Using Belly Dance to Heal Deepest Emotional Wounds - Part 1

Using Belly Dance to Heal Our Deepest "Emotional Core" Wounds - Part 1

This post is not for everyone.

 

Really.

 

This is for "mature audiences only" - reader discretion advised.

 

(And let it be said, at the outset, that this by no means constitutes medical advice, that I am strictly sharing personal experience, and that if you are at all in doubt before you begin - should you choose to do something similar - consider asking for guidance from a licensed medical or therapeutic professional. And perhaps have a trained counselor with you as you do this particular form of "inner journey.")

 

What Is a "Core Wound"?

A core wound is the psychological impact from an experience (or set of experiences) that we have when we are young, or are otherwise exceptionally vulnerable. This (these) experience(s) occur when we are still shaping our basic worldview; our concept of whether or not the world is a "friendly place."

 

Core wounds most commonly come from experiences with our immediate family. In particular, they come about with those whom we identify as essential to our survival.

 

To the best of my knowledge, all of us carry with us some sorts of core wound. We often have them no matter how much we do psychotherapy, seek "spiritual enlightenment," or just plain "work on our stuff."

 

We can have breakthroughs, and often do. But still, these are the "core." They go right down to how we believe that the world works - in our favor, or not. Dangerous, or safe and friendly.

 

How Can We Determine What - In Ourselves - Is Our Own Core Wound?

Core wounds feel like psychological "hurt." In fact, they "hurt" a lot. So as a result, we try to bundle them up and isolate them away from our conscious awareness.

 

Core wounds never really go away on their own. They stay inside us, with tremendous power - mostly because we try to contain and control them.

 

Often, our core wound show up as "blurts." These can be phrases that we say to ourselves. Sometimes, they even slip into our conversations! Or, we show ourselves (and others around us) our core wound by voicing strong opinions about how a person (or certain group of persons) always does something that is "bad."

 

Core wounds feel intensely private. We rarely - if ever - discuss them with others. Often, if we do psychotherapy or have a life coach or a spiritual counselor, we may work for months before we tentatively allow our core wound area to be broached. This is because, of all the parts of our inner world, our core wound feels most sensitive, most vulnerable, most "ouchie"!

 

And yet, if we do allow a core wound area to "come into the open," we may be surprised to learn that our coach, counselor, or therapist really knew about it all along. (And so, for that matter, did our relationship partners, and possibly our boss, co-workers, family, and friends.) This is because our core wounds affect us so much that we "give them away" all the time!

 

Mother Henna writes about her experience of seeing her "pain body" as separate from her "light body."

To be continued (in next posting).

Who Else Talks About Core Wounds?

Eckhart Tolle writes about core wounds in The Power of Now. He calls them our pain-body.

 

Core wounds never really go away on their own. They stay inside us, with tremendous power - mostly because we try to contain and control them.

 

Often, our core wound show up as "blurts." These can be phrases that we say to ourselves. Sometimes, they even slip into our conversations! Or, we show ourselves (and others around us) our core wound by voicing strong opinions about how a person (or certain group of persons) always does something that is "bad."

 

To be continued (in next posting).

 

The Most Amazing Thing ...

The Most Amazing Thing Is That - You Already Know This!

It happened during the second-to-last class of autumn. I was giving a "preview of coming attractions" - going over the "hot topics" for the winter quarter to come.

 

I took a deep breath, and launched into what I thought would be the most oddball, obscure, and yet most fundamental part of our next studies. I felt pretty scared with this topic. It's one of those that makes "esoteric belly dance" - well - esoteric.

 

Mentally, I braced myself for resistance. You (that is, the new group of students - and also those of you reading this) have borne up cheerfully - and even enthusiastically - as I've introduced a range of topics that you (students and readers collectively) often refer to as the "woo-woo stuff."

 

That's right. Esoteric, by many other standards, means the "woo-woo stuff." And you've been cheerful and enthusiastic in not only trying this out, but in using that term.

 

This time, I thought, I'd lose you forever.

