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Hello all and especially Rainbowbear.
Your recent mention of a Belly Dance teacher prompts me to share something.
Recently my wife has taken up Tribal Belly Dance here in the Portland Oregon area.
It has been quite a revelation to observe the effects of this among herself and her friends who have joined in this practice.
American tribal belly dance is a fusion of many cultures being made into something new here in the US. I am not really qualified to give a proper definition.
What I would like to talk about is what I observe about the practice and how it relates to Chi Kung and energy work.
First of all the work seems very grounding, which is to be expected with a physical practice of any kind. But what is most interesting to me is the structure within the movements which is so much like other movement arts from asia. What I see when watching the movements is reminiscent of Bagua zhang practice. The dancers who really have “it” have great structure, and seem to have great tendon alignment and engagement. This is the essential piece of proper energy movement and structure in Tai Chi, Bagua and other internal arts, as well as with many ChiKung forms. It is fun to watch beginner, intermediate and advanced dancers and to just perceive how the energy is moving. Just like in Tai Chi, if the tendon line is soft and ill defined, the power is not there. But in the case of belly dance, the power is of a different sort. More, earthy and sometimes frankly sexual energy power.
This brings me to what seems to be a great benefit for the women involved in this practice. They have a way to connect to the earth, and to each other to express their Jing essence in a way that involves their structure with movement and rhythym and I think connect them with their chi more fully and opens up the pathway for the whole jing/chi/shen connection to be made. More earth centering creates more Heaven connection. The net effect on the women I have seen go from very beginners to intermediate dancers over a year or so has been a great sense of empowerment and improvement in bringing their attention back into their bodies. Something which a lot of head centered westerners, even women, have trouble with, more or less.Watching a dozen or so women celebrate dance in a circle around a fire to tribal music, the energy raised is wonderful and inspiring.
Seeing two dancers work together and mirror each others movements is an amazing thing when you can almost see and feel the energies streaming between them…wow.Really great stuff. I have been amazed by this energy work. I am sure not all belly dancers see this the way I do, because my perspective from Chi Kung and energy work is a bit different. But I know many, especially in the American Tribal style are very aware of the forces they are working with, which is what gives their stuff so much “Juice” as I like to call it.
Very empowering for the women involved. another great practice for women to explore, which isn’t internal martial arts or alchemy but can incorporate and work with the same forces in a different way.
PS – Poor me, I have to attend such gatherings and watch beautiful women dance to tribal music. What a chore 🙂
Craig
It is my personal believe that this belly dance is a great path for women to connect. It is great to have this information/experience on this forum. Thank you Craig.
And to all:
To be honest I am always completely overwhelmed by some of you, using so much intellectual knowledge, so many words, really too much for me to grasp. I can’t get it, no matter how many times I read those words again and again, I can’t take it into my body. As men tend to be more brain oriented it is great to have this kind of interaction with each other on this forum or anywhere else. And it really makes me joyfull to see the play and fun of these word riddles and word fights the ‘guys’ are having (beside some of the vomit). For me it is sometimes too much of a brain joggle to comprehend it. I really have to pass sometimes.It is true that an one-to-one transmission by a skilled teacher teaches me more than thousand words because it is an understanding on a ‘feeling’ level. So Rainbowbear it is true for women to be more carefull with teachers, we are definately more sensitive to their energy and can damage us more.
Understanding this I started to look for a female teacher instead, but guess, there are none really. Not the kinds I was looking for or maybe I just didn’t look at the right places, but my guess the real ones are at home. So not much else was to be done than to look inside myself, looking for a true female path. It is just useless to apply male practice on a female body. I tried for 12 years now and it is getting me everywhere but nowhere really. I spaced in and out, travelled galaxies and universes, met demons, immortals, aliens, reptiles, ghosts, name it… I did learn a lot, I mean A LOT but the best lesson of all lessons was to finally understand that there is only one way for a women to get somewhere, that is inside and trusting herself. Without it all the rest is completely useless. And oh yes, this is said so many times before but still I see women running and chasing, exhausting themselves to follow and trying to understand the male path. Putting themselves to their very limits (and going over it!) to ‘get’ it…
To Rainbowbear:
So Rainbowbear it doesn’t matter if you don’t have any ‘master’ around you, master yourself because no man is gonna teach you what you really need. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have money to get classes; you have people on this forum who teach you more for free.
And buy yourself that beautiful sword you want to dance with, and dance your own dance from your own heart and it will become YOUR truth.I am truelly thankfull (after awhile ;))Michael W invited me on this board, because I can take and read, zip the wisdom of all those wonderfull guys who have a giant computer in their head. They gather all the knowledge for me while I am truelly not able to manage this on my own. Reading and gathering all this information would be a tremendous stress for me because it is against my inner nature.
If only men and women would understand their difference and their tremendous power if they join their qualities, we would be so much happier, together.
And thank you Trunk and Rainbowbear for your kind words.
