Dancemeditation™ is a unique moving meditation system for self-discovery, healing, & evolution. It helps us be present in our body in the Moment.
In Dancemeditation, we turn away from the external and turn toward the internal, away from disembodiment and toward embodiment. Rather than working out, we work in. We turn away from feeling incapable, diminished, overwrought, fragmented, disconnected, and toward trust in our body’s language, dreams, information, and intuition. We turn toward awareness of breathing and motion. We turn toward the sensation of skin and bone and fascia. We turn toward an intimacy with self. We turn toward Mystery and Communion and Belonging.
Roots
Dancemeditation™ is rooted in three large bodies of work—Art, Somatics, and Shattari Sufism. With Sufi mysticism as the spiritual backbone of the Path, Founder Dunya McPherson evolves and enriches the meditative work by drawing on materials from Somatics and Art that support our embodied interior unfolding.
How We Practice
We practice in solitude or in company. Groups settings are non-competitive, largely non-verbal, and maintain a balance between inner & outer witnessing.
“It is hard to describe what I have been experiencing. The work helps me access my heart body. Nurturing myself, feeling the softness of my animal self.” – S.
A Few Meditations
We use a wide variety of breathing and movement techniques to quiet an over-active, distracted mind identity and invite intuitive, inspired embodiment. Dancemeditation™ practices encourage us to more closely feel our body while uncoupling the impulse to fix or alter it. What is Unseen can emerge. There are many possibilities, all such beautiful ways to activate intuition, creativity, and inner freedom. Here are a few examples to give you an idea of what we might explore.
Rocking Meditation – Each part of our body has its own voice and we strive to let each part speak. This might mean, for example, unhooking the shoulder from the ribcage so each can articulate distinctly. Rocking gently shakes these often frozen body parts loose, freeing them. Rocking is emotionally comforting and stimulating for the nervous & circulatory systems. Sand Tracing Meditation – Prone circular & spiral movements done with awareness of skin sensation and gravity, encourage relaxed flexibility, whole-body integration, and coordination. Slow Fluid Stretching Meditation – Breathing supports oceanic repetitions of moving into and away from the endpoints our full Range of Motion. The oscillations lull the cognitive mind. Stretching, rather than holding, is continuous motion. This engages our body’s fascial network, relieving joint stress. Breath Dance Meditation – In this Movement Mantra we bring awareness to the continuous base note of breathing inside our moving bodies and experiment with different relationships to that pulse. Rhythmic & Non-rhythmic breathing. Gesture Meditation – Hands immediately spring to awareness here, but gesture can be made by any body part, or with the entire body. Gesture’s semaphoric, symbolic language opens the realms outside ordinary perception and interfaces elegantly with the hypnotic study of ornament. Deep State Motion – Moving in full receptivity—the sense of being moved—can’t be predicted or forced but it can be gently, sincerely invited. Deep State Motion is this mystical communion. To be moved is to be in what the Sufis call tawhid, or Unity. Deep State practices are a direct handing of the energetic lineage of Sufism. Whirling – Whirling is a dynamic Sufi purification practice. Begun by the beloved mystic, Jallauldin Rumi, it has been handed directly down in an unbroken lineage from practitioner to practitioner for centuries. At the same time it is inherent in all humans; children naturally whirl.
We are a body-being.
We delve inside,
deepening into an ever-unfolding Subtlety.
Teachers
The listing includes Dancemeditation Teachers offering Dancemeditation privately or publicly, as one-on-one mentoring or in group classes, in-person or on zoom. You can contact them directly.
Anastasia Blaisdell, Western MA ~ inneropening@gmail.com
Andrea McCullough, Southern Colorado ~ sacredtempos@gmail.com
Dunya Dianne McPherson, Founder, Northeastern US ~ dervish@dancemeditation.org
Stephanie Rudloe, Boston, MA ~ stephanierudloe@gmail.com
Jane Sunanda Schmidt, Ft. Lauderdale, FL ~ metayoga@outlook.com
Kryss Statho, New Orleans, LA ~ perchance2dream@hotmail.com
