Dancing Before Breakfast
The following channeled dialogue that I had two and a half years ago with St. Hildegard von Bingen, a 12th century German mystic and composer and one of my spiritual guides, concerns an electrical event which my guide created. My CD player turned itself on at 6 a.m. two days in a row. I had not set its alarm, and still don’t know how to do this. I had just quit my job and was looking forward to sleeping late. When I do want to be awakened I usually set the clock radio alarm and hadn’t even thought to use my CD player for this purpose. I asked Hildegard in a verbal channeling session if she had been instrumental in turning the CD player on.
HILDEGARD: I was a part of helping set your clock so that you would get up and dance! It may seem incongruous to you that I would understand things of a mechanical nature, but it is ALL spirit and it is by talking to the spirit of your CD player, which you think of as a purely mechanical device, that I was able to do this.
MARY: So now the idea is that since the alarm wakes me to my favorite music instead of to a radio station, I should dance as soon as I get up?
HILDEGARD: Yes!
MARY: I had a Sarah Brightman CD on my player. I think her Eden CD is so beautiful that I can’t help but dance when I hear it.
HILDEGARD: Yes, there is an ancient quality in it that is delightful. I would suggest that you now write an article about dancing in everyday living, and getting up in the morning dancing. Dancing through life is what each person on this planet is called on to be doing. Most people work very hard all week and then they allow themselves to dance only on the weekends. This is why there are so many deaths on Mondays, because people have to wait a whole week to be able to dance again! Your whole life needs to be about dancing. The death rate is also higher after vacations and holidays. The cause of death is ascribed to a heart attack or to a traffic accident, as if that makes it out of the victim’s control. People think that these events just happen at random and that there is nothing purposeful in them.
MARY: Even though I love music and love to dance I don’t do it very often. It is just not yet an integral part of our culture to dance, especially in the morning.
HILDEGARD: Your culture has relegated it to the “professionals.” Ha!
MARY: I think that is a challenging proposition for men especially. I can’t even imagine American men getting up and dancing before breakfast — or lunch.
HILDEGARD: If you can imagine just for one day, every human being in the United States getting up and dancing before they even start preparing a meal, before they get dressed or brush their teeth, before doing anything, just putting on music and dancing and moving for five, six, seven or eight minutes.
MARY: Why is that is so powerful?
HILDEGARD: When you dance, something in the depth of you changes. You have energy portals throughout your body that are different than chakras and they bring in energy from another realm and transmute it so that it can be part of this realm. Those energy areas are in your bones, in the marrow of your bones and it is when you are moving and dancing and flowing that these portals soften and open and energy can flow in.
It also helps change the whole mind focus. It’s a good thing to have learning but your culture is so separated from God. When you dance you are in the moving and breathing and in God and you reconnect with that primal part of you which remembers, “Ah, this is of God, this is sacred.”
All dance is sacred and beautiful and passionate. Your culture has tried to squeeze out passion and beauty and make everything very intellectual. This was necessary in the past to gain a balance because even in my time there was so much superstition, fear and nonsense that we needed to have some of the intellect to balance that out. And now you have the intellect but you have gone too far to the other extreme and you have lost the passion for living and the connection with God. You are not separate and dance reminds you of that. It helps drive out fear.
So, dancing while doing the dishes or trying to dance while showering, even just gentle movement is very powerful. If you watch little children, you see them always wiggling and moving. In other cultures where children are allowed to move they grow up to be adults who still move and play. They are happier than people in your culture and more productive and more Godly. In your culture it is “Sit still! Sit up straight! Stop that moving!” So it is these adults who have been programmed this way who need to come back to childhood, back to the flow and then help out the next generation of children by being examples. If children see adults all around them in their life who are stern, they think “I don’t want to grow up.” But if you personally get up every morning and dance and listen to music and say, “Yes, this is great and it feels wonderful,” then later when you’re in the grocery store and there’s good music playing and you’re kind of bebopping down the aisle, if children see you dancing, then they think, “Hey, it’s possible to be an adult and still be happy. I can still move and play. I want that.” Then it is almost like they spread that word to all of their friends who in turn are receptive to this information.
MARY: I’m glad that you are talking about playing. I was afraid that when you turned my CD player on at 6 a.m. you were telling me that I should be up and working.
HILDEGARD: No, the message was for you to get up and enjoy your day even more and have your energies expand. Our turning the music on was a message that dancing is a support for you when you are working hard. It was our way of saying that there’s an infusion of energy that is available to you that you were not tapping into. When you dance you bring in energy and a deeper peace and a reminder that you are connected to the Divine. When you vibrate with the spirit of the dance you act as a conduit for the Divine to come in and manifest in physical form as energy in your reality. You invite it from out of the potential into your reality. This energy then goes into the eaves and into the walls of the house.
Two and a Half Years Later….
Now two and a half years later I dance when I get up in the morning and find that it was easy to establish this fun habit. This practice helps energize me and helps me to stay in a place of peace. After dancing I can feel the same tingling sensation in my body that I feel when I do Reiki, which is another way of having Divine energy flow through my body. I have also found other ways to bring joyful dance energy into my life. For the past year I have been participating in Sufi Dances and Dances of Universal Peace.
Sufi Dancing, also known as Dancing from the Heart and Prayer Dancing, is a way for a large circle of people to blend their mental energy, loving hearts and spirits, not only with others in the circle but also with the planet and universe. Each dancer moves gracefully from partner to partner while gazing gently into the other’s eyes. Song, chants and sacred phrases that have been put to music help the dancers to let go of their individual egos and merge with the loving, harmonious energy of the circle. Meditations are done between dances to help them remember their Divinity and as they start the next dance they look for and find it in one another.
Dances of Universal Peace were initiated by American mystic Samuel L. Lewis, a Sufi teacher and Zen master. They were inspired in part by his study of the Sufi traditions of India and the Middle East. He was influenced by the spiritual teachings of Sufi mystic Hazrat Inayat Khan and contemporary dance pioneer Ruth St. Denis. Lewis envisioned the dances as a powerful way to promote “peace through the arts.” One of the purposes of the Dances is to honor the One Truth shining through all spiritual traditions. No experience is necessary for either Sufi Dancing or Dances of Universal Peace. There is always a dance leader who demonstrates the movements for each dance. The Dances are sometimes thought of as a form of body prayer, and are done in a circle, with the dancers performing simple steps in time to the music of guitars, drums or perhaps a flute or an oud. The power of mantra, the repetition of sacred phrases, some drawn from the Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Goddess, Celtic, Native American, Sufi, Hindu, Zoroastrian or Universalist traditions, help bring the dance participants to a place of profound peace which they then as a group, radiate out to the entire planet. This is a joyful, healing experience for all.
Mary MacLaren is a freelance writer, artist and Reiki practitioner who lives in San Diego. For more information about Sufi Dances in your area go to website http://www.dancesofuniversalpeace.org