 

But as I launched into my description, my jaw dropped. I saw you nodding your heads in agreement. (This time, "you" being the students who were actually in the class that day - and perhaps even you as a reader.)

 

Over half of you were saying, essentially, "Oh yes, we know this already."

 

What?

 

One of the weirdest, most unusual, most "woo-woo" parts of the curriculum, and it's already common knowledge?

 

I just couldn't believe.

 

But it made sense.

 

In the class, we had a massage therapist whose interests and background included energy work. We had a Reiki practitioner. We had a few whose interests in yoga, meditation, and related areas were almost life-long. In short, at least half of you had more than a passing acquaintance with one of the most powerful principles for pathworking, or for bringing your energy work into your physical practice.

 

Jedi for Women

 

Over the years, as our curriculum shifted from classical, mainstream Oriental dance to ... well, Oriental dance plus something ... I've tried to express who and what we were in different ways. One that made the most sense was, simply, Jedi for women.

 

Imagine that you are Obi-Wan Kenobi, but a young Obi-wan. You're not yet the Jedi Master. In fact, you're not yet even a Jedi knight. You're a young man who hopes to one day become a Jedi knight.

 

Or imagine that you're Hermione, and more than anything, you want to go off to a school that teaches you to use the powers that you know that you have - but simply haven't ever been able to bring together.

 

Or that you're an young woman in pre-Arthurien times, stepping into the boat that will take you through the mists to Avalon, where you hope to learn the fabled priestess arts.

 

You've Already Been There, and You Already Know This

 

Now, let's take this one step deeper.

 

Imagine that not only you are some fictional character, setting out to learn and master some arcane arts that will require years of complete devotion and dedication - but that at one point, in one of your many lifetimes, you were such a person.

 

Imagine that at one time, you not only knew these things, but had mastered them.

 

You were, at one point, a Jedi Master. You were a grown-up, fully powerful Hermione. You were a Priestess of Avalon.

 

And now, in this lifetime, you're simply trying to bring it all together.

 

And thus, you gravitate towards energy practices, such as yoga. Or perhaps you've already studied energetic healing arts, such as Reiki. Or you've followed a tradition of ritual, and opened up your sensitivities in that area.

 

Somehow or other, in your various wanderings, you've already picked up enough so that when the new information is presented to you, it's not new anymore.

 

It's already part of your known and familiar.

 

Make sense?

 

Of course. And for a very good reason.

 

An "Integration Lifetime" - Or Why It Seems So Tough and Complicated

 

Many of us are experiencing an integration lifetime. We're pulling together all that we've learned before, and we're making the breakthroughs that we were reaching towards earlier, but possibly didn't make in our previous lives.

 

That's why this lifetime, for so many of us, is so complex, demanding, and challenging. We're "wrapping up" a lot of things all at once, while reviewing all that we've learned before, and making major breakthroughs that we almost - but didn't quite - complete in our earlier lives.

 

Sound exhausting?

 

It's kind of like taking organic chemistry during the summer. (Difficult under the best of circumstances.) And then, while doing that, taking a "survey course" covering a few thousand years of humanities. And then doing an extra-credit project under the direction of a Nobel Laureate researcher.

 

Which would explain why our lives are so full, so complex, and so challenging.

 

We're not just making headway in one area, we're doing a lot of things, all at once.

 

And the Answer Is ...

 

But what is this one thing - one of the three "cornerstones" of esoteric dance - that many of you know already?

 

Read the details in the next blog. (Yes, I promise to be forthcoming. And I'll put the link here as soon as I publish the next blog.)

 

Or, if you simply can't wait, pick up your copy of Unveiling: The Inner Journey, and read the paragraph at the bottom of page 410. (Yes, this is smack in the middle of Chapter 29, "Pragmatic Esoterics," or - as we now call it, the "woo-woo stuff.")

 

 

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Here's to your health and well-being - and to your overflowing personal energy and abundance in 2013 and beyond!

 

Much love - Alay'nya

 

P.S. Do you have a desire to be a "Jedi Master" in your own life? Do you desire bringing all of who you are - energetically as well as physically, and emotionally as well as intellectually - into one art? Do you desire your own pathworking?

