Dancing with Liddy
Inviting You to The Great Dance Party!!!
My granddaughter L O V E S to move, make worlds, and do gymnastics tricks. This summer she also enjoyed Soil Born Farms, where she sold produce in a kids' Farmer’s Market. Trees. Water. Dirt. Animals. Kids. Movement! She’s a Great Dancer!
It’s natural for kids to Create, Play, and Rest. It’s we adults who most need to be reinspired about the dance of creativity, play, and rest, what I call CPR for body and soul.
I wrote The Great Dance for Liddy, my nieces, and all who sense the Mystery of Life moving inside, around, and through us.
To be honest, The Great Dance, my fifth book, says best what my other books tried to say. Invoking and affirming the interconnected dance of EACH BEING in The Dance of Life is EVERYTHING!
Many think that the Dance of Life is a metaphor. But ask a person who carries indigenous wisdom, a dancer, mystic, member of an ensemble, or an athlete. They will tell you The Dance of Life is real. It is our joy and the source of our most sacred instructions.
That’s why…
We’re inviting YOU to a Great Dance Zoom Party
Saturday, August 8th, 10 am Pacific.
Put on your party hat. Bring Your Book if you have one. Get ready to dance as Marla, Ruth, Cynthia, and guests dish out inspiration, reveal
secrets in the book, and ways to bring The Great Dance alive!
Get Your Party Link Here
Kids are gonna love Ruth’s amazing “Finding Waldo” images. Animals wearing hats everywhere. But do they know that their dance is a sacred dance?
Kids probably know that creativity, play, and rest are home base. That each day is an improv where wild things happen.
Perhaps, The Great Dance is even more for adults who need to be reminded that personal and collective creativity, play, and rest are needed now MORE THAN EVER!
Creativity is everywhere. It’s in everything we do. Making dinner. Running a meeting. At its essence, creativity is about contributing through craft, skill, ritual, and art. At best, creative contributions are how we return care to the Dance of Life.
Play is the holy of holies of creativity. It happens in any open space where little is required or earned, and we feel delightfully challenged and engrossed. I found out that play is a medicinal trap door into unconditional neutral regard, unexpected outcomes, and resources.
Rest isn’t just sleep. It’s release from activity and obligation. It’s the land of restorative spaciousness and a home of true listening where many find divine connection.
CPR
What Does Your Body Want? Why not design life around it? When body and soul come alive in community, things begin to make sense in profound ways, ways that are hard to articulate.
I wrote What the Body Wants (currently out of print except for used copies), an artist’s-way style book for those who are asking, “What does my body want and can I have that?” The book invites readers to explore–
Easy Body, Easy Soul: Reawakening Your Spirit Dance
What if the Hokey Pokey Is What It’s All About?
Leaping Speedbumps: Beyond Our Worst Fears of Being Seen and Known
The Mind Must Dance, Too: Liberating Your Made-Up Mind
Words, Voice, Stillness: Letting It All Dance
Ecstatic Community: The Body of Your People
Play Heals: Creating on Behalf of Others
Dancing Life’s Difficult Dances: Age, Loss, Dying, Prison, War
Afterward: Fear of the Body
An InterPlay List of Practices
Building on What the Body Wants,I wrote about Creative CPR as it applies to navigating energy, visions, love, purpose, and suffering. The Art of Ensoulment Playbook allows me and other Ensoulment Coaches to track, practice, and share basic somatic vocabularies that open up wisdom and divine intelligence.
The Great Dance is in each of us. Hooray if movement is how you hook up your body, mind, heart, and soul. Hooray if you are seeing and supporting it in others.
Ruth Schowalter, artist and illuminator of The Great Dance, will begin offering a weekly exploration of the poem's themes and the Art of Ensoulment starting in August. Contact her at ruthtruth@mindspring.com to get updates as part of The Dancing Monastery. There are several weekly online dance chapels, led by dance chaplains, that offer smallish, gentle, improvisational sanctuaries where we move and pray. I lead a chapel each Monday at 4:30 Pacific. Message me for the Zoom link.
Of course, the best dances of all are spontaneous ones that happen with pets, wild ones, loved ones, and kids like Liddy who keep the dance alive without ever needing to write a book.
She is a cutie! And sooooo flexible!