Dancing with Horror

The Deal of Belief and Unbelief

I’ve spent most of my life as someone who shares things that others don’t believe. I’m used to being unbelievable.

I’m used to knowing how to consistently create beauty, connection, and care while others wonder why we can’t do it and then assume that the only way forward is to use methods that keep us spiraling into dis-ease.

I’m used to the horrendous tension of living in a world where power, violence, and trauma are the norm as part of a society that refuses to dance for healing or consider the evidence that generative creative methods are a better alternative.

I am used to living in systems where people want external authorities to take control through rules and agendas that reflect the tyranny of their own white people.

I’m accustomed to visceral contact with spirits, realms, and messages that transcend me and feeling connected to friends and family in ways that people reductively call “empathetic.”

I am used to being dismissed, shunned, and getting the eye ball of light-hearted cynicism and scrutiny, for truly no one with the power to change things seems to give a bleep about what some dancer thinks or knows.

I’m used to the familial horrors and suffering that lead to addiction, unaddressed grief, and oppressing one another.

I’m used to the genocidal governance of church and state that led me to renounce my ordination as a Christian minister and step out of an academic career, even with a full scholarship for a PhD. (Read Chasing the Dance of Life).

I’m used to being considered a kook even after writing four books, co-creating an internationally recognized methodology called InterPlay, its spiritual counterpart, The Art of Ensoulment: How to Create from Body and Soul, and mentoring courageous people for 40 years.

As a result, when I hear people who are not believed, I try to stay open. When I do, worlds open.

I believe friends in the global majority who can’t stomach one more interaction with a noxious white person. I believe Natasha’s If You Don’t See Color You Don’t See Me, Coke’s Body Memoir, Marla’s Body of Joy, Monisha Mittal’s Poetic Revelations and Soyinka Rahim’s BIBO Wisdom.

I tend to believe it when someone tells me something weird happened to them.

I believe in the wisdom of those who bow down to the poverty of their life and tell the truth about their struggle.

I believe the very real bodies of those around me who flirt with joy and crunch in tension. I believe in tears and laughter.

I believe in what happens in our dreams and imagination. And Goddess help me, I believe in the trance of evil that overtakes humans and makes us volcanic in our horror-making, wiping out whole ecosystems, languages, beings, and even Love itself.

So, when I tuned into The Telepathy Tapes, I did so not because I’m gullible; I did it as someone who knows what it's like to be discounted as someone centered in wordless ways of knowing. The Telepathy Tapes delve into the research and wisdom of non-verbal autistic individuals whose bodies don’t function like mine, yet are a thousand times more facile at navigating than those of us using our familiar, “believable” webby internet. Most importantly, our non-verbal autistic community wants us to know that they reside in the field of consciousness from which all things rise —a field that feels and sounds like the world I have been trying to emulate.

https://thetelepathytapes.com/

As someone who struggles to find words for what my body knows, I am indebted to The Telepathy Tapes and to all the artists, poets, mystics, ancestors, communities and guides who continuously co-create and anchor the world in the numinous field that is our birthright —a field of health and astoundingly ordinary beauty.

From Jon Kabat-Zinn from The Mindful Future in Lion's Roar Magazine

There are infinite ways to approach meditation practice, but when you drop into it fully, the first thing you experience—when you learn to rest in and take up residency in awareness— is the direct, non-conceptual experience of interconnectedness and belonging.

You are whole, and simultaneously part of a larger whole, nested in an even larger whole, and on and on endlessly. This direct experiencing of interconnectedness and non-separation naturally evokes compassion and loving-kindness and a deep sense of intrinsic connection to others.

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Self-Portrait as Tuning Fork by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer from The Unfolding

I am what continues.

—Joi Sharp

There is, perhaps you’ve felt it,
a moment when the day falls away
and your name falls away and
everything you thought you knew
falls away and for a moment
you know yourself only
as whatever it is
that continues—
your whole body abuzz
with the eternity of it—
and you quiver
as if struck by the great hand
of what is true,
becoming pure tone,
a vibration, a wave,
a human-shaped resonator
tuned to the frequency
of life itself,
and though later you might try
to dissect what happened,
in that moment you’re too abloom
to wonder how or why,
you simply are
this ecstatic unfolding
knowing the self as I am
so alive and so infinite
you tremble like a song.