Have You Found Your Dancing Ground?
Welcome, 2025, Well-Come!
While leading a New Year’s event, I heard myself invoke a spiritual practice I may most need for the year ahead. To welcome. I’ve always cared about hospitality, but how will I embody it in the current uncertain and fearful climate?
I know that the spirit of welcome is both delicate and powerful. It slyly moves soul to soul and body to body. Welcome puts me at ease so I can be silly and spontaneous, share my stories, open up, sing, and dance the way I dance. It helps me welcome others. And sometimes, I even let go and let life dance me–the greatest gift of all.
I always have to see if I can trust the welcome!
The dancing ground is that reality that creates welcome for all who feel love and joy in their whole being, no matter what we are doing. It called me long ago. I felt it but didn’t realize how difficult it would be to nurture it in Protestant communities where we declare a vision of hospitality, but our behavioral rituals and languages remain heavy with exclusion. I know the dancing ground is there, but my community rarely dances. Because of that, the better part of me doesn’t feel welcome.
What creates the dancing ground?
I cocreated the InterPlay practice in part because I couldn’t find the dancing ground in my lineage. Today, I’m part of a diverse group of people who eagerly welcome each person’s voice, story, stillness, and dance. We also synch our bodies and souls through music and movement and share a freedom we may have last known in childhood. Yet, it is not childish. It is artful.
We become 1000 birds flying together, especially when each person is welcomed to share, honor, and dance with
Their own Spirit Team, lineage and kind
Their Creative Birthrights, including the weak ones
Their Belonging and Purpose
Their Limits and Suffering
If you’d like to get a taste of some dancing ground wisdom, check out the beginning of The New Art of Ensoulment Playbook; download it here.
I'm also hosting a two-hour Hidden Monastery Welcome Zoom Retreat this Wednesday, January 8th, from 9:30 to 11:30 a.m. Pacific. Register now. WE’ll tend our body and soul and map out the Dancing Ground. If you are called, the Winter Art of Ensoulment Journey starts January 22nd.
P.S. I am pretty sure this is the last time I will teach in this format. I’ll be supporting my colleagues who are coaching with this material and letting them take the lead. If you want to connect with me around the Art of Ensoulment or know someone who might be interested, please let them know.
Much love and grace- Keep dancing.