For me, the beauty of trance dance is that it enables a direct experience with the unified source of life that is variously called God, unconditional love, unity, Great Mystery and many other names.
My personal journey has taken me through experiments with psychoactive plants, yoga, tai chi and the consumption of the material contained within countless spiritual and new age books. In my search for meaning, I have cried with both laughter and pain, flown ecstatically high and crumbled in the face of death. I have cowered with fear and climbed with joy and utter delight. This journey, of course, continues.
It is in the practice of shamanism, however, that my absolute passion for both inner and outer nature has found full expression. Growing up in a rural community in west Worcestershire and spending most of my childhood on the family farm, provided the opportunity for daily contact with the earth, the wind, sunshine and rain, snow and ice and fog. I was able to observe and more importantly interact with the mass of life I discovered in each direction I turned.
It is only now, with a warm and gentle realisation, that I understand this beginning in life to have been a necessary immersion into the physical expression of love. How incredibly wondrous nature is, that she should tempt me with her beauty, yet only to bring me to myself, to the understanding that there is no separation and that the web of life touches all with its luminous strands.
In periods of chaos, despair and utter loneliness, all I truly knew was that the trees and varied greenery offered sanctuary of such deep simplicity, that my heart could not refuse. The Garden of Eden continues. It is ever present in the gaps between leaves and branches, boughs and bristles.
This literal worship and acknowledgement of the beauty of nature is the drum beat of my heart. It is in the dance of the seasons that I lose myself and become the dance itself. It is nature that has sung my cells awake, so I know only that God, Great Mystery, call it what you will, is the dance and the dancer, the heart and creator, the love and the lover.
In trance dance, I invite the trees and birds and bees to come and taste the human breeze. In the dance we meet, in the dance we merge and I cry with the memory that we are one.
