 - December 7
Mary Abrams Movement Resources
10 East 18th St., 4th Floor, NY, NY This seven week course meets with Dunya on Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 2-5pm for immersion in Fluid Yoga, Sufi Dancemeditation and healing practices and Writing from the Body. Registration:
$490;$420 by 10/15
By Credit Card: through website www.dancemeditation.org (Go to ‘Store’)
By Check: made to: ‘Dervish Society of America’
& mail to Dunya, 250 Elizabeth St. #7, NY NY 10012
Please include your name, address, phone and email.
Info: 212 226 2114 ======================= COMING UP: • SENSUAL ALCHEMY Body of Santa Fe
November 18 - 20
For Information & registration: 505-986-0362 • WINTER MOVEMENT MONASTERY
Chappell Hill, TX * Dec 29 - Jan 4 Registration:
$740 seven days by 12/1
$810 seven days after 12/1
$130 single day (thru 1/1)
$350 New Year\'s Special: 3 days Fr 30th, Sa 31st & Su 1st
By Credit Card: through website www.dancemeditation.org (Go to ‘Store’)
By Check: made to: ‘Dervish Society of America’
& mail to Dunya, 250 Elizabeth St. #7, NY NY 10012
Please include your name, address, phone and email.
Info: 212-226-2114 ======================= Announcement: Rescheduled! Due to Katrina, the Celestial Body Seminar in Ft. Walton Beach, FL scheduled for December 3 & 4 is being moved ahead to June 10 & 11th 2006. Please call for more information: 850-243-9444 ================================== Reflections on Sema, Sufi Trance Dance Practice
--- Dunya Dianne McPherson This is an email exchange between myself, [Dunya], and Sita Lewi, psychotherapist and director of Ecstatic Moves in Houston, TX. I had asked Sita for some feedback on the short piece I was writing for the enews and was inspired to include her commentary here. My initial piece was focused on definition and intention of Sufi Trance Dance as well as how it is an avenue for meeting with lineage. With Sita’s contribution it expanded to include reflections on process and initiatory impulse. I felt Sita neatly articulated the letting go action we take in order to arrive in the void, the place of complete connection. Dunya: Natural forces are stirring these days. Whether one is in the line of a storm or not, storms reach across great distances to effect us all in a myriad of ways. The past year in this enews letter I’ve often emphasized micromovement practices. Lately however, when I cleave to the floor and engage in small motion, the ground pushes me up into space, into a different range of activity. My body seems to be catching streams of volatility in the weather. The result is a trance dancing -- not scattered but active. I recognize this as sema. In the Sufi lineage in which I was trained, what resembles and is commonly labeled ‘trance’ is an avenue for alignment. Sufis call this sema. (Sema is also the term for the dervish whirling practice.) The dancer relinquishes will-driven or mind-driven motion in favor of receptive motion. One engages in one’s dance, aware of what the body is receiving and stays close to the motion without manipulating or derailing it with excitation, or digression. It is patient work even while one’s limbs may be flailing or shooting about. We may look chaotic but we are not. In classical Sufism, sema “does not give rise, in the heart, to anything which is not already there.” That is to say a trance dance itself does not take you anywhere other than where you are, thus we are all bound by our intentional practice. In order for a trance dance to be evolutionary, we must choose whether we want to remain entranced in old, cloudy layers of self, or whether we can dance from a level of self which is essential. We all have an Essence Self. It is a pattern of motion. When our dance moves in accord with this pattern we come into alignment with natural force. In this place the Sufi lineage meets. In Sufism, the point of trance dance is not an end in itself. It is a means to an end, and the end is to meet with the lineage, to be in communion at the Stillpoint in Center where we are not alone, where we belong, where we are met in what is truest in us, where we share, where we are responsible together, where we are custodial of our gifts and where we move inside a full intelligence. I find it interesting and welcome that the dynamic time of storms activates strong communion with lineage. Sita: For me, Sufi Trance Dance is not about just having a spiritual high or a supernatural experience to talk about. It is about emptying my self, my beliefs, my emotions, my thoughts, and even my dance into the void. Only after that emptying do I experience myself in a place where I am joined and in communion with the Beloved. I feel tied into or linked with the essence of All --- not just with the earth, the elements, animals, or humans. I am dancing with individual aspects and the whole simultaneously. After the deep emptying, when I have surrendered, I am offering \"world work.