Dancing in the Footsteps of the Divine

I entered my T'ai Chi Chih practice this morning after Frances and I watched the rising red sun shoot a spike of pink-red light upward into the clouds. The brightening sky morphed into pure white light glittering with silver sparks of tiny tumbling snowflakes. I wanted to be those snowflakes.

Of course I couldn't float and glide and sparkle like teeny bits of moisture but that didn't stand in my way. If it wasn't possible with my body, I could join the shimmering display in my mind. Divine!

Sometime during my practice I thought of Dorcas, one of the first T'ai Chi Chih teachers I met in the late-80s, early-90s. I was in a two-year Psychosnythesis training program with Dorcas and my eventual TCC teacher, Paula. During one of our training breaks Dorcas and Paula invited group members to join them in a T'ai Chi Chih practice and I eagerly accepted their invitation. Although the TCC didn't capture me immediately it was the first step on this path that I continue to follow some 20 years later.

I received an email last week notifying Twin Cities' teachers of a memorial service for Dorcas who died several days before Christmas. I recalled my interview with Dorcas for a story I wrote and published in the Minnesota Women's Press in December 1999, "To dance in the footsteps of the Divine."

By this point in her TCC practice Dorcas had ventured into yet another purpose and passion, an event called Womansong. This evening of song and dance was designed to use women's songs to connect to the feminine face of God. As co-creator of Womansong Dorcas believed that movement helped bring the experience of the divine to a deeper, more personal level than sedentary forms of prayer.

"The sacred is within and without and the movements help me to see that I am connecting with all that is around me, within me, above me, below me," Dorcas told me during our interview, "I discovered when attempting to connect with the sacred that movements with arms extended upward or hands over the heart seem to stir within me certain feelings even more powerful than words."

Dorcas specifically mentioned Daughter on the Mountain Top as one TCC movement that felt like a prayer. She continued, "I've decided that if everybody danced, we wouldn't be at war because you can't dance and fight at the same time. There is such power in dancing together." (Justin Stone, the creator of TCC, does not call TCC dance although he does believe that if everyone did TCC practice, there wouldn't be war.)

Another interviewee for the story, Hiyalah Indiga, developed Earth Dance, an interplay of words and motions formulated from a reworking of the Lord's Prayer originally attributed to Karen Loveland, a member of Unity Church in Santa Rosa, California. Hiyalah told me, "When you connect with your body, you connect with your breath and you connect with that flow of energy in your body. I think that's a spiritual experience and I think that can be like a prayer."

Indeed, my experience practicing T'ai Chi Chih moving meditation led me to propose this story idea to the editor of the Women's Press in the first place. At that point in my TCC journey I realized that I wasn't simply meditating during my TCC practice, I was also engaging in prayer. As I summed up in the final paragraph of the Women's Press story:

To open our hearts, minds and bodies to the renewing effects of free-flowing energy, to move and truly experience the life force first-hand, may be among the most satisfying and suitable ways for us to express our reverence and gratitude in prayer.