FINDING MY MYSTICISM
FINDING MY MYSTICISM
The following is an excerpt from the Introduction to Sojourn the Inner Heaven, Dunya’s guidebook to Dancemeditation. After immersing herself fully in Modern Dance and ballet, a serious injury forced her to explore other possibilities, leading her to the mysticism of Shattari Sufism.
by Dunya Dianne McPherson, from Sojourn the Inner Heaven
In childhood, I was a little mystic, as children often are, and I loved to dance and play music and draw, as children do. I was in the Moment. I was connected to the All. As I grew up, I increasingly lost track of my innermost self and my connection to All. My familial world was quite alive with mystical threads, but school education was the suppression of self-realization in favor of social conditioning. I felt the gradual alienation most in dance, my primary language, since whatever was truly worth my knowing went through that lens.
Western education emphasizes the mastery of information; to become adept in a field—in my case dance—one trains, attains expertise, then performs and teaches the art form. I enjoyed it. It was fun. It was a puzzle, and the puzzles got harder and more complex, but always a sort of game for my mind or my body, which were handled as separate parts of me. I attended Juilliard and went on to perform professionally, choreograph to critical acclaim, and teach at universities, always seeking and not finding that shimmering, immense timelessness I’d known as a child.
Turning Point
At 29 years old, a NYC concert artist with a thriving career, I struggled with a difficult physical injury. This was 1980, before the internet and early in the burgeoning Human Potential Movement. A fellow dancer told me about a Shattari Sufi master, Adnan Sarhan from Baghdad, traveling through, giving workshops. “It’s physically easy,” she said. “There is this really fabulous energy,” she said. So one evening I accompanied her to the Little Red Schoolhouse in Lower Manhattan snd plunked down on a carpeted floor amidst one hundred other people seated side-by-side.
I had no background in meditation and few expectations. We all faced a stage to follow a little, stocky, older man’s movements and, in very short order, a syrupy, golden-ish energy flooded into me. No words, no explanations, no corrections, no acquisition. Yet oddly familiar. I picked right up from where I’d left off in childhood, as if the intervening years were irrelevant. This was what I had yearned for. The mystery in my depths said Yes.
Waking Up Inside My Life
For 17 years I continued to attend long retreats and workshops. The experiences there transformed me, the way heat transforms ice into water then steam—not a ‘get better,’ ‘be wiser’ sort of way, but as a leavening which washed out my starch, rendering me fluid and connected to a continually shifting holism. I was finally waking up inside my life.
I thought that to go from open-eyed, expressive performance—a relationship between myself and others—to closed-eyed inward-faced dance ending the I/you duality was the only shift I needed in order to be fulfilled. Then teaching brought me to the next evolution. It was through teaching, informed by my exploratory daily practice—a personal laboratory—that a fundamental reconceptualizing of body roiled and bubbled up from my cells. Dancemeditation emerged.
The experiences there transformed me...
rendering me fluid and connected
to a continually shifting holism.
I was finally waking up inside my life.
FURTHER READING
To learn more about Dancemeditation
& Dunya's journey, explore
her books.
