Dancing Your Body Temple

A temple is a structure reserved for spiritual activities; such as prayer and the worship of a divinity. Often seen as the dwelling place of the Divine, a temple provides sacred containment for reverence, devotion, and connecting one's soul to Spirit.

The body is often referred to as a holy vessel or a temple. Understanding and aligning with Spirit within your body temple can provide you with a clear and direct inner path to the Divine. Hidden among the layers of skin, muscle, blood, and bone resides the creational glue of the universe.

Comprised of the fundamental forces - Earth, Water, Air, Fire, and Spirit - your body provides you with a portal to the core essence of creation. The rich matter that make up your cells flow in harmony with the universe when you honor the forces of the Divine within and dance in time to the rhythmic pulse of cosmos.

Just as an outer world temple becomes enlivened by the prayers of the people within its walls, the Divine within responds to your devotion, reverence, and activation. By dancing your body as you pray to the sacred musical pulse found in the rhythm of the sun, moon, and stars, as well as, your beating heart; you enliven the forces of creation that live inside your body temple.

With rhythmic movement you activate: 1) your earthen physical container. 2) your watery emotional energy. 3) your mental air realm. 4) your fiery life force. 5) your spiritual soul essence expression. When these elements in your body move to the tempo of music, you literally dance your prayers into being.

Without movement and the fiery energy it creates, the physical body temple becomes stagnant and lacks life force. Dance provides an exceptional tool for igniting life force, generating energy, and activating your prayers.

When you use Fire's main activity (movement), it teaches you to move your energy, move your body, move your life forward, and move out of situations that don't serve you. When a level of social change occurs, dance and music generally can be found at the forefront of that change.

In some cultures, people have felt fear around certain types of dance because they perceived them as too radical, different, or promiscuous. For instance, this happened when the dances preformed to waltz, jazz, and rock and roll music were first introduced.

In some cultures, the regulation of dance has been used as a means to control. When people's movement is very limited, their ways of thinking, their life force, power, and ability to connect to the Divine directly becomes restricted.

If you want to free your thinking, increase your creativity, free a block in your life, or fully enliven your prayers, you literally need to move in new ways. Finding new movements shifts your energy. For this reason, dance has been used to free overly-tight constraints around the physical body, or the way people perceive the world, and bring in new levels of perception.

Dancing your body temple gives you a powerful tool for moving deep issues and energies. Dancing to strongly percussive music with little or no words serves this purpose very effectively. Shamans use the ancient tools of ritual drumming and dance for connecting to the Divine, transforming energy, spiritual journeying, and achieving trance states.

Riding the rhythmic musical wave while dancing moves you into a trance state allowing access to inner realms and awareness not found in your ordinary reality. Dance can be used for increasing personal expression, opening to creative insight, connecting to the Divine within, and accessing deep levels of soul transformation.

From the beating of your own heart drum to the rising and setting of the sun, nature's elemental forces of creation provide the rhythmic pulse for your sacred dance of life. Dancing your prayers into being and enlivening your life force as you honor the Divine within, forms an entry point for the forces of creation to assist you in bringing grace into every area of your life.