Dragon Dancing
These are notes coming from remembering our final circle last Saturday, a meeting that Helga and I had, and research I was doing for a pilgrimage: the body of work I have been doing for the last three decades of my life is often divided into pieces like shamanic dance or healing or pilgrimage or teaching or art and it is often presented as it is separate from how I live, which if you count time in the woods off grid is actually forty years of conscious partnership with the primeval!!
In the Dragon Dance we are using the overall picture of how reality works and focusing on shamanic dance because it holds the potential to let us embody the energies coming from the centre of the earth and from the cosmos. Those streams of powerful energy come into the landscape and through our human systems, meeting in our hearts. The land, the season, the group intention, all influence what kinds of impact energies are having on us but also how we impact them for the betterment of our world’s harmony and flow.
The dragons are huge enough that if they really wanted to use their full potential to correct the dark side that humans have brought to earth, they would scatter us further than bowling pins in a strike. The dragons are an archetypal part of the primeval energies that as we mentioned last session, are feared by those who fear chaos. In fact chaos holds potential and it is absolutely essential in for creativity to occur; learning to raise and direct the primal energies is the task of the shaman and the shamanic dancer MERGES with the energies alchemically to create right relationship with them in order benefit beings.
If you dance-journey to meet the dragon and can actually blend with its energy then you are in the most intimate relationship with it; you blend your essence with the dragon’s to find out how to embody this amazing wisdom at the SOUL or archetypal level. To align your spirit and soul with the dragon is to experience a larger and more holistic point of view than most of us experience when we are caught up in the speed and unconsciousness of our secular society. It is better that we get to know the primeval and elemental energies than to stay in disconnection and fear of being earthy. When we can’t surrender to the guidance of helping spirits we lose our own wild nature.
We are spirits in a body, so in this course we are invited to move within our bodies with the consciousness of the dragon. We let our personalities step aside, enter a deep love space and don’t hold back. We surrender to the power of the earth itself, which contains all the 5 elements in her being.
During the alignment process with Helga we are tuning in to a different element each week so that we can experience the creative range of expression of the dragon essence and to practice Oneness with it. We take the raw energy and transmute it through the crucible of the heart, to enhance the potential of our lives in a loving relationship to our environment. Our lives only have meaning when embedded in the earth context, otherwise we would not have incarnated. Our future is not separate from the Earth’s unless by choice we all leave our bodies, and then our souls would still imprint her etheric body.
The gateway we are using to the hidden realities, which are just as real as the seen realities, is shamanic movement and sound ie vibratory alignment. Our intention to heal ourselves and the planet. We can explore ways to experience a larger existence than our culture’s inappropriate one, which is limited by fear and/or misuse use of power, which is to control others.
Real power comes through love and it is cooperative and harmonious, playful and innocent and free.
To drop the ordinary mind’s control and stay in the heart so that we can experience the support we are receiving from the spirit of earth and cosmos, is to “live large” and beautifully. It is what Mi’kmaq elder Albert Marshall calls “two eyed seeing”: we need both logic and the poetic way of looking at the world in order to perceive all of reality, we need our creativity and imagination to get beyond social conditioning that imprisons us in the ordinary mind.
As Helga said last week, we go into a holy space, the container, the womb of each session. There we contact essential knowing that has been lost through centuries of repression and war; we go into the dragon cave to explore and dance the dragon archetype, in each element, & that is beyond language. In this course we bring dragon wisdom into being at many levels. We give power and expression to the collective energy being directed to rebalancing ourselves and all beings with the earth. We don’t need to wait until some other time. If we practice it now, we are affirming the truth that the heart knows already, which is our birthright — and we are affecting the town of Windsor, the province of Nova Scotia and all the places we have been lovingly connected to in our lives, so the ripples go out.
At this tipping point in our history it is important that we can find trust in the primeval energies of this planet and the stars. We have been given our precious lives in order to find one another and create a paradigm that will serve all beings, the greater good. By calling on the dragon essence, we will see through the illusions of the disconnected world and into the deeper reality of the one that we are co-creating We ask that dragon wisdom be awakened in us. Yes it’s risky because this is not a video game, but if we stay in our hearts, we will pass through the gates and bring back the medicine.
Love and Light,
Nancy Dancing Light Sherwood@EarthSea, 2015