Marya Mann : Blog : Dance For The Worlds ~ A Thanksgiving Revelation

Dance for the Worlds ~ A Thanksgiving Revelation

If there were one small dance you could do to bring healing to the larger dance of life, would you do it? Would you spin like a Sufi or fancy dance like a Native American? Would you lift your arms to distill your own vibration and stretch your soul into oneness with the source of the rain and the secrets of matter?

Would you be willing to dance that dance this Thanksgiving, no matter where you are or who you’re with?

Brave souls will. Five dancers, musicians, and a school of dolphin already have. We’ve been performing this dance – the Dance for the Worlds — near the crashing waves at Magic Sands Beach in Kona, and we have seen the amazing magic happen.

Dancing with the melodies of the sea, Tracy, Bella, Alyssa, and Koakane began slowly two months ago to learn the graceful arcs and synchronize our swirling arms, seeking unity with the Earth, the elements, and each other. Moving to the beat of Pomaika’i‘s drum and Bernie’s rattle, we calmed ourselves to calm the surface of the sea, massaging universal healing energies into action, and we felt the transformation of our bodies into one pure flow.

At first, this wasn’t so. With willing fingers and steady feet, we struggled to find our common rhythm, stumbling like I did 20 years ago as I sought to find my place in the world. At the time, I was a racial hybrid, pressure cooking in a kettle filled with the shame my grandmother felt for being “‘injun” in a white world, a Christian idea of original sin, and a childhood romance with anything Native American.

My spiritual heart-door was open, and Dhyani Ywahoo, with her feathers and rattle, chants, visualizations, and dances, swept in. The Peacekeeper Mission in Colorado brought this twenty-seventh generation Tsalagi (Cherokee) teacher to my doorstep. She shared a dance for relating to the Four Directions which helped me untangle the thorny roots of my past — an unhappy marriage, the slow learning to even stand on my own two feet, much less dance on them – and helped me learn to make wiser moves than I had made in the past.

Movement, I realized, is not something we do, it is what we are, and as we move, so shall we be. Dhyani was one of those rare teachers who didn’t care about my previous sins or my worldly aspirations. She led us in the ancient Dance of the Directions, guided us journey to the Temple of Understanding, and helped us to find the real life purpose that would animate our endeavors as though we were already perfect.

Two things stand out for me about her teaching. One is that every nuance and word came from her heart. She brought her whole body and awareness into cultivating light, truth, goodness, and beauty inside herself first, and then in each of us. Midwesterners like me were barely finding our way out of the closet of assumptions that included a paternalistic, judgmental God, a phobia of the Goddess, and a confusing set of metaphors and symbols that conventional religion had bestowed on us.

I knew it was all supposed to be pointing to some kind of basic goodness in people, but I had not yet begun to believe it. I felt the divine spark in myself occasionally, but it seemed sparkle in some far-off heaven rather than within me. Religion or science rarely articulated the nuanced understanding that we are all streams of the life force, divinity, “radiant fields of energy,” as Einstein said.

Dhyani’s Tsalagi teaching reminded me that I was a spiritual being in a physical body. I learned that I could re-direct my wavering energies, discipline them, and help to reweave the sacred connection between body, mind, heart and soul.

Through sacred movement, I could remember the who I was, and standing on the Earth as one cell in the planetary body, I could the electron spin inside my body with the electrons swirling as vortices of powerful energy in the directions of North, East, South, and West. When I did so, rooted in my center while focused on the intention to restore web of beauty on Earth, miracles would happen, she said.

She told the legend taught by her Cherokee family, that Star Beings came from the Pleiades to the land of Atlantis 133,000 years ago, bringing specific dances, chants, and rituals of awakening so that all people could live with a clear mind and harmonious relationships. “The star beings,” she said, “wanted our ancestors to learn the dance well and pass it down through each generation, so that at a time in the future when our planet needed healing, we could bring this dance back again, and help the Earth to heal.”

This, I think, could be the right time. When the ocean picked up our reverberating beat last week near Magic Sands Beach, we felt an immensity of mana, as real and life-changing as ordinary miracles always are. We felt the Fifth Direction, the center, the soul, the small dance within that connects us with larger spheres of life.

Then, in a sudden marvel, we all saw it. The panorama of 6 ft. incoming waves, crashing their whale-sized selves against lava rock, abruptly transformed into sweet, sinuous undulations in a thousand shades of blue. The white fringe of water that had crested and catapulted against the shores of Kailua Bay calmed and an uncommon peace filled us all.

We heard later that soft waves upended surfers’ plans all up and down the Kona coast, even though they knew nothing about our dance. Locals commented how on Monday morning, bursting waves leveled out, went silky and soft, the turbulence taken down by something as mysterious and sweet as a child’s first words.

Then our silvery sea friends, the dolphin, appeared 200 ft. out, leaping their joyful bodies in delight, noodling around in schools and universities of exploratory life.

It was a great birthday present for me to see them come close, to play in their cozy home. Neglecting our shores lately, bothered perhaps by tourists wanting to swim while the cetaceans needed to nap, they seemed to enjoy the quiet serenity as well as the dance of land-based creatures expressing communion with the peaceful sea.

Did they really feel the energizing presence of the dancers, moving with pure intent to heal and harmonize all the nations, all the elements, all the worlds?

I like to think so, in part because our Dance for the Worlds – an evolution of the Dance to the Directions — is part of a vast movement that began before any of us were born. Whether you believe like Dhyani that Star Beings came to Earth or that this myth somehow helps us relate more sanely with existence, it doesn’t matter. What matters – in truth, makes matter – is that with clear intention and focused minds, we can change the world, one dance at a time.

So miracles have happened, here in Hawaii, and as we calm the surface of the waters here, I hope you feel the miracles in your own life too. Each of us has this capacity, to re-story the streams of atoms that continually animate the body, these bodies of ours which are nothing less less than divine. We all carry the spark of wisdom, and it’s up to each of us to lighten up that spark, transform our grief, and re-ignite the holy flame.

As we look at the rising sun on Thanksgiving Day, let’s hold our hands upward to honor the grace of the sky, bring it back to our hearts, and sweep our arms toward the Earth, inhale her breath, draw the power of the Earth upward, toward heaven, and make an offering, however small, for peace on Earth.

As our intention moves, our hands move, and as we give blessings to the universe, the blessings of the universe return to us. We are the regenerators, the revealers, the transmitters of love and receivers of life. In this way, we can heal the Earth, Dancing for the Worlds.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Dr. Marya

To Learn the Dance for the Worlds, you can register for the Workshop at Kalani Oceanside Retreat to be held on Jan. 16, 2010. Please check out Marya’s Calendar

P. S. You can read more about Dhyani Ywahoo and her powerful, prophetic, and compassionate teachings in the book, Voices of Our Ancestors: Cherokee Teachings from the Wisdom Fire, available here Dhyani’s Book