HIP LIP & MUSINGS BY PALIKA

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Sacred Dance and Tribal Belly Dance © Palika Benton and Heavy Hips Tribal Belly Dance Womyn's Sacred Dance and Tribal Belly Dance are "hot terminology". Everyone is writing about these concepts trying to define them, determining the "authorized" parameters of their constitution and weighing in with subjective opinions and experiences. As a dancer, a teacher and as a deeply committed ecofeminist I have wrestled with the words "sacred dance and tribal belly dance". I do this because I feel compelled to analyze the deeply held but often unexamined rationales, beliefs and moral structures that underpin the social construction of our contemporary material, discursive and philosophical lives. And I write about it because the phenomenon is more powerful than words in theory can ever touch, but I have to try because when it comes down to it - Women's Sacred Dance - Tribal Belly Dance are experiences, real and tangible, alive today, moving, transforming, practicing in the lives of real women like you and I. I find it compelling the degree with which this term is finding such broad appeal and enthusiastic response. Something about "tribal and sacred" feels relevant - feels necessary in our often dissociative, fragmented and pressured lives. Today we live in a world that is crowded, noisy, impersonal and obsessed with material consumption. We are "turned on" 24/7 with cell phones, phone machines, beepers, voice mail, e-mail, faxes, internet & satellites, ipods, mp3 players, television, radios, mtv, and blockbuster movies. Subtly and not so subtly we are encouraged to oil and contribute to the capitalist machine as either producers or consumers of an exponentially increasing irrelevant cache of "things". The beliefs we have to swallow in order to participate in the well greased capitalist slogan,"Everything can be had for a price" is starting to rear its ugly head - we can't sleep at night and we notice that something doesn't feel good inside. Somehow to some of us, the words tribal and sacred trigger a memory, a hope. We have an idea about what"tribal and sacred dance" means. We think it might mean deeply personal and integrous social values that could evolve things between humans and nature, perhaps save the planet, our souls and our bodies inside and out. And its something we want to claim and practice and live before it‚'s too late! For most of us, our feet and hands rarely commune with Earth, our food is anything but sustainable and consciously produced, and our social/economic cultures continue to destroy the necessary balance between humans and Nature. With the disintegration of extended family and now even the nuclear family, many of us find ourselves miles away from parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. We choose our families now, for better or worse and sometimes they stick around for the long haul and sometimes not. Cultural norms have emphasized the individual's satiation of all their incessant desires and the individual's social status in life above all else until we are sick with competing and clawing over others to reach an impossible summit and we find that we simply want community who work and play together and support each other through difficult times. We wish to belong to an affinity group, that is loyal, caring, kind and shares, who are invested in the well being of the group and in conscientious living, thinking and being. Finally, this obsession with individuality, the me, me, me, the endless self absorption and indulgence in attempting to fill all of our physical, mental and emotional desires, is beginning to feel empty. Spiritually and physically we feel void. Something about the words ‚ "tribal and sacred" feels like rest, like redemption, like relief. The words conjure feelings of community, authenticity, trust, faith, integrated interdependence with Earth, an identity and shelter with an extended family who stick with us and our children over a lifetime.... a tribe and life that lives with Spirit at its root. Intrinsic in the idea of tribal is a daily personal community that is deeply imbued with a shared sense of meaning, and purpose together; we are known and loved and know and love the extended family which we are dependent on in order to thrive spiritually and materially. We witness and support the daily struggles of one another, and being a functional part of the community circle is deeply fulfilling, relieving, and feels safe. We help and support the group because the group helps and supports us. We tolerate limits on personal freedom, because sometimes personal freedom is selfish as well as unsustainable over time and we value compassion and service and justice over selfish. The word sacred lifts us our minds and hearts to an aspiration of conscientiousness, of paying attention, being mindful of what is here right now, of not ignoring the growing violence, or the disintegration of Gaia's wholeness. We yearn to be members of a mindful affinity group whom are committed together to heal the