 

Join me. Click here, scroll to the lower left on the page, and join the Unveiling community for quarterly (and sometimes more frequent) communications. This is reserved for people like you - people who want to infuse their practice with the energetic aspects, and use their dance art as a pathway for healing, wholeness, integration, and mastery.

 

Autumn Lesson 4: Breaking Through Emotional Resistance

Autumn Lesson 4 in The Season of Cups: Moving Out of Stuck Situations

The primary focus of this ten-week series (from the Ace through the Ten of Cups) is on cultivating our internal energy and bringing it up our spines. The final stage of this series is actually the Ace of Cups, when we (supposedly) learn to "fountain" our energy around ourselves.

 

This is an important goal, both because being able to "fountain" our energy (actually, to do anything at all with our internal energy) is good, but also because this ability is a crucial predecessor to the really important energy exercises:

• The Micro-Cosmic Orbit (a Taoist energy practice),
• The Middle Pillar (a western esoteric energy practice), and
• The Circulating the Body of Light (both western and eastern).

 

We will be doing the first two of these practices (Micro-Cosmic Orbit and Middle Pillar) over the winter, and the final one (Circulating the Body of Light) in the summer.

 

What we are doing now, though, is a structured energy practice that will lead us steadily to some of these more advanced exercises.

 

In the previous three weeks, we introduced the Season of Cups and basic exercises for this autumn quarter:

• Week One: Energy Dancing with a Water Feeling,
• Week Two: Filling Our Energy Well Using Circular, Flowing, and Snake Movements with the Chifti Telli Rhythm in Esoteric Belly Dance, introducing our Ida/Pingala energy channels, and
• Week Three: Autumn Lesson 3: Unifying Our Vital Energies, tracing Ida/Pingala up the spine along with the Sushumna primary channel.

This week, we encounter emotional blocks that keep us from fully doing our energy work.

 

The Four of Cups; follow the link for a good interpretation.

 

The Four of Cups is a moment of stasis; we are so locked up in our present thoughts and conditions that we can't open up to new "good energy" that is being offered to us.

 

When we studied the Two of Cups, we realized that we were being directed to examine the Ida/Pingala energy streams at the root of our spine. At the Three of Cups, we included the Sushumna primary energy column in our attention, and did the first "interweaving" or "crossing over" of the Ida/Pingala streams. We did this at an energy nexus point on our spines that connects directly to the second chakra in front.

 

(Recall our energy anatomy: there are six "nexus points" on the spine, each of which connects via nerve bundles to one of each of six nerve ganglia on our fronts. Each of these physical nerve ganglia bundles corresponds to a chakra area.)

 

Now, at the Four of Cups, we're at the second crossing of the Ida/Pingala streams, which corresponds to the third nerve bundle on the spine and the third nerve ganglia grouping and chakra center on our fronts.

 

This third chakra occurs at our solar plexus. This is right where our upper diaphragm (the one separating our heart and our lungs from our abdominal organs) occurs.

 

When we are energetically and emotionally blocked or "stuck," then our diaphragm is tight, and we have a rigid hold on the muscles in our upper abdominal area as well as our sternums. The result is that we have a tight and rigid dance.

 

 

In Unveiling: The Inner Journey, I describe how one of my master teachers, Anahid Sofian, corrected me and another leading dancer on precisely this matter.

 

Across the crowded floor, a series of young women swayed like seaweed in the ocean. Their eyes on the diminutive teacher, they followed Anahid Sofian in her graceful yet precise movements...

 

“Leah,” she called out to a dancer, “you need to release – right here.” She gestured to her own sternum. We were practicing upper body undulations, one of the most beautiful and sensual moves in Oriental dance. “And Alay’nya,” she turned, scrutinizing me, “you need to do the same.”

 

Both Leah and I were well beyond the beginner’s level. ... Here we were, getting the same correction on one of the most basic moves. “What,” I wondered, “is going on with us?”

