The question isn’t what is my dance? Or how do I dance? The question is can I let go of ego-mind thinking enough to allow the dancer I AM to flow through every atom of this body in abandoned bliss, so creating and expressing the purpose of this lifetime?
I first heard this concept of being the dance and Life Itself being the dancer from a talk by Eckhart Tolle – it has fascinated me ever since.
In this state of being danced by the dancer of Life Itself, fear is an illusion, as is worry, doubt, guilt, obligation or any other such mind-created state.
In this state, the flower I was born to be, blossoms in its own exquisite way – a lily in the field.
Picture that humble yet magnificent lily bent and broken under the burden of such fear-ridden emotion. It has no choice but to wither and die.
Luckily for the lily – it knows not how to allow such devasting thinking into its existence. So it dances. It dances in the pure and absolute joy of simply being and expressing that which it was born to do.
Hiding Your Light Under A Bushel
How painful it is when we hide the light within that waits to shine. We become isolated – not in the sense of being alone – but in the sense of being disconnected from who we really are and we end up living from a place of ignorance. We think we are our thoughts and the resulting life we live is perfect evidence of such thinking.
For so long I have walked my own journey of awakening. It has become very clear to me when I am being danced and when I am resisting and shutting out the dancer. Certainly, little by little those barriers have been broken down as I persevered on my path. Yet the essence of daily dancing so often faded from the first clear connection in my mornings until by evening I was tired, drained and trying to escape those feelings through food or tv or other addictive, escaping mechanisms.
When All Else Fails – Surrender
But eventually, perseverance pays off. Old patterns became so painful that I was forced to surrender fully to them. Suffering does that. There’s a point at which it becomes just too much to resist anymore and letting go becomes the only option left.
The dancer in me called and the ego-mind collapsed. I learned that it wasn’t a matter of getting ‘out there and making it happen’. That is will and while will has its place, (mostly in choosing where to place focus), the real secret to collapsing ego-mind is allowing. Allowing resistance to be there, to appear in its myriad forms – (illness, anger, distraction, addiction – to name but a few) – and then allowing the dancer to emerge from that darkness into the light of pure, unadulterated, love of life. To simply dance for the sake of dancing and nothing more. To persevere with processes that connect and open up a space for that deeper dimension to flow through all the moments of our days.
It’s the expression of Life Itself that creates more of that same life force. It multiplies as it dances by radiating that joy out into the world. No matter the form of that expression, be it a humble lily in the field or a timeless leader and teacher known and beloved far and wide, it is the expression that counts, not the form.
Focus is Key
Staying on the straight and narrow path requires the ability to refocus that monkey mind, minute by minute, just as a pilot refocuses the course of the plane, minute by minute (or at least the instruments do). And that is the job of me, this body and mind, in this incarnation, to keep the vehicle aimed straight and clear so the dancer within, the I AM essence, is free to dance. Wallace Wattle, the early 1900 author of The Science of Being Rich wrote something along the lines of … the hardest thing you will ever do is focus the mind. Life has indeed taught me so, but how magnificent the rewards.
When we feel wonderful we are being danced – Life Itself is dancing through us.
