Tabita Rezaire – Dance Until Exhaustion

Dance until exhaustion.

The ways of the body are deep, ancient and powerful. We tend to forget how sophisticated and mighty the body is. This is the absolute technology. It gives form to the formless. Through it we travel through space-time and can access the depth of existence… if only we listen to its guidance… as the body speaks.

Dance is a form of listening.

As we dance, the wisdoms anchored in the body are allowed to surface. The body remembers. To re-member. As in to bring home all the members of a system, of who we are, all that has been excluded – because it is too painful, too awful, too shameful. When we give permission to the whole to be seen and held, we remember. As we do, we heal.
The journey home is long as we have forgotten. Forgotten the songs. Forgotten the moves. Our bodies yearn to be moved by the flows our ancestors knew so well. Some movements survived through the times, even when their tales didn’t.
As long as we keep moving we will remember, as our ancestors live in our bodies, breathe through us, and dance with us. We are because they carried the gift of life forward. As we dance in celebration of life, we dance in celebration of them. We dance for them. To honor their gifts and release their burdens.  We dance in gratitude for what we have received, the life we were given, the life that we are.

Dancing is a grace.

Humanity has danced since time immemorial. Dancing to celebrate. Dancing to mourn. Dancing to pray. Dancing to fight. Dancing to heal. Dancing to survive.
In community. In struggle. In bliss.

We have always known the power of dance – how moving our bodies in rhythm is deeply healing. The songs of the body are many, always reminding us of our vulnerability and infinity.
Our bodies, minds and souls find expression when we dance our own dance. When we tune in to the wisdom that lives in us, we are guided to the movements we need – to rejoice, to release, to process or to transcend the world… Awakening to our inner guidance we move energy in motion. When we surrender completely, the dance becomes an expression of our inner being, allowing us to channel healing energy within. And so we dance our inner dance to nourish that voice within us that knows.
As our soul leads the dance it becomes a moving meditation, a quality of being beyond the action. It is not about dancing but about becoming the dance.
The power of dance is limitless – as art, war, therapy, spiritual exploration, or cultural expression… We birth our potentials as we dance; intuiting our way forward one swing at a time. We dance our revolutions.
Vibrate the cosmos and the cosmos shall clear the path. We are the cosmos.
Raising our arms high we dance to invoke the sky; bringing our hips down we greet the earth in reverence.

We have been dancing
We keep dancing
We will forever dance
We are the dance

We are but one dance with the earth, the universe and its source.

The process of creation itself is a dance, a dance of energy, which becomes a dance between the elements until bodies and leaves form to dance upon the wind.
Dance is geometry as everything moves in waves, patterns and rhythms.
From the geometry of the body we align with the geometry of the cosmos.
Everything is energy, everything dances.
Let us turn our life process into a dance. Let us honor the process of life as the dance that it is. And dance with it!
The choreography of life is uncertain, wild, chaotic, sometimes orderly, always full of opposites yet it remains constant and potentially fulfilling beyond our expectations.
May we become spontaneous dancers, who need neither stage nor audience, only the trust that by merging with the dance moment after moment, one merges with its source. In full movement and utter stillness we keep dancing, since the dance never stops.

Dancing to be in the world, to become the world, to birth the world and to dissolve into it again. May we find the dancer in us that we all are and find the courage to dance with life.

To abandon ourselves in the dance to find the source of the dance: the Dancer – the source which birthed the dance for us to dance. The dance that is all creation, all expression of life vibrating through endless forms and patterns. That is why rhythm is so fundamental. To find the sound and re-sound in the sound. Humanity has always turned to sound to deepen its experience of life. Dancing. Chanting. Praying. Swirling. Bowing. Tuning in to the pulse of existence. As we allow ourselves to be moved by rhythm we become dancers. And when we dance in absolute abandonment, totally involved with our whole being, our every cells and molecules dancing in unison until we don’t know what is us and what is not us, we the dancers can reach the Dancer behind the dance. Then we dance the cosmic dance.

Only in total surrender can we have an experience of the Dancer. In full, complete abandon.

In that absorption lies the ecstatic state.
Countless have danced fervently in pursuit of ecstasy and have missed it. As it is not something you find but something you become. It is not an achievement but a homecoming. There is nowhere to go, only to allow the Dancer in us to take over.
In that sense dance is a spiritual path – a technology to induce ecstasy, to experience totality.
This experience of rapture has often been seen as a threat to social order.
Societies have always sought restraint of the body, its wisdom, its power, its fury, and its fluids. We live in a world where dancing bodies are endangered, where many bodies are seen as a threat. Black, big, hairy, covered, naked, crippled, we are all on the same dance floor, despite what some may think. We are all doing our best to keep with the rhythm. In resistance we dance, for resilience we dance.

As we dance for justice, we put the body in motion to still the mind, open the heart, and ease the pain. In a wild delirium we open up the body, give up the body to break through domination and make our vessel suitable for the dwelling of infinity.
Here we say yes to the life we have been given. We consent to life. Truly.
Through breath and movement we commit to change, to serve, to love.
We dance to become love.

The lesson from the dance: not conquering life, but becoming it.

This potential is a portal! Our fullest potential is to merge with the cosmos and become the cosmos, to experience ourself as all. For this awareness to emerge within us, we first need to become nothing. To dissolve until there is nothing left of us in us, until emptiness becomes who we are. Then the whole existence can reflect without encumbrance.

We explore who we are, until we are no longer.

The ultimate dance is the dance of our dissolution. A blissful dance of devastation.
In French the word dance and dense sounds the same. I always feel the sounds behind the words are meaningful. We dance to refine the density of our beings; we dance to break free from the bondage of earth. We dance to liberate ourselves from the cyclical nature of physicality. This dance is a roar, a scream from the depth of the body to the depth of existence. In this tumult we find the point of stillness in the motion. The source. Feeling the Dancers inside the dance. Laughter pierced through the core of their being, for all they were seeking was already there.

When we are graced to become nobody, we are blessed to greet existence and connect to the absolute to co-create with life as life.

Dissolution of individual consciousness to universal consciousness.
When I say dance until exhaustion, this is what I mean. Not exhaustion as tiredness but to exhaust who we are, as in to wear out our personal identity, our sense of self-perception, self-importance, and our misery.
To dance until our sense of self disappears.
The ultimate dance is the dance of undoing the self.
So we can experience that which is not. For that which is comes from that which is not. From nothingness creation sprung. In the same way as sounds come from silence. Movement comes from stillness. The silent stillness is the source, which finds expression in the movement of sound.

This is our journey home.