 

Suddenly it hit me; one of those “Aha!” moments. Leah and I both epitomized the “young-woman-on-her-own-in-the-world.” Having to make it on our own in essentially a man’s world, we had taken on the masculine attributes of body armor by using our muscles and ligaments! By stiffening our muscles, and holding them tightly, we created an impenetrable shield; we were “armored” against the world. What we were doing in our bodies reflected more the influence of Athena, Goddess of Intellect (as well as war; she is the ultimate Amazon), than Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love. We were fully in our Amazon mode!

 

Releasing the muscles in our sternum took conscious attention from each of us. It did then, and it still does. The old tension patterns die hard. [from Unveiling: The Inner Journey, Chapter 14, "Locking Our Minds Out of Our Bodies," pp. 189-190]

 

For many of us, as we go into the autumnal Season of Cups, our attention is not just on practicing technique. Rather, it becomes a quest to release those tensions and blockage patterns that keep the movement from flowing freely.

 

Here's to your own "inner un-blocking"! Namaste - Alay'nya

 

P.S. Getting Your Own Copy of Unveiling: The Inner Journey

Do you want to continue reading Chapter 14, from which the beginning was excerpted above? You can have your print copy of Unveiling overnight from Amazon, or a Kindle version within minutes.
 

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P.P.S. More Unveiling

A very important related section is in Chapter 9, "The Essence of Stillness." I have a nice long extract posted on the Unveiling website. Go to the Resources page, and look for the extract about Esther. Also, you'll have a chance to sign up for the Unveiling e-newsletter, and be given early information on:
 

• Workshops: Whether my own, or those that I highly recommend (and will likely attend), be the among the first to know your options for putting your Unveiling studies into practice - topics will range from archetypal to dance to the "Fountain of Youth,"
• Best-of-the-Best links and "insider info," which I custom-select, carefully edit, and share just with the Unveiling Community (free, but you must Opt-In using the Opt-In form on the website's first page) and
• Weekly updates - so that you won't miss a thing!

Filling Our "Energy Well" Using Oriental Dance

Filling Our "Energy Well" Using Circular, Rolling, and Snake Movements with the Chifti Telli Rhythm in Esoteric Belly Dance

Julia Cameron, in her book The Vein of Gold, talks about "filling the well." She writes, "As artists, we must learn to be self-nourishing." (p. 21)
 

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Water: The Energy of the Season of Cups

As we move into Autumn, the Season of Cups, we shift both our dance and our life-focus. Summer was the Season of Rods, and dealt with fire energy. If we had progressed in our energy cultivation path well over the previous year, we had plenty of "energy to burn" by summer time - and that's exactly what we did!
 

Now, though, with the heat of the summer waning, we are ready for something different. Our bodies - and our psyches - seek replenishment.
 

Energetic Anatomy

Because we are doing esoteric belly dance, or Oriental dance (belly dance) with an energy component, the idea of replenishment has very specific and practical meaning for us. We focus on drawing energy into our "energy reserve centers," and to building and strengthening this energy.
 

As a first step, we look at one aspect of our energy anatomy - the various energy channels that come up our spine.
 

In many of our energy exercises, we draw energy up our spine. Very often, we bring energy straight up our spinal column.
 

However, in this lesson, we pay attention to the fact that the energy currents up our spine are more complex.
 

There are really three channels, or nadis (a Sanskrit term), as recognized in the yogic tradition. These are:

• Pingala: The nadi carrying the "active" aspect or prana (this is our vital life-force, or ch'i)
• Ida: The nadi carrying the "passive" aspect or apana
• Sushumna: The nadi carrying the Kundalini energy

These energy channels have been recognized in our own Western medical tradition - in a very subliminal manner - for thousands of years. Specifically, the cadeceus - our emblem for the healing arts - is a stylized depiction of these energy channels.
 

The tantric tradition of kundalini yoga has been to awaken the energy flow through these nadis, culminating in a fully awakened and energy-vitalized state.
 

Relating Energetic Anatomy to Western Esoteric Tradition

In our studies, we use this time of year to "fill our well" energetically. In fact, we opened this quarter by giving attention to energy dancing with a water feeling.
 