You are right bout the femaleness and chasing. So hard to stay still and look inside. Sometimes frighteningly so. I have a picture in black and white of a buddhist nun standing in front of a mistly lake, robes waving in wind … her article in Shambala magazine talked of the standing alone and willing to do that ….. and again you pointed that out. Sometimes I just do not understand why we have to be alone like that. I have heard that there is only one true master for us … the creator. Just gets lonely sometimes, although it is getting better, with this forum – with Wendy, with others of like lostness and searching.
Rainbows to everyone’s hearts.
Dear Rainbowbear, English is not my language but I find it interesting to play with your language.
You feel ‘alone’, expand it, you are not alone but = All One
Take another expanded look at the picture, she is not alone, she is standing in all, as one… and yes, by herself, her ‘master’ is the lake and the wind, the fog and the silence…
Hang that picture in your eye sight and join her!Beautifully said and I do so try to do that throughout the day. Join her.
What is your native language?
Hello ! No one can be 100% male brain nor 100% female brain.To thinK your alone is foolish.There are the trees ,flowers .Rain drops and yes the cosmic thread that binds us together the good ,the bad we are all part of it like it or not but we can alter the thread to help one another but yes the hunger for money ,power ,fame destroys oneself if not humbled .I have healed people and not charged them one cent.Am I wrong do so ;I have to be poor or alone inside?But if I charged $300 and call myself grand qigong master and be rich and have no morals is nothing that I want.yes I have studied tibetan qigong for more than 20 years and have abilities to help others I was child disciple and learned much.But I am humble and will not turn a person away who needs help even if I go to bed hungry and cold.Humble wishes may your heart fill with the rainbow and yes let it shine past the universe.pops.
I guess too what I mean by alone …. after I did a cleansing fast for 40 days I felt similar to that picture of the nun. In a void with no attachment, just there. To tell you the truth it scared me for I had not been there before. To just be there and be okay with just void, being able to converse and interact and work but just being unattached. Was so close. But it is unfamiliar ground and I ran, grabbed the closest thing to hang on to …. food. It is difficult to exist as her with everyone else not that way. Not so easy. Kind of went “so what do I do now”. I thought I would know, but I did not. No one around to aide. Not sure if anyone can in that circumstance.
I live in Belgium, native language is similar to Dutch (Holland = our neighbours in the north), like American and Australian.
Elements, pieces, aspects of it RESEMBLE and elicit the same principles I learned in Bagua. I watch it and say to myself, yeah, that move is just like this move in Bagua. Or, if she would just extend and connect that tendon line in that move she would have so much more juice. Or, wow, she is doing the moves but isn’t really grasping the essence, still kinda empty.
Kinda like watching my teacher from several years ago practice Chen style taichi and watching ripples of energy radiate out from him. Then I got to see this guy in China do a demonstration of the same form, and I immediately recognized the form and thought, huh, where’s the juice?? This guy was doing a demo as part of a tourist thing which was held at an art gallery-retail shopping oppurtunity. I think many of my travelling companions may have thought they were seeing some good TaiChi, though I have to give credit as I think anyone with eyes to see could see that he had a good routine, but there was a distinct lack of real energy behind it.
Anyway, to address your question, there are many instructional tapes on tribal style belly dancing, but don’t expect to see Bagua in them. I am just talking about recognizing principles that are universal, and feeling people raising real energy and also playing with it, and sharing it with eachother.
Think of doing chikung and intentionally moving energy between two or more people as you move. Sometimes felt something like this when doing two man circle walking in Bagua, but this tribal dance thing has none of the fighting yang energy projection of Bagua. Soft feminine energy projection and reception. Ahh, really great stuff.
enough for now.
Sounds so very nice. As usual though I am sure there are no teachers way up north her. but maybe I should consider some belly dancing lessons from Viraj, if he is still around, he was considering going overseas to study. Something to think about I guess.
THANKS!
I have been away from the net for ten days, and am delighted to return and find a new level of male-female balance and honest communication on this board. Its very heartening and exactly what I hoped this forum would become.
Wendy and Rainbowbear, please invite your sisters to join in this process.
My own theory, for those who have taken my healing love course in recent years, is that the splitting of the original androgynous (bi-sexed internally) being into male and female bodies is the major trauma on planet earth from which we are all recovering. That is why i believe the taoist formulas for immortality focus on coupling yin-yang and rebirthing an intenrally bisexual being that is “immortal” because it is self-regenerating.
And I’ve also concluded that doing a bypass of this issue straight into primordial beingness/nothingness doesn’t permanently resolve the problem. Its why stillness meditation only offers temporary relief to most. It offers a good perspective on the core dimension of our non-sesxual self, but it doesn’t resolve the ongoing tension of the sexed body we find ourselves in this dimension. If it did, why are so many so-called enlightened (male) teachers always trying to screw as many of their female followers as possible?
In short, the future is not permanent dissolution of the self into another dimension from which we undoubtedly arise, but evolution of a new humanity in this dimension (or a parallel one) with less polar friction or put another way, more male-female integration. That is the sole purpose of human incarnation, in my opinion.