\" The Beloved can use me and my dance for whatever is needed. Where I feel the lineage is in the ways that I let go during the dance. I feel supported by the lineage as a safety net for letting go, over and over again. I have never had the level of emptying and surrender that I have in Sufi Trance Dance. The time that we students spend in synchronistic movement with you [Dunya], micro-movement with ourselves, and planned exercises with each other builds so that by the time that we get to the Trance Dance it is clear, pure. ================================== Reading Recommendations Schimmel, Annemarie. Mystical Dimensions of Islam. Chapel Hill, NC, The University of North Carolina Press, 1975. For those interested in Sufism I highly recommend this book which includes in its wide scope a chapter on sema, the Sufi ‘ecstatic dance. Professor of Indo-Muslim culture at Harvard University, Schimmel, who is both scholar and practitioner, provides a history of Islamic mysticism exploring the definitions, origins and developing stages of Sufism, a mammoth endeavor that she frankly admits is impossible, yet admirably and comprehensively tackles. Her stunning breadth of knowledge, clarity of presentation and sensitivity to the nuances of theory versus practice illuminate the complexity of this massive topic. Her bibliography is the who’s who of Sufi scholarship. ======================= “Summer Monastery Musings or How My Body Speaks Why have I lowered my chin? Was it poor posture, tension, submission, or fear? I find myself crumpling down my solar plexus, falling into my center rather than growing out from it. Turning inward and holding closed; my chest caves and my shoulders roll forward. Sinking into my body, I fall away from my mind. Cool air glides over my toes and teases my face, rushing into my nose with each inspiration and warming slowly as it journeys down my throat and into my lungs. Good breath. Powerful breath. My strong belly expands, pressing against a floor that resists and the air instead fills my lower back, stretching the lumbar muscles and skin. Grandma‚s rocking chair and a lazy Southern porch swing, my sacrum rocks from side to side. Switching legs, floating from left to right and back again. My spine long and straight, an Ashen spear, strong but giving. My head, the spearhead, suspended at its end. One leg emerges, foot melting onto floor, toes oozing outward. I suspend forward and my knee grazes the ground, almost touching, merely teasing. Sinking back, my weight shifts and glides through my pelvis and over my feet, toes curl under and disappear below shapely thigh and hip. My weight glides again and the other foot appears, emerging into the warmth of sun and the play of wind. I lay on the floor with my stomach stretched open against the blanket. My spine lengthens and stretches, pulls open my ribcage and spreads my solar plexus wide into the grounding earth. Legs and shoulders reach skyward away from my core and I am soaring on a field of green or beach of black sand, warm and supported at the center of my world. Freedom to think. My shoulders release and slide smoothly, coolly down my back and inward toward my spine. Uninhibited by the bonds of tension, I feel my arms falling away, into the ground like the roots of a banyan tree descending from the branches above. My spine is long and straight, electrical messages speeding through optic fibers. Clear strong messages find my fingers and toes. Full and heavy, suspended at the base of my spine, swing my hips, twisting, circling, and churning. She is a cradle, my link to universal sisterhood. Weight shifts and rolls through my hips and over my legs into my feet and still hovering above it all is my head. My neck is soft, long and lithe; gently supporting my skull and brain. Chin powerful and soft held up normal and easy. Not held in defiance or arrogance nor lowered in submission, prayer or thought. There‚s no friction in my jaw or between my spine and cranium. They just float below muscle and I am free to think and feel and be. Breath fills the movement with life, turns to energy and flows through my body and back out into air and another breath, mine or someone else‚s, yours? Air rides over skin and tiny hairs, thin and soft, bend like wheat to caress skin. Skin slides over meat and bone. Muscle undulates under skin, rolls over muscles, curls over and under, separating, opening, tumbling deep and massaging tendons and ligament, stretched taut to join muscle to bone and bone to bone. Less soft and less giving than muscles they‚re plucking deep below the surface waters. Sensation, the outside coming in and expelled out. Sensation, outside meets environment, textures and elements. Sensation, energy flows. Sensation, inside moves with inside, layers goes deeper and deeper.”
---Krys Stathos, dancer & DM Teacher Trainee, New Orleans, LA [note: Krys’ beautiful writing was slated for this enews before she was ousted by Katrina from NOLA. We are grateful to have her work, written and danced, with us.] And that is the end of our newsletter. Thank you very much!
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