rift between humanity and nature - to live at last with compassion, kindness, forgiveness, love and peace as our guides. We realize that slowing down and practicing gratitude and humility are priceless jewels. Living with awareness and acting with integrity makes us feel warm and fuzzy inside, happy. This Quality of Life doesn't evolve from our present social, material, and political practices, values and paradigms, perhaps because they are fundamentally incompatible. Capitalism is the paradigm controlling our most basic social and cultural organization and social institutions and this is a recipe for disaster as it supports the greed and selfishness of a few, while offering the masses a dream to invest in, where they too may one day be a member of the powerful resource controlling elite. We are so busy pursuing this dream we are blinded to its flaws and its fidelity and dependence to exclusivity and hierarchy. If everyone is competing to reach the precious few carrots dangling before our incomplete egos all of the time, then all our sisters and brothers - human, animal and plant are our, "competitors, our enemies" - the ones who get in our way of having everything. Now perhaps, the yearning for a simpler, slower, smaller, and more integrated communal life is growing within us, we see the truth of limited resources, see the division that competition hones to a finely chiseled point. We intuit that valuing independence, individualism and personal satiation at all costs may not be the basket we want to place all our eggs in. We may have overlooked the benefits of aligning with - and committing to a group that shares values, interests and needs. We are re-membering ourselves to a survival adaptation that may still be deeply relevant for our modern brains, bodies and emotions, - that of the community. We are yearning to give allegiance to a tribe where every living entity is valued, protected and cared for equally with a clear eye to the interdependent, limited and living nature of the Earth planet Herself. So what has this got to do with "tribal belly dance - with sacred dance"? In ATS abbreviated for American Tribal Style Belly Dance, we practice a unique way of practicing unity and surrender in perfect synchronicity with one another as group; using improvisation, intuition, intention to commune and move like one being completely in the moment without choreographing or predetermining anything. We do this using the ancient movement of Belly Dance, of sacred birth, of the shamaness who understood the connection between her body, her spirit, her mind and the web of all of life as our "way". This "sacred" dance - belly dance, remembers us to our interdependency with the living earth. Belly dance is the dance of birth, the dance of our earliest ancestors who accepted the magical and divine reality of the female because she bled in synchronicity with the women of the clan and on the dark of the mysterious moon, and didn‚Äôt die through her bleeding. "She" was our first Deity because the "she body" produced and nurtured the continuing line of human beings. Original Womyn was likened to the land, who fed the people, nurtured them, mediating always the thread connecting birth and death. In the practice of ATS we learn a repertory of isolated and layered - pelvic, torso, belly, ribcage, hand, wrist, arm, head, patterned foot and leg movements; we come to share a rich vocabulary of movement. The movements themselves follow sacred geometry "circles, spirals, figure 8's", and they originate from the core, the pelvis the spine and when shared with the sisters connects us to one another and the greater human tribe on a deeply real and metaphysical level. Practicing these movements in an environment of meditation, prayer, visualization, deepening, releasing, discipline, unconditional support and exploration, we become attuned to one another on many levels as any lifelong co-habitators become. Our practice is rich in its content and generous with its outcome. After regular practice, we can "talk" in this shared vocabulary, moving absolutely in perfect harmony in any moment by reading the subtlest cues of weight change, energy change, intention, or physical hints. Our conversation is our unified movement, completely improvisational, a success of unanimous "flow". We move seamlessly from one woman to the other, leading and following, trusting the commitment of other to the well being of the group above all. In this experience, in this moment we "dance" the perfect adaptation for a perfectly unknowable reality - Life. As we practice this sacred and tribal dance together as women, we strengthen our commitment to lead all men and women towards a unified alliance in healing the rift between humans and nature and eradicating a deeply ingrained proclivity for exclusive and hierarchical social structuring. The dance evolves from the original sacred process of giving birth and protecting and nurturing life, but the gifts of the dance belong to all living beings, female, male, animal and plant. As long as humans have lived together, depending