On the divine art of prayer in movement: Belly Dancing

"Belly dancing is a dance form in which femininity and spirituality become one.
This may be the reason why it is so taboo. "

Belly Dancing is one of the most magical and healing art forms I have found. It gives me ecstasy and takes me into transcendent states of being. It is totally transformative on all levels: body, mind, emotions, and spirit. I have found no greater art form to put me in touch with my femininity, as in the ancient form of goddess femininity. Our culture and the civilization in which we live now repress sacred femininity and power of sensual dance, because a schism occurred in the patriarchal religions that separated sensuality and spirituality, but I have had to reconcile this dichotomy, and embracing my sensuality through the goddess body prayer, belly dance has brought me closer to my spirituality, to my wholeness as a woman.

Woman is a ray of God.
She is not that earthly beloved:
She is Creative, not created. --Rumi

The following are excerpts from Grandmother's Secrets, The Ancient Rituals and Healing Power of Belly Dancing by Rosina Fawzia Al-Rawi:

On the first Thursday of every month, here in grandmother's house in Arabia, the house filled up with men who brought huge drums… women of all ages would gather together for tea and they would just let their bodies go, moving freely and ecstatically, chanting la ilaha illa llah (there is no God but God) over and over, dancing and singing as a sacred form of prayer in movement, their wild movements gyrating to the beautiful Arabic oud drums. This ritual went on for hours, until time and space no longer could be perceived through the human senses. The whole day ended with a prayer for all beings on the planet..

A History of Dance:

In the early Matriarchal Societies, primitive people saw themselves holistically, as incarnations of the Great Mother's children; to them, there was no separation between the body and the world, inside and outside, this life and the next: all things were indissolubly united. The "self" was as yet undeveloped; a matriarchal holistic vision reigned. Originally, all rituals were danced; body and mind were set in motion as a unity. Through dancing, they expressed their deep emotions. These dance rituals strengthened the bonds between members of the community, expressed joy and pleasure, or praised life, and delved into the great mysteries of life, death, and the unknown. In matriarchal horticultural and agricultural societies, women secured most of the basics for survival and held key social positions. It was through women that the ecstatic dances were made into major social events.

Dancing is the oldest and most elementary form of spiritual expression; it is magical. It is because of their magical bond to the living and their knowledge of the mysteries of life that women became guides. As the bearer of life, a woman was most strongly connected to her body and its changes, as well as to the pulse of life itself. She was the giver of protection and strength. She had the capacity to connect to higher spiritual forces and preserve the unity of people, nature and the world of plants and animals. This connection to nature and the body awareness that ensued manifested themselves through dancing. Women had an understanding of the changes in their bodies. They knew when they ovulated and recognized the accompanying external signs; they observed the special sensitivity they had during their moon cycles, the visionary powers and clairvoyance. Fertility was a matter of survival in these times, and the moon played a major role in it all.

Priority was given to the night in matriarchal consciousness, when the moon was out. Day came from the night, and not the reverse as in Western culture. In the Arabic calendar, the day starts at sunset, when the night starts.

…The women danced their dance that corresponded to their body and expressed all the moods and feelings, all the longings, suffering, and joys of being a woman. Through their dance, they came into harmony with the universe, abandoning themselves to life and to the divine. What dance could express this more clearly and passionately than belly dance? It can indeed be considered the oldest dance ever danced by a woman, purely and simply the oldest dance in the whole of civilization. It expressed the longing to stretch beyond one's limitations and come closer to the divine. The whole body shook with worship as a prayer.The Sufis use dance in this way, the dhikr, which means calling God.

From Matriarchal to Patriarchal: The older, matriarchal conception of the world was replaced by a hierarchichal-patriarchal worldview and the feminine was no longer acknowledged and respected. The partnership and complementarity of man and woman became distorted, as the feminine connection to nature and life, as well as woman's proud strength, came to be considered dark, profane, and dangerous for man's "spiritual" efforts. There was a transition from lunar to solar mythology and gods, from harmony with the Earth to a military domination of it. Dance went from sacred to profane. As the times changed, so did women's dance. The sensuality and earth-connected sensuality express by women through their dance, their seduction into life, no longer served women and the mystery of being, but instead served to entertain and stimulate the onlookers.

Originally, the movement of the hips and pelvis were sacred, as they represented a ritual of life and fertility, and it was a form of prayer and sacred worship. Yet, as it became merely a form of entertainment, a show for men, it went from sacred to profane. This could especially be seen in the Roman and Greek times, when women were subjugated to a repressive patriarchal culture that did away with feminine, self-confident dancing. These societies worshipped military power. Then, in the Middle Ages, after the witch-hunts, all singing and dancing were banned by the church, and chivalrous love as an ideology created the image of a Christian, moral, and virtuous woman and the "gentleman". The process aimed to dampen desire and control the body, which was sinful. At this time though, it was the gypsies who brought the lively, sensual, and earthly pelvic dances from India and Arabia to Europe. Music, songs, and dancing lay at the center of their lives.

