Dances, Trances, Magic and Harmony

You can dance your way home. 

You can dance your way to peace, prosperity and harmony.

Dancing throughout history has been used ritualistically for spiritual purposes, dramatically for artistic purposes, as well as recreationally for fun and to deepen civic ties within the community.

In a secular civilization you will only ever get to experience dancing recreationally and watching dramatic dances both from high culture at the ballet, and in the every-day through the dances that are popular on platforms like Tik-Tok and Instagram. 

You will seldom see a Church using dance to express and experience spiritual truth in secular societies, especially in the West where the cult of the individual has replaced communal worship. (Although there is a rich history of religious institutions dancing) Whilst in the east, dance plays a much more important role in the worship of divinity and the experience of spiritual and ecstatic trance states of mind. 

Dancing triggers Trance States

Throughout history it has been known to spiritual practitioners that specific movements to a specific rhythm (a simple drum beat, or a full symphonic orchestra) will trigger an expanded state of consciousness and a sacred experience. The experience the dancer has can be as simple as entering into a visionary trance to receive prophetic visions from deities and spirits venerated by their culture, all the way up to experiencing union with the ultimate divinity and a personal revelation of gnosis. 

Experiencing these states of mind during a spiritual dance will affect your psyche and impact your every-day state of being and in turn your behaviour on a day to day basis. This is because interplay between the inner world of imagination and fantasy, and the outer world of consensual reality is governed by the same magic that dance seeks to embody in order to affect casual change in outer reality.

Does The Top Table Dance?

If your status in society is such that the consequences of your behaviour have a large effect on humanity and the environment then doing the wrong dance that evokes malevolent inner states could have disastrous consequences for the rest of us.

Similarly, do the right dance, make the right moves, and move gracefully in synchronisation with your partners; and you could have harmonious consequences for everyone and everything as a state of harmony flows from your inner world, magically out into the outer world; having a seemingly casual effect.

Refuse to dance at all and your subject’s might not follow your steps. 

Dancing for Harmony

On a personal level for individuals, scientific studies show the overwhelming positive benefits that dance can have on your physical, mental and spiritual health.

And at a communal level the results also speak for themselves as to the benefits dancing can have on the health of a community, society and potentially civilization at a global level.

If you learn a dance where the choreography has you dancing in harmony with others then you will enter a trance where you embody a state of personal and relational health with your dance partners. 

Having experienced a state of true harmony with your partners during the dance, you will carry some of that embodied experience into your day to day life, resulting in a different experience of being which dictates what you do and therefore the results you get in life.

Aside from dance, there are other ways of experiencing a state of harmony with others, for example singing together, or coming together in creative art or religious/spiritual exercises for communal purposes. But nothing comes close to the depth of the relationship you establish with a dance partner. Especially during a ritualistic dance where the moves are choreographed to represent divine harmony, triggering a trance of supreme relational health between all dancers, resulting in civic flourishing after the dance. 

Dancing is powerful magic that helps find your own sense of inner-harmony, and, if you dance together with others as a troupe or company will help you find a sense of relational harmony in the movements of the dance.

Learning to Dance: Throwing Some Shapes

But where do you start? Especially if you don’t consider yourself a dancer and just want to learn some basic moves so you don’t feel awkward?

To begin you want to match a basic movement to a beat in a rhythmic way.

In order to do this it’s easiest if you think of shapes and dancing around them or following the lines of the shape as you move your body between the points of the shape. The movement between each point to a rhythmic beat helps you establish a sense of coordination and harmony with your dance. 

To start begin with just your feet and the shape of a diamond. 

Stand in the middle of the diamond. 

Then, to the beat take your left foot and move it out to the left point of the diamond. 

Then move it back to center. 

Then move your right foot out to the right point of the diamond.

Then move it back to center. 

Then move your left foot forward to the front point of the diamond. 

Then move it back to center. 

 Move your right foot backwards to the point of the diamond behind you. And then bring it back to center.

Do this to music, a track with a rhythmic beat and you’ve begun to dance. 

By using the points of a shape to guide the foot placement you can dance in a more fluid and natural way which enables you to stop consciously focusing on your dance movements, loosening the grip of fixed reality so you can enter into a trance state, triggered by the specific movements of your dance which aim to embody specific energies. 

From here, if you want to establish a state of harmony with others, you just need to know the choreography of the dance you need to do between you to enter into a trance of harmony embodied.  

To go further you can dramatize the dance, each dancer playing a character so the dance represents an archetypal pattern expressed in an artistic way that leads to a sense of catharsis resulting in a deeper sense of shared experience and communality.