on one another for survival, when the "wood's been chopped and the water's been carried"; people have drummed and danced together, solidifying their allegiance with one another and with Mother Nature. making meaning of their lives in a mysterious universe. We've drummed and danced for birth, we've drummed and danced at death, we've drummed and danced for love, for first blood, for rain, for sun, for harvest, for worship, for joy, to understand our universe and ourselves, and just because we feel it in our bodies. We‚Äôve danced to insure that all will be as it should in the universe. We dance in gratitude. When we dance and drum we re-member our embodiment and connection to all that is Earth, Air, Water and Fire, we re-member that we are Earth and Spirit, and we feel a sense of kinship, an identity of oneness with those we make the music with. We understand that we are here together on this soil, with this river, on this hill, in this city together and share many feelings of loneliness, hope, joy, wonder, fear and a deep wanting to know what it all means. We sense that we all want to give love and we all want to receive love. This deep sense of existential connection that is experienced through daily, yearly and generational living with one another which can be expressed, celebrated or mourned by drumming and dancing together is "tribal". Tribal is the non-verbal sameness between us, the thread where we commune and empathically grock one another‚Äôs experiences and where in this aligned committed intention of a group, we place our trust to survive and thrive. We join the group to become a strong integrous bundle of sticks For myself there is a freedom and a touching that is possible when I dance freely, witnessed by and with others, with the drums, in circle, that is fundamentally healing and unifying. Dancing in a circle, I feel relieved to be part of group, relieved that I don't have to recreate everything on my own, don't have to always make it to the top; stand solo or compete with all my sisters. I see troupe and group dancing as a fantastic template to develope fidelity to community and to model movement in cooperation, in sync, in harmony, as unity in purpose. These qualities humanity desperately needs. We have indulged in our separation and our difference to the point of estrangement. We have fallen into a false belief that our progress, our well being is separate from those of a different color, origin, social status, gender, country, ritual practices and even species. So much so, that our entire culture touts estrangement as normal. We are flabbergasted by requests for equal access to water, fertile soil, clear air, shelter, especially when the request interferes with profit, for example, "You mean to say that this community that lives on the river, the people, plants and animals should have an inalienable right to the river, that everyone should share, no more - no less?", - "No, we have bought the title to this river - our sovereignty over it is government protected and our corporation, our lobby, own everything below it, and above it for 50 miles and everything in it as well, except for what we throw away and ruin, which we leave behind and choose to ignore. And we are protected by law -the inalienable right to profit at ALL costs - we are protected to pursue privatization of this natural resource." How have we come to this believe this lie even made it law, that nature, life, health, peace, and harmony can be owned- privatized? The Earth's resources belong to all, not just the bullies who are bigger and stronger and misuse their strength due to lack of moral character. Sacred dance and drumming are tools of prayer and realigning with spirit bigger than our individual self. It shows us that privatization is a lie, and that sharing is the only truth. Belly Dance, and other forms of prayer through movement are the balm we need and the push we need to discover "right seeing" and "right being". This new form of an old dance, Tribal Belly Dance, is like a magnet drawing urban women young, old, poor, wealthy, pagan, Buddhist, educated or no, straight, gay, single or married, into the eye of its storm. Birthing from the feminism of California and the resurrection of a spiritual practice rooted in service to others and environmental integrity there is a forest rooting of Tribal Belly Dance Communities on the west coast, and saplings are sprouting up in the Midwest, heart of our political empire - Washington DC and in conservative states like Texas, Georgia, Missouri and Florida. Philosophical dialogues searching for the definition of its purpose, rhyme and reason are rampant on e-mail groups, online chat forums and in Belly Dance journals and e-zines. Women's lives are changing, they are waking up to mindful living on all fronts and their hearts are becoming soft, vulnerable, open and ready to expand. We are making friends with all feeling states through the experience of dancing and sharing our most intimate fears and hopes? In the classroom of belly dance, transparency and disclosure reign, and with