During the Industrial Times, with the rise of capitalism and technology and the ruthless exploitation of nature, a self-disciplined individual was called for. Man was alienated from nature. The subjective sense of time and the sensitivity of individual rhythms, which were based on faith and a feeling of connection to nature, were henceforth replaced by a universally valid, linear, and abstract division of time. With the new "exact" sciences and their mathematical explanations, pure mind began its triumphant progress over pulsions, feelings, and emotions. All needs or experiences likely to threaten conscious control were viewed with mistrust and fear. The ideological equation of the feminine with nature and physicality, and the masculine with culture and reason, lent a quasi-scientific legitimization to the oppression of women. The beginning of "civilization." Life became separated into work and family, a separation between masculine and feminine domains.

N Praise of Dancing:

From the mind into the body. Body knowledge starts by removing attention from the mind and focusing entirely on movement. The movements of belly dancing enable a woman to understand and experience a natural rhythm. In this dance form, she swings her limbs around the center of the body, around the navel of the world, through waves and swinging, rhythmical movements of the pelvis, through movements older than any single woman, indeed older than human civilization. We dance to become one with a rhythm that was here before us and will remain after we are gone. Through dancing a human being can move beyond limits, into a world of great thoughts where the yearning for transformation lingers and where the majesty of the true self is recognized. With dancing, each human being becomes ancient and universal.

The natural ecstasy released through dancing takes the dancer beyond his or her isolation and feeling of being separate. It turns the drop into a river. It is a divine form of union. Dancing is the most direct way to become aware of your inner space and of the space outside your body. Dancing unfolds feelings, longing, and nostalgia as well as the mind's powers of observation and thought. Dancing is a way to find the teacher inside, in oneself. The wings of imagination soar through dancing. In the heat of dancing, the barriers between mind and body vanish. Through dancing, people discover the beauty and the strength that lie within; and through the natural ecstasy of dancing, they learn to surrender to a higher force that lets them guess at the unity and wholeness of life. Through their movements, they come to nestle in the movements of the universe and in turn their own movements are reflected in the movements of the stars, the flowers, and the newborn child. In this instant, the world becomes a work of art, a kingdom of unity. The heart open and a great reconciliation with oneself and others can take its course.

Through dancing, people understand their feelings. They are moved by feelings of lightness and happiness that enable them to take life easier, to overcome its ups and downs with a lighter foot. Through dancing, people free themselves from the certainty of death and connect to the pulse of life. The barriers between I and you become less marked; the methods by which we accommodate reality to our own mold lose their rigidity. The painful coincidence of free will and destiny can be grasped in its greatness, which helps us become children of nature. Free choice and surrender can both be expressed through dancing and turned into intuition.

The Dichotomy of the Dual Nature of Woman.

Through dancing, a woman can oppose the splitting between the social and the natural, as well as the taming of her wilder self, which can start early in a male-dominated history. A woman thus learns to name and express the being that lives deep inside her, waiting and longing to be discovered. This is the other, hidden self, the one who does not match norms or expectations, the one who roars like a lioness….this one lives mostly in the background, in the dark cave, deep inside the belly, and only seldom surfaces. Dancing helps you start to heal this inner split. It offers the conscious and the unconscious, the rational and the intuitive a space in which they may gradually flow into eachother. Two ancient forces live within every woman, two distinct female beings that combine to create the feminine mystery that men find so difficult to understand. While one force is usually soft, understanding, civilized, and human, the other is often just the contrary. Both forces make a woman into a full female, a whole human being. Clarissa Pinkola Estes expresses it as follows: "the paradox of woman's twin nature is that when one side is more cool in feeling tone, the other side is more hot. When one side is more lingering and rich relationally, the other may be somewhat glacial." This dual nature makes a woman into an intuitive and instinctual feminine creature. When both sides are given expression, life and nurturing, a woman can enjoy all her strength and all her energy, she can rise above the projected split and live intensely in the moment. Patriarchal societies have forced women into stereotyped roles: the understanding, virtuous, and self-sacrificing woman, or the passionate, seductive and frightening woman. These categories tear up a woman and rob her of her strength. To be respected and taken seriously, she tries to hide her femininity and constrict her body into an emotional corset. Split into saints and witches, women were at once put above and beneath the reality of life; they were supposed to derive happiness and satisfaction from a peripheral existence, supposedly in harmony with their "natural" role, namely self-sacrifice and submission. Dancing is an opportunity for a woman to look at these facets in a light and playful way, before deciding where she wants to stand. Belly dancing is a dance form in which femininity and spirituality become one. This may be the reason why it is so taboo.