A Dancer's Epiphany

In one era of my life, my partner and I were students of the Divine World-Teacher Beloved Adi Da Samraj. Beloved taught us that certain practices helped us to forget our egoic, separate selves, and thereby to remember our root nature as manifestations of the Divine Being - call it the Universe, Truth, God, as you will. I experience dance as church - as active spiritual practice - because of these teachings. And although my Dance is a daily practice, a prayer I share with my family, still we set aside special occasions to retreat deeply into the rhythm, to touch the Divine Oneness, to see the way we are connected, and to hear past our daily click-clack of complicated symbols. The Dance is Immediate, our barriers dropped, our souls exposed.

In our late twenties, my partner and I went to a house party with a group of devotees of Adi Da. As the night unfolded, I found myself sharing a dance floor with my partner and many other people - warm, dynamic, loud. The DJ felt our moment, and put on some kind of magical trance music: extended, textured, full of Light. I remember feeling my feet and my hips, where I connected to my partner, and I remember my hands raising of their own accord. I remember feeling soon somehow much, much larger, limitless, though I had not the consciousness to look for a limit. I remember knowing my fellow partiers were here with me, in a place not a place, as it was instinctually prior to space and time. Wherever we were before we were born, wherever we are after we die, there we were in that moment. It was fleeting and endless, and I was baptized by understanding and recognition that my search was over - this Oneness was the Truth I'd always been looking for. This was not the first time I encountered this Truth, just the first time I recognized it.

The summer I was 15, my father left the military, and we moved from the urban West coast to the suburban Midwest. A friend was kind enough to throw me a going away party, and I took the occasion to make my first party soundtrack. This was 1992, so my cassette featured Kriss Kross, PM Dawn, a deep cut from the Right Said Fred album, and as a closer, Bon Jovi's "Never Say Goodbye," a power ballad about love and friendship from the album that taught me how to fall in love with rock n' roll, Slippery When Wet (which turns 29 years old tomorrow, as of the time of this writing). That night was the only time in my life that I've played spin the bottle. It had rapidly devolved from a game into a square dance of make-out moments in the closet, polite middle class high schoolers kindly making sure all party goers who wished got a turn, bottle be damned. Though those make-out moments are pleasant memories, they are blurry and faded - early attempts to connect with one another and fight loneliness in the manner most of our mainstream culture told us about. Years later, when I fell in love for real, though, I understood that true connection was both more delicate and more rare than the fantastic thrill of the make-out. I understood why there's one moment that stood out from the makeouts in the closet. One moment we really connected. When that last song on the mix played, we danced and one special party person gifted me one long kiss in the middle of the room, in front of everyone. I remember feeling out of my body with euphoria, surrounded by a brightness which outshined the whole rest of the room, my dance partner and I sharing the unspeakable bittersweetness of the one and only kiss we would share in this lifetime. For the past 20 something years, I thought the power of that moment was the kiss. I was wrong. It's better than that: we are true practitioners of the church of Dance, and we make Divine magic.

I've only seen the Dance practitioner from my going away party maybe three times since then. They came to visit this past weekend for our annual summer house party, in a clear and conscious invocation of the church of Dance. As intended, we parked on the dance floor, hips loose and hands up. I could see the way the other party goers watched this dancer. We compare the Dance to Sex because these are pleasurable, rhythmic, energetic activities, by which we can celebrate our Oneness and share the pure joy of being alive with our fellow travelers. This is why we often mistake the bodily expression of "I am ALIVE and must be One with the Rhythm" for "Let us Mate." As a hungry adolescent I was on the prowl for the latter. As an adult in a committed relationship, I take great pleasure in developing rich friendships based on the former. I hold these friends with whom I can practice Dance in this manner very closely in my heart, as intimate to me as the family and tribe with whom I interact every day, though I may see a fellow Dancer but a handful of times in my adult life. The connection I share with these dear friends is as much a treasure to me as the romantic intimacy I share with my partner, and I know that I need both of these kinds of relationships in my life.

We've seen the truth together, and it is what we are when we forget our selves. Our egos - our assumptions of separateness - melt away on the waves of the beats. The melodies we sing together are the wisdom of all humans who have ever danced, the aspects of larger Truths that we learn through love and loss and laughter. The expressive and visceral ways we move can outshine the most dingy or the most polished of spaces. Dance is that connection we find in the space illuminated by the combination of the Beat, the Melody, and the Movement. It is Truth manifest, and as deep a Love as I know how to share with any person.