a conscientious leader/teacher, the movement in the classroom ripples out with intention to activism in the family unit, in personal and public relationships, in social service to the greater community - healing and awareness permeate and create change. With as much integrity, honesty and humility I can muster, I speak from my experience teaching the past 8 years to a steady population of about 80 students per week in 5 -7 classes per week. Tribal Belly Dance is a spiritual practice. We address and meditate on all of the issues above as well as focusing on critical issues of self emergence through body image, self esteem, service to others, earth stewardship, compassion, mindfulness, humility and a purpose to life that is meaningful despite the reductionism of capitalism. We pray fervently to practice inside and out an intention of compassion to change the social inequities between humans and to find a way to live on earth that is not only sustainable but flourishing in love, compassion, abundance of diversity in wildlife and biospheres. We want to be in congruence with spiritual and material living. These hopeful prayers manifest as we come together in a movement discipline that is wholistic in its goal to address all of our needs - physical, mental and spiritual. The primary quality that defines this new contemporary Tribal Belly Dance is the practice of moving harmoniously within a group identity, we align and affiliate with a circle of dancers. We meet with this circle of women each week, humble - financially strapped, student, newly divorced wife, post partum mother, commuting executive, recovering addicts, survivors, healers, teachers, social butterflies or yogis, and we do our inner work - together. We pray, we sweat, we cry, we laugh, we hope, we release, we discipline our bodies, open our minds and discover our spirits, we explore silence and we speak up for the first time, and we listen and we breathe. The dance and our commitment and hopes for it, take over and we move together for the purpose of celebrating life's passages, be it a birth, a wedding, a passing, harvest time, migration time, first blood, or simply our aliveness and our gratitude. It is dance that our women's community does together as part of their daily lives. It is birthdays, anniversaries, solar festivals, lunar festivals, and drum and dancing for the sake of connecting together to celebrate life on Earth in a holistic way. It is daily mindful being and prayer. Tribal belly dance is all of this to us and more and it just keeps swirling and manifesting and changing.....like.....DNA. It's that organic, we come together diverse and leave feeling unified, hopeful, in communal mind together, all because we take this ancient movement originating from the power and creative mystery of birth, and we're able to touch back with a silver thread connecting every mother, daughter, grandmother, sister, auntie and the collective wisdom gathered there and that re-members us to whole living, whole thinking, whole praying, whole being. We train ourselves to dance in unison without a planned choreography and in so doing learn how to align with the human community in everyday life. We practice trusting the group's commitment to the well being of all, we voluntarily set aside the need or want to stand above, separate, as our primary motivation. We are learning to act toward a purpose that serves all in an unknown situation, we are habituating ourselves to care about the group. Traditionally, Middle Eastern dance in the US and Europe has pretty much meant the practice of "Orientale or Egyptian Cabaret", a very stylized often tightly choreographed solo dance, performed in modern history as an entertainment for an audience. Though its roots are absolutely folkloric and come from the people with origins most likely Neolithic and birth related, it developed over time into a culture and style that is distinct from its shamanistic roots. Not to oversimplify, but one must also bear in mind the culture of cities, suburban areas, and country villages and their consequent influences on the development of local styles of dance. Cabaret's elegant style and costuming has developed along with the intense energy of a male leisure and ruling class, where local folklore, faith and social needs collided with imperialistic colonialism and patriarchy. I find cabaret costuming troubling, as it reminds me of a cross of a Las Vegas dancer and a Playboy centerfold, cultural reflections that I think have deeply misogynist underpinnings and reveal its most recent historical context. Costuming alone is certainly not the determining factor in the what & why of dance, but costuming does reflect the fundamental ideologies and/or recent histories that inform any type of dance. While many Oriental dancers are very talented, aware and experience their own empowerment through their dance, the overall culture often feels objectifying to women, sadly reduced from its origins as a dance in which the dancer is a medium for divine reflection and intervention for the community. It has become, "I'm