Recently I led a workshop with a UK-based teacher combining guided meditation and teachings in the nondual wisdom tradition with expressive dance. For me, it was a joyful rekindling of my love of dance, which I practiced regularly for many years in the 5 Rhythms style.
Meditation, resting in awareness, returning to our natural state of nondual presence, brings us back to what we essentially are, pure being, the timeless, boundariless potential at the heart of existence, which gives rise to everything. In the Tantric tradition, this is Shiva, undisturbed and uninvolved, the stillness around which life revolves.
But Shiva is only one of the two inextricable dimensions of reality—the other is Shakti, his consort, the dance of manifestation and becoming in all its messiness and complexity. Shakti expresses herself in the welter of everyday life, through relationship, emotion, self-expression, creativity, art, sexuality—and of course, dance. If we identify with either of these archetypal forces to the exclusion of the other, our spiritual unfolding is incomplete.
If we just meditate and witness from on high, a tendency among longtime Zen practitioners and students of Advaita, we become dry and detached from life, fixated in a kind of frozen and often fear-based reluctance to engage with our own urges, preferences, passions, and the other primal energies of life. If, on the other hand, we become identified with the manifestation—with the drama of gain and loss, love and hate, attachment and aversion—we lose touch with the still, silent knowing at the heart of the world and suffer on the endless wheel of what the Buddhists call samsara.
Shiva is often represented as the vertical dimension, the timeless, transcendent principle, and Shakti as the horizontal, time-bound realm of birth and death. Each of us dances at the still point where the vertical and horizontal dimensions perpetually meet and emptiness opens into form, stillness flows into movement, and nothing reveals itself as everything. This is where the path unfolds moment after moment. Or, in the words of Ram Das, this is the only dance there is.
As T. S. Eliot puts it in his long poem “The Four Quartets”:
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.