Now that we've introduced our theme, we move from the overall feeling of water energy (the Ace of Cups) to the lesson in the Two of Cups. Margaret Wells, who has developed interpretations for the various Tarot cards, describes the Two of Cups as bringing forth "a moment of shared feeling."
 

Look closely at the imagery in this card, designed especially by Melvis, in a project organized by Margaret. See how the two cups are blending together? And they're both receiving droplets of water.
 

This is what we're doing. We're bringing "droplets of energy" to both our prana (Pingala) and apana (Ida) origination and storage points at the base of our spine. This is the starting point for our exercise.
 

Practicum: Second Week of Autumn

Pingala/Ida Nadi Tracing

We will return in this week's class to the Cabbalistic Cross exercise that we began last week, using the music Anahat (by Kairo by Night).
 

We are going to use the opening phrases of this music (about a minute or so, before the "melodic line" kicks in) to trace the Pingala and Ida circulation lines up our spines. This acts as a reminder to ourselves that these two nadis play a role. Even though many of our other energy exercises will bring the energy straight up our spines, we acknowledge the different "currents" or nadis as we begin our practice.
 

Please note: The Cabbalistic Cross is not an "energy-building" or "energy circulation" exercise. Rather, it is the first step in aligning ourselves with certain "realms of consciousness" (Sephiroth in the Kabbalistic tradition), and is a preliminary to an "energy boundary" exercise, the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram. We are inserting the Pingala/Ida here - because it works - and we'll insert it into other exercises/etudes as well. Keep in mind the distinction; energy-building or cultivation vs. energy circulation vs. protection/boundary-creation.
 

Other exercises for the Second Week of Autumn

• Diaphragm stretches: We'll begin paying more attention to each of our three diaphragms, allowing them to release, so we can bring in more air. This is an important precursor to learning undulations, both upper and lower body.
• Circular Movements: Hip circles and rib cage circles help us to "feel out" the fullness of the energy basin that rests in our pelvic girdle.
• Snake Arms: We'll introduce some exercises that will help you move your arms and hands gracefully. These are necessary precursors to candle dancing, which is an optional study for Winter Solstice.

As always, we'll do veil work - both in place, and moving across the floor.
 

Music/Rhythms

We will listen to and move with various chifti telli pieces, which are the focal rhythms for this quarter.
 

Principles

• Lotus Flower: This is a Static Principle, and is the second one that we learn in our sequence. It is the natural corollary to the Anchoring Principle that we studied last week.
• Expansion/Contraction: This is a Dynamic Principle that we'll study in greater depth over time. We use the Expansion/Contraction method, combined with breathing (even a little pranayama) to fill our energy cauldron (the "basin" in our hip girdle, where we build and store intrinsic energy, or ch'i). This is a natural accompaniment to - and adds to the energetic value of - movements such as hip circles.

Using Unveiling: The Inner Journey as a Study Guide for Autumn Dance Classes

Textbook References

The following chapters in Unveiling are relevant to this week's study:

• Chapter 25, "Sex Secrets of Belly Dancers": All you need to know (and more) about our various diaphragms. Also a write-up on why we do those horrible abdominal exercises during our warm-ups. (Strengthens our internal and external obliques.)
• Chapter 22, "Looking Like a Dancer (Even If You're Not)": Includes a very brief description of the Anchoring Principle, which I learned from martial arts master Peter Ralston, along with a brief mention of the Lotus Flower Principle (which I simply call "reaching up" in the text).

Related Personal Pathworking Steps:

At the beginning of this post, I referenced author Julia Cameron, who talks about using images to feed our artistic souls. I build on her ideas in my recent book, Unveiling: The Inner Journey. (Look at the Personal Pathworking at the end of Chapter 3, "Bedtime Stories for Grown-Up Girls.")
 

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Studying with Alay'nya

It is still possible to join us in the Alay'nya Studio in McLean, VA. Beginners meet on Sundays from 11:30 to 1PM. Learn about the Beginner's Dance Package, and email me for an invitation to join us for a complimentary introductory class: alaynya (at) alaynya (dot) com.
 

Related Posts for Using Water Energy in Dance

• Energy dancing with a water feeling