doing a sexy dance for your pleasure. " The patriarchal tradition of a woman dancing primarily for a male audience is relatively new, but 5000-8000 years doesn't seem new to me. It feels old and yucky and many of us are done with it. In truth it must be said that within the Tribal devotees of belly dance, there are throwbacks to titillation to males as the informing principle of costuming. But there is also a very conscientious intention to use costuming to empower the women's experience as subject herself. Belly Dance is erotic, passionate and often channels sexual energy, but it is much more than that. I refuse to be reduced to a woman/object who simply gyrates in a displaced sexual display by the definitions of individuals who are fixed in their power over, consumer oriented and selfish mindset. The sensuality of this [belly] dance is of the creative, generative, fiery source, and absolutely as Caroleena Nericcio says, "a stirring display of the strength and beauty of women". Contemporary women understand the recent history of Belly Dance and it's fusings in patriarchal culture and they have rediscovered their power and ability to reach right in and extract the essence that is redemptive, powerful, creative and wanted now. Belly Dance is being returned to its rightful owners - women. Therefore despite the colorful and often rocky history of Belly Dance either as public performance or private ritual and all its realities and situatedness across the spectrum from divine to profane, from reification to shameful disparagement - its vital, original power to unify individuals - drawing them together in their oneness and reminding them of their fidelity to Mother Earth - is consistently drawing women into its myriad depths. As women all over the world trek, crawl, climb, dig, and fight their way to be heard, to have history be written to include them, to lend their voice and wisdom to the re-balancing of the Earth, they are flocking towards this sacred dance. In China, Brazil, India, Mexico, Germany, Australia - everywhere women are coming together to discover the sacred pearl within and a genetic lineage of Earth wisdom that is radical, real, necessary and vital to healing the planet. The wisdom of Belly Dance of Sacred Dance is inspiring us to re-member ourselves to its deeply healing and curative properties. I think more and more women are exploring this kind of analysis, which highlights the current relevance of belly dance to contemporary woman and its healing possibilities for all of us. When I dance I am the Earth Maiden Warrior, The All Sustaining Mother and the Cutting Crone of Life & Death. I am not the object of someone else's gaze, not the object of their desire with no purpose and raison d'etre of my own. I am not a sexy woman just waiting and hoping to be picked by you or desired by you. I am here for the greater human community and myself, representing my membership in a tribe that is in sync with the Earth on which it depends and loves. I am the subject of my own creative, earthy, passionate, essential and strong relationship with my people and Momma Earth. I am expressing my sensuality and strength for myself and the community I dance with as the subject of my own life, in the body I celebrate which is the one I have in this moment, in this breathe, on this space of Earth. I move in sensuality, desire and power from my own desire and will. I choose who, what, when and where. I choose to re-align with women and stand for the rationale of interdependence with Nature. I choose to live by the spiritual principles of compassion, peace, integrity, the good of all, humility and truth. I choose to pay attention and be here now. Ethnic Dance and ethnic inspired dance has meant dance forms, styles, choreographies and costuming that reflects daily activities, seasonal celebrations and attire that is worn normally within a specific culture. This is also a definition of Folkloric Dance. As a long time student of West African Dance, I am deeply embedded in the idea of dance as part of the community. All the women, all the men, and all of the children know their community dances. I also experienced this growing up in Baltimore with a very active Jewish community where at the many weddings, and bahmitsvahs, friends and families often circled with much joy dancing traditional step dances. This is the practice I want to cultivate. I want to dance with and for my community of women, with and for my children, and with and for the members at large who help my family and myself thrive. I want to dance with those I garden with, those I worship with, and those I sing with. I want to dance with those I cry and mourn with, help give birth with and age with. And I want to dance and drum for and on the Earth that sustains and cradles all of us. Many of the steps and styles of tribal inspired belly dance are shared with Orientale dance as well as: Arabic, Tunisian, Bedouin, Tuareg, Berber, Turkish, Indo-Asian, Jewish, Rom Gypsy, Persian, Spanish Gypsy, Greek, African etc.It is the regional cultural styles and applications