We’ll keep birthing and dying/dissolving until we internally recover into consciousness of our original andrognous nature, even if the physical bodies remain sexed. This is also why all the alchemical formulas focus on recovering yuan chi – its the missing link in the process.
Yuan chi is what got scattered in the splitting of the androgynous being into male and female bodies.Of course, in the process many parallel or sub-dimensions of experimental sexuality may be created, as humans discover there spiritual power.
What wendy’s and plato’s posts (below) suggest is a truth for most men and women: we need to fulfill/complete our “horizontal” body-sexual identity before we can integrate it with our “vertical” heaven-earth identity. That, I believe, comes from playing various sexed roles (father-mother, brother-sister, son-daughter, husband-wife) and from learning energetically how to balance the internal male-female impulses that are mostly unconscious.
I’ve found qigong and alchemy give me the awareness of the polar forces involved and train me to deal with them consciously. Traditionally, in China,
the path starts out differently for men and women but as you get more skilled in managing sexual yin-yang balance at different levels their paths and methods converge.but there is a lot of sexual repression in China, its been in a patriarchal-confucian cycle for quite a while, and i think westerners will take this process to a much deeper level because of open exchange and exploration.
Thanks to all for sharing your inner lives.
michael
I completely agree with this and it is my humble feeling that if we manage to accomplish this understanding we will be able to make a planetary shift as a whole, not individually. Again it is my humble understanding that silent meditation can be a great path for the individual to accomplish his or her ‘personal enlightenment’ but the power generated by these individuals is not big enough to make a ‘planetary shift’. Only if we unite, the power will be tremendous and will take us to another level.
For that man and woman have to accept and integrate their male and female nature, which can be a life time job on its own. Only from a deep acceptance of our inner nature we can open ourselves to the opposite sex/energy and surrender naturally without fear or loss. That is why I emphasize the importance for females to listen inwardly not outwardly, to create private space inwardly AND outwardly, in a yang society we have to make space for the yin to expand equally, so we will be able to unite with the yang from a balanced point. Read clear: It is not AGAINST yang, it is because I wish to unite with yang.
It is my feeling that we are able to uplift and expand the traditional ways to another level, so I avoid ‘masters’ who tell me ‘their’ ways, I have a deep feeling of how things ‘could’ become .
It is very hard for me to put things into words because then I need to shift from the feeling level to a mental level which is not always so obvious. So mostly I just shut up and don’t mix myself in mental discussions.One last note: maybe you remember Michael, the V’s left this message:
‘Gather the 9 and Become One’.At start I took this message litteraly and I created some big mess. Later on I completely rejected it because of the troubles I caused. Very wise but painfull lesson. But now, years later and a bit wiser, it all starts to make sense. The 9 could be the 8 of the Bagua and 9th as the center/gateway/yin-yang polarisation, go through it, unite, overcome the yin/yang split and become One, as they do.
Some way to go 😉
Wendy,
I have neither the experience nor knowledge to comment on your desire for male/female harmony and liberation in terms of healing dao practices. However, one thing that seems real to me that Id like to share with you is the idea of the acceptance, rather than the pursuit, of your divinity. Though the spiritual technique I practice is based on the notion of acceptance rather than pursuit, I realized that pursuit crept into my practice early on. I wanted to be more pure, balanced, creative and the like. And I realized that as long as I was in the pursuit mode, I was in the grasping, taking, accumulating mode. No fun. It took me a long time to really come to realize on the feeling level that the creation, for now anyway, felt like a love song, a gift, and each moment provided another opportunity to release, to love.
So, now I approach my practice as a sort of lovemaking. It is making a difference. That part of me that seeks to defend, protect, accumulate is less active, and that part of me that is free to give and receive is more active. This post does not, perhaps, address your desire specifically, but the heart of it, the surrender to a wholeness increasingly felt as a love song, certainly is currently making me feel more balanced and whole.
Blessings for your fulfillment.
PS I recently saw a video of Michael Winn doing Tai Chi for Enlightenment. The whole thing looked and felt like lovemaking with life to me.
And I’ve also concluded that doing a bypass of this issue straight into primordial beingness/nothingness doesn’t permanently resolve the problem. Its why stillness meditation only offers temporary relief to most. It offers a good perspective on the core dimension of our non-sesxual self, but it doesn’t resolve the ongoing tension of the sexed body we find ourselves in this dimension. If it did, why are so many so-called enlightened (male) teachers always trying to screw as many of their female followers as possible?
If one has to mention a few real names, I would go for Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Confucius, Socrates or Mencius (or Buddha, if you want to bring him into the picture)- instead of wannabe ‘masters’ who hardly even touched first few levels of dhyana.
Stillness meditation is just one of effective tools to start the process of natural ‘jing to chi to shen’ transformation. It is still not spiritual cultivation- only one of the means to assist you in one. It’s an exellent and direct step-tone, but it’s not the doorway nor the house.
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