Dance as Spiritual Practice - Moving & Connecting Energy

There are many ways to practice sensing energy or to meditate in motion. One of my favorite movement practice is dance, and the form of dance I prefer is actually called soul motion.

Dance as a form of spiritual devotion, meditation or to evoke ecstasy has been practice in many ancient cultures and still is in many indigenous tribes. Even in Europe, the farmers used to dance to connect with the energy of mother earth in the spring, by stomping the ground, to wake it up and make it fertile.

The dance I do with a local community is not choreographed, in dance terms, you could say it is improvised. It is not a performance, more of a ritual, for the self, and sometimes with others. You listen to how your body wants to move, just let it move however it wants to, to release potential energy blocks, thoughts or emotions. Listen to the soul how it wants to move you. Dance like no one is watching. It is not a performance, it is for ourselves.

Quieting my mind, I often just start by laying on the floor and following my breath. Then I start sensing the floor under my body, feeling the gravity of the earth embracing me. I start playing with that energy by rolling around on the floor, stretching or curling up, just connecting with the ground and my body, my muscles everything I can sense at that moment.

The music playing in the background at this point does not matter much to me, it is there to give me some guidance but the dance is my own, I am dancing intimate, centering, connecting with myself, grounding, before I take off.

The music for those kind of dances is usually inspirational in nature, soft at the beginning, getting wild at times, and then again time to recenter. A variety from New Age to, pop, to classic and.  so on. The lyrics are often inspiring and thought and intuition provoking. Sometimes the person leading the workshop (sometimes there is just  a DJ playing the music) will also give some guiding ideas as to what to do next, inspirational suggestions. Such as, connecting with what is behind us and in front of us, the past and the future, and with above and below through our dance movements.I love to do that by spiraling my arms around my body, moving my energy in the present from the past into the future.

Once I start moving, it is fun to experiment with movement to the music, not following the melody beat by beat, but skip a beat or two or more, move slower, change the rhythm within the music, variety, and see what the body, your energy does with that, how it shifts. I sometimes watch with a soft gaze the movement of my hands and depending on the light, I can see the energy moving around my arms and hands, it is the most amazing experience. And when I widen my consciousness to see others, I can see their energies move as well.

Aside from dancing intimate, eventually, I usually dance with another person. The dance of two flows into each other, that is the sign for an agreement to dance"in union". This is an interesting energy experience, as two heart fields merge and start to move with each other in synchronicity. It is hard to describe other than it flows and moves in waves. You may get inspired by the dance of the other, yet you remain true to your own dance, not drowning your own truth by copying another.

Eventually, there comes a time to detach and move on to another, or, to the self. This I learned to be such a valuable lesson for life, to let go and move on, not worrying about the other person but see it as the natural flow of life.

The most insightful part of this dance for me is always the pause, where I stop moving as I feel I got lost in my thoughts, and I recenter and reconnect with myself and the Divine.

We also dance as a group in community. The interesting part here is the sense of the energy of many as you expand yours but at the same time you can move away and contract your energy field to dance intimate again whenever you feel that is the right thing to do for you. Yes, it is like a wave.

Once the dance workshop or class is over, I bring the inspiration I gathered from my movement into my every day life. I found this joyful video of someone dance walking through the City. Try it! I sometimes do now! Follow the link. Dancing in nature is a wonderful experience, for example using a tree for balance as you dance around it or exploring the texture of a huge rock with your whole body.


I want to end the entry with a quote of how one of my soul motion teachers, Suza Enlger, describes the practice I do:

"Soul Motion, designed by Vinn Martí, is a practice of paying attention and waking up, together, to the physical reality of a body in motion, and the spiritual reality of the Presence that moves us. It’s a dance at the crossroads of the vertical drop into self and the horizontal extension toward another. There are no steps to follow, just the whimsical path of endless self discovery – down from the mind’s conversations of past and future into the raw, messy & miraculous event of this body sweating, tensing, opening, living and dying: now. Soul Motion offers a key to spontaneous expression, a ticket to the Mystery, and release into freedom."
~Zuza Engler, Certified Soul Motion Teacher