that vary. In addition, each time a dancer creates a choreography, they are interpreting, stylizing, and creating. Thus something new but simultaneously traditionally inspired is produced. Thus the term, "inspired ethnic dance." This inspired dance is not for example pure ethnic N. African dance because I am not a Berber for example, and I am not dancing within the context of a daily Berber life. I am grateful to those dancers and ethnographers who are able to preserve and catalogue traditional dance forms, they are indeed endangered. I am also, very interested in learning a traditional Tunisian pot dance for example, and feel very privileged to receive that if someone goes there and brings it back to share. I would then call that dance an authentic Tunisian pot dance out of context. If however, I learned some Tunisian stylings and steps and then choreographed a dance with my own creative input, I would call it a Tunisian style dance or a Tunisian inspired folk dance. Tribal style is ethnic inspired dance, and all dance is stylized, creative & created. It is also important to touch on the myth that only an intact dance transported to America from Morocco for example is "real" tribal dance. Humans dance and I've seen a step created/discovered in a hip hop or jazz class that is exactly that same as something I learned in a Senegalese class 6 months later from a native W. African. Human beings have rhythm and intuition and we just do it, we move our bodies all over the world and often in the same ways, for the same reasons. I think the authenticity of tribal is dependent on the intention of the movements and the contexts in which they are done. So some teens doing hip hop at a birthday party can certainly be "tribal" as they are expressing a communal identity and affiliation. There is also the story of a westerner who spent extended time in a community in N. Africa cataloguing and learning their traditional dances to complete a Ph.D. and then upon returning years later attempted to tell the N. Africans they were doing their dance wrong because they had organically changed the steps over time. (Hmm, food for thought). Furthermore, I think using the term tribal or ethnic dance is an attempt to reflect or imbibe spiritual and material cultural values that are relevant to cultures that are still organized as extended family units, and who are more directly interdependent with an agriculturally dependent sustenance. These communities are seen dancing through the passages of daily life, and in celebration of seasonal cycles thus displaying a deep connection in work and play to the Earth they depend on. I think folk/indigenous attire is appealing because it is colorful, layered, often hand embellished, hand dyed and reflects lifestyles with different priorities and values, than those of the western capitalist culture. There are those of us who find elements of nomadic or agricultural communities more holistic, more in sync with spirit and having material and social elements we are deeply lacking in the west. The linking of the spiritual and the material through drumming and dancing calls deeply to us. The celebration and healing of Earth feels necessary and urgent - feels sacred, and we dance to manifest it into a new paradigm that under girds social organization, interaction, and responsibility. It is also essential that we address the co-optation of indigenous dance, the capitalist packaging and selling of it as one more "thing" to make a buck from, or get a "thrill" from because it is "new". One hundred percent of the world has been seen as a mine for exploration and co-optation by western capitalism, with cultural, spiritual and material cultures all seen as fair game to make a profit on. So while we learn, appreciate, mimic and preserve traditional dances, music, costuming etc. it is essential to give credit where it belongs and not pretend that we own the "Bedouin dance" or even completely understand it. That is impossible for most of us. It is essential that we know where our dance is coming from. If we choreograph a movement sequence inspired by Turkish, Bedouin, or Tunisians stylings for example, we should say so and simply call our dance a "Bedouin inspired dance". Furthermore as we fuse and interpret new and old influences into a theory, style or practice of dance, we must guard against declarations of "real, or authentic". Simultaneously we must recognize that we are absolutely all members of the "Earth tribe" so to speak, and inherently feel called to dance and drum and create community movement which reflects and feeds our psychic, physical, and spiritual yearnings, which may mean that choreographies and movements of a community on another continent may be completely relevant for a community of peoples here in America. I've always called the movements of Middle Eastern and N. African dance the living dance practice because of the foundations on circles, spirals and figure 8's and its origins in giving birth to life. But the truth is, these movements of circles, spirals, figure 8's and undulating like a