Sacred Learnings from the Dance Floor

This week’s dance revelation didn’t come to me on the 5 Rhythms dance floor. But at Ecstatic Nights San Diego.

It’s technically in the same dance floor. Only, it isn’t.

Different people facilitating the same space creates a completely new arena.
Add a few carpets, LED lights, bodies dressed in color and glitter, and suddenly the space is a whole new location.
Sacredness becomes electric. Ritual meets rave.

On the Five Rhythms floor, I dance with my soul family. I dance with the man who feels like a long-lost brother. The woman who was my grandmother in my past life. A soul I feel I’ve danced with on our wedding night lifetimes ago.

There is intimacy there.

I don’t feel that same intimacy on the ecstatic floor. Maybe because I’m not a regular in that community. Perhaps because I don’t feel spiritually tethered to those people.

And yet, that’s exactly why I went.

I needed a space where no one knew me.
Where I could be fully, audaciously, stupidly, ridiculously alive.
Where I could flirt, be sensual, shake like the drummer at the edge of madness.

The Five Rhythms floor, as sacred as it is to me, is not always a space to be fully untamed. Sometimes the container feels more controlled than held.

My soul was craving the wildness of dancing in the dessert, under a full moon, howling like lobas and lobos in the dark.

A lobo found me almost immediately.

His eyes locked with mine, our bodies found each other before the rhythm dropped, his forehead glided against mine as our heads synched in flow.

And thus began an electric exchange that illuminated the sacred power of shared presence: where connection becomes a merging of awareness itself.

Usually it takes me a while to fully drop into the dance. To get out of the thinking mind. The mind that wants to label, to take notes, to learn. The mind that watches the body move and wants a grade.

But when someone comes to meet you on the floor, and your body grooves with theirs, the mental chatter disparities. Your body’s attention synchronizes with their body. Your mind can’t run off to other places because something alive is happening right here, right now. You feel the world around you inhale and exhale.

Your hips move before your mind tells them to. You make eye contact with the lobo, who smirks at you as he grooves. And you groove back.

The chase, the thrill, the play, they tether you powerfully into the present moment. A moment that feels like a scene from an Iñárritu film. A world of colors, a sea of dancing, smiling, radiating bodies. A sensual chase. A playful chase. A tasteful gliding of bodies, of foreheads and chests, barely touching, fully touching, then barely again.

This chase, this sacred dance invited me into that other realm,
the lush, shimmering reality artists enter
when they are no longer creating,
but being created through.

I was there.
Alive in a way that felt almost too bright for the body to hold.
Beaming, expanding, becoming.

It felt as if I were pulling something invisible down from the sky,
threading it through my breath,
through my hips,
through the quiet intelligence of my bones,
and offering it back to the earth as movement.

Sacred Pause.

When he glided out of orbit, the world flickered.
That glowing ecstatic, bubble of joy I had been forming all around my body, popped suddenly.
Like a dream slipping out of memory the moment you wake.

God. Goddess. Drew me a metaphor here.

A lobo who pulls you in, lifts you toward the ethers.. and the sudden groundlessness when he goes. The falling. The floor rushing up to meet you.

This wasn’t the first time.

It happened last month, outside the dance floor. And here it was again, arriving as as reflection dressed in music, dressed in a stranger’s smirk and swaying hips. The same lesson, different costume.

Beat.

Why am I being shown this again?

I sat with the question the way you sit with a card after you pull it.

And what came was this:

Union allows for rupture. And rupture creates a wound, which is really an opening. The opening through which the stem unfolds onto the sky.

Now the Lobo leaving wasn’t rupture, but it reminded me of my pain. The abandonment wound I tucked in a shoe box deep under my bed. The one that started bleeding out last month, after trust was broken yet again.

Somehow that trail of crimson liquid followed me onto the dance floor, it stopped me from flowing and locked me tightly in a glare. I couldn’t keep moving, all I could do was watch as the blood crept closer to my feet.

Just keep dancing, I told myself, trying to get my mind out of my bedroom, out of my pain, and into the dance, into the temple.

It was like trying to run through water. Heavy. Awkward. I had to wrestle that voice down , the one that kept scanning the room, wondering if anyone had seen him leave, if anyone was quietly witnessing my sudden solitude.

And then came the embarrassment of even caring about that at all. