What a Session Looks Like

The Sense of Moving: The Feeling of Me
by Jae Greunke, NYSpirit Magazine

We begin the class nearly reclining, timing our inhalations and exhalations to the quiet, rhythmic music. We follow Dunya’s lead, repeating a sequence of gentle stretches that alters and deepens bit by bit. My body begins to lengthen, awaken, and relax. Dunya hardly speaks, and the atmosphere in the classroom becomes thick with the attention we pay to our languorous movements.

Dunya’s guided warm-up transitions comfortably into an individual one with the instruction to close our eyes and move any way we like. I continue the luxurious stretching on the floor, following my impulses as I become fascinated in the differences between my right and left sides.

I sneak a peek at the rest of the room and see that, truly, everyone has found a unique way of dancing. Some have risen to their feet. Many play with their natural posture and gestures I recognize from before the class began. Looking at them, I want nothing other than to go back to what is as uniquely mine as their movements are theirs. So I close my eyes again…

I feel myself move more delicately than I am wont, with all the qualities of a string of pearls: light, luminous, rounded, and refined. Eventually I wear myself out and settle against a wall to watch the other students. Curiously, their movements seem to shed my gaze as a tent sheds water. Though they’re bared for me to see by the way they move, the significance of those movements is theirs alone, and I can’t divine it.

At last Dunya invites us all to rest on our back for a final long repose. The music plays softly in the background, and the memory of my dancing plays through my body just below the level of my conscious mind.

I tell Dunya later that, for an ostensibly spiritual undertaking, I’d found her class surprisingly grounded in physical realities. She explained the class is an evolving form developed from her background in dance, yoga, and the Sufi tradition she taught for many years. “I want to help my students go beyond habitualness to something that is happening right now… to come to a sense of relaxation and self-trust, and feel more connected to their whole body self. There is nothing, in terms of spiritual pursuit, that should go away from the body.”

Dunya defines mysticism as moving through deepening states of consciousness into the Moment, and body as the fabric of consciousness. She says, “Body moves. Body is movement. Body is consciousness. In Dancemeditation, we move and dance, seeking and discovering who and what we are. Dance is the doorway in, not out. We shine the body’s light into the shadowed self.”