snake, or shaking like and earthquake are not Middle Eastern or N.African. They are original, they have moved through time and cultures and continents planting their seeds of revolution and reminding women that we are keepers and shamans of life's circle. The movements and dance belong to Everywomyn. Through glorification, recognition, ignominy, and profanity, the sacred dance of birth and creativity just keeps flowing - kind of like a river that is sometimes visible, sometimes under ground, sometimes flowing, stagnant, wild, or crashing over boulders. So while I appreciate that in recent history belly dance came through the earliest pre-patriarchal Middle Eastern and N.African cultures, it is ultimately birthed from the creative prowess of women, and their snakelike connection to Earth, birth, and death and the daily movements of people working and playing. The energetic principles inherent in circles, spirals and 8's are harmonious to the physics of the universe and when we move in those forms we feel rightly situated, we experience our membership in Life, they have no cultural fidelity, they just are. This sensibility has snaked itself into the consciousness of urban women in the west and our own manifestation of sacred belly dance is rising and writhing across the continent. The world cycles - we cycle, we are integrated in what is - be it birth, sustenance or dissolution. Tribal Belly Dance is the manifestation of women of the western world who, mired in the culture of capitalism and inspired by the ancient dance of the east and newly awakened to the emptiness of material progress are finding and putting down roots. We are not mimicking the dance of the East nor stealing it. Rather we are organically responding to the urban yearning for a Earth centered lifestyle, that looks truly at the costs of resource privatization, and corporate control over everything public from our most fundamental paradigms like faith and belief, to the practical ways we organize ourselves. It's a tool we choose to heal the rift between earth and humans. We respond in prayer and in meditation in our bodies; focused but soft attention, watching breath, undulating pelvis, tilted but independent torso, sliding ribcage up and under, opening our hearts, our diaphragm, lubricating our pelvis and hips, stoking the fire of creativity in the belly, resetting the mind, and priming the womb for change....for evolution. We learn a language of inspired movement with our sisters and teach ourselves to cooperate, intuit the needs of a group and respond to them with love and hope. We have fun and we grow and we support one another. I hear the words of the women I teach and they tell me again and again how this practice of movement and meditation has radically altered something inside of them and rippled out to everything they touch. This is my life. I help humans dance together, to move their Earthly bodies and deep spirits with drum, cymbal, pipe and strings, to dance in harmony for each other, for the community, for shelter from the noise of contemporary life. I invite an opening in the body for ego, selfishness and reactivity to melt away, so that the heart becomes softer, pinker, bigger - willing to remember its capacity and desire to love, forgive, protect, and serve. I invite synchronicity between our sinuously rotating hips and the cycles of migration, the cycle of water, or the rotation of moon caressing our shores and our bodies. Skipping lightly over the earth like a horse over the plains, elevating a harvest to art in movement, circling ribcage or wrist like the cycles of the seasons - I invite, I mark. Undulating torso as the seaweed surrenders to the mood of the ocean, stamping feet and undulating pelvis like the earth birthing a mountain - this is sacred - spiritual, communal practice - I weave, you weave, we weave. I lead prayer, urge mindfulness and integrous living and use sacred Belly Dance as the container to awaken others and myself. We dance together these sisters and I, manifesting these prayers in our unison movements, our bodies tied together by our intention to be completely unified, not one standing out - following leadership through the circle of dancers, listening - watching for her to change, leading and following into trust in this unknown moment. How can I turn away from this - this pull of blood, molecule, water, originally one? Tribal Belly Dance is Sacred Dance - original, primal and necessary. Renewing for human beings, it is our promising to Mother Earth that we are re-membered to Her and will act with integrity and intention toward what the obligation as her stewards entails. Finally it is witnessing the lives of sisters and brothers who share all the joys and tribulations of an embodied and human life and our path towards conscientiousness and awakening. This community prayer and practice through sacred Belly Dance and music heals and creates good will, vision and action and I'm grateful to serve it in its compassionate embrace. Palika Benton 831-464-9664 PO Box 3662/Santa Cruz/CA/95063 http://www.heavyhips.net