If it can be said that I have a spiritual practice, I’d say that I actually have two of them, one private, the other public.
The first one I call physical culture. This practice engages and celebrates form and function of my own body and its continuity with both Above and Below, via heart-centered walking/yoga/chikung/taichi for two hours altogether on a daily basis. The other involves periodic events celebrating sacred dance in community. Here’s the latest, November 30.
I’ve been participating in the Dances for Universal Peace for about 25 years. See for example, the joy in this dance!
It never ceases to amaze me how we, who are drawn to this practice — often supposedly perfect strangers! — can come together to mutually acknowledge our source within, our source above and below, soul to soul in shared communion in the one Love. From the very first dance, to the very last dance, we leave behind our individual quirks and engage what we have in common.
Each circling two-hour dance session begins with a Sufi Invocation.
While holding hands, stepping slowly inwards:
Toward the One,
the Perfection of Love, Harmony and Beauty,
the Only Being
United with all the Illuminated Souls
who form the Embodiment of the Master,
the Spirit of Guidance.
This past Saturday, I drove three hours to Fort Wayne for a post-Thanksgiving DUP event (see above) with two dance sessions (2-4 PM and 6-8 PM), with a delicious catered meal in between.
This event did the trick. Once again, at nearly-82, I started over again, began again, and this year it happened to be early, on December 1, with New Moon in Sagittarius, my Sun/Ascendant/Mars birth sign.
At meals to break up the silent, solitary drive to and from Fort Wayne, I began to slowly absorb the latest printed edition of also nearly 82-year-old Barbara Hand Clow’s Alchemy of Nine Dimensions.
I was astonished to learn that her way of understanding the 4th dimension encapsulates all that tends to drive me crazy (and to combat I have instituted screen fasts) on the way to the peaceful (peace-FULL) 5th dimension. Think of the 4th dimension essentially as the staticky twittering, gossipy, often paranoid realm of human ideas, words, theories, lies, emotions, will, memories, anxieties, drives, etc. All that invisible gunk swirling around in the collective unconscious, with erumpent power.
In the peaceful 5th dimension, we witness that incessant activity of what meditators have long called the monkey mind, without identifying with any of it.
Instead of terror-stricken, thrilled, anticipatory, dreaded, banging back and forth, de-centering, slipping off track this way and that . . .
Yes, instead: 5th dimensional, playful! A spacious detached awareness that embraces it all without judgment, both neutral and compassionate.
BTW: how do you like that word, “erumpent”? I just discovered it. The perfect word to describe what I have long sought language for. Breaking through the surface.
All those chaotic 4th dimensional energies are not only rampant, but erumpent, especially these days, in the confused and confusing no (hu)man’s land post-election, pre-inauguration; and as of yesterday, yet more erumpent “news” (really olds): the blanket, so-called “presidential” Biden pardon of Hunter Biden on December’s New Moon of every crime since January 1 2014 (i.e., since Ukraine erupted) that The Big Guy had promised over and over again never to give to his son (and therefore himself).
Which however, means that Hunter can be called to testify “with immunity,” so cannot take the 5th — no, not 5th dimension; 5th amendment! I.e., if he refuses to answer questions, or answers falsely, he can be indicted for new crimes not covered under the blanket pardon which ended December 1!
Thanks to the 5th dimension, we can refuse to get caught up in the enormous drama we are all privy to during this seemingly climactic period in human history on planet Earth. In fact, this active, playful, refusal offers itself as a continuous, erumpent, DANCE OF UNIVERSAL PEACE!
Oh wow. Just realized: the erumpent Trump Dance may be accomplishing the same joyful communion!
