I would only believe in a God who knows how to dance.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Dance is intimately connected with spiritual practice and religious worship. Think of whirling dervishes, aboriginal trance dances, Shiva keeping the world in balance with his cosmic dance, and the spirituals that get churchgoers out of their seats and singing and moving.
We can think of dance as a moving meditation.
Dance liberates us from our thinking minds as we fully inhabit our bodies, while simultaneously cultivating what the Greeks called ekstasis, a “stepping outside” of ourselves and our everyday lives. As religious scholar Karen Armstrong describes it in The Case for God, it’s the experience when the “dancer becomes inseparable from the dance.”
I am currently working on an epic {yep, epic} post about the spiritual practices of early humans and the very different ways people have thought about God and religion prior to the modern era. And it’s all coming back to dance. As a preview, I can tell you this:
We danced our religions before we believed them.
We danced them because they weren’t written. We danced and painted and sang them because that’s what “religion” was thousands of years ago – practice. Movement. Embodiment. Incarnation. Centuries later, we continue to seek these ecstatic experiences, the moments that “touch us deeply within and lift us momentarily beyond ourselves,” Armstrong says, whether it’s through “music, dance, art, sex, drugs, or sport.”
Since I’ve been working on this epic post, I don’t have a completely new post for today. Instead, I’m sharing a revised version of, and some reflections on, the third post I ever wrote on this blog, back when four people were reading it {and two of them were my parents.}
I wrote last April about how tap dancing, which I just began practicing last year, is a form of mindfulness meditation for me. Enjoy the new reflections on dance as a moving meditation … and look for the post about rethinking religion next week!
As a newcomer to tap dance, I have to concentrate so fully on each step that I cannot think of anything else when I am in class. I can’t allow my mind to wander to the ungraded essays, unwritten blog posts, or unpurchased groceries which sometimes divert my attention in yoga.
When the instructor tells everyone in class to do a time step, they execute a seamless move. To me, that instruction is as helpful as my husband telling me the Vikings defense was in Cover Two. Not knowing the complete step by heart, my mind has to think carefully through each individual movement at a time: “stomp, brush, hop, shuffle, step, fah-lap, ball-change, stomp, repeat.”
It’s like when we first learned to drive ~ at first, every single action required our full attention. We fully experienced driving. But now we can drive, literally, on auto-pilot; we go through the motions and our minds can {dangerously} be a million miles away. An action of which we were once completely mindful is now performed mindlessly.
Tap class reminds me that mindfulness is not just sitting in meditation ~ it can be active and engaging. It is not “not thinking,” it is not “just paying attention,” but it is paying attention in a different way. It is focusing entirely on the present moment, and doing the current task as if it is the only thing to be done.
For me, tap dance is a body awareness meditation ~ for a full 90 minutes, my mind is fully focused on every one of the complex movements of my body. I am aware of the coordination of the muscles and the bones of my feet, ankles, and legs as I learn a new step. I hear the satisfying taps and clicks of a busy dance classroom. I am aware of my fellow dancers, and my position in space, so I don’t crash into others! I leave class feeling refreshed and energized.
*****
Reviewing these words I wrote a year ago makes me aware of the progress I have made. Often our changes and improvements are so slow, so subtle, that, like the proverbial frog in a pot of water, we don’t sense the changes as they happen. It’s only when we see the before and after that we understand the transformation.
Last week, as I struggled with a portion of our tap dance, I asked a friend in class to show me the step. She said, “You do a Maxie Ford, then hop…”
“It’s a Maxie Ford?” I asked. And then I did it! No stamp-shuffle-hop-step running through my head — I just knew the move and did it. Through practice, practice, practice, I now know the step by heart.
By heart. We often start to learn a new skill with our mind – the sequential steps, the details, the structure. As we practice, we take it into our heart. It shifts from being slow and effortful and deliberate, to being part of what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow.” We concentrate on our achievable task, acting with “a deep but effortless involvement that removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of everyday life.”
I’m still mindful in tap class, but the concentration has changed. I’m not dancing on auto-pilot, but I’m not struggling, either. The mind and heart and body, which I so deliberately worked to coordinate last year, just dance.
I’m not learning to dance; I dance. I flow.
We danced our religions before we believed them.Tweet
It’s so understandable why. Csikszentmihalyi says that “a broad range of activities rely on rhythmic or harmonious movements to generate flow. Among these dance is probably the oldest and the most significant….From the most isolated New Guinea tribe to the polished troupes of the Bolshoi Ballet, the response of the body to music is widely practiced as a way of improving the quality of experience.”
Dancing king Patrick Swayze once said, “There’s just something about dance. It’s like a primal thing in all of us.” I think he’s right.
The quality of our human experience is enhanced when we move beyond cognition. We need not just the intellect, but “the commitment of emotions and will. It is not enough to know how to do it; one must do it,” Csikszentmihalyi tells us.
So we dance.
*****
Top photo credit: Mara ~earth light~ via photopin cc
Middle photo credit: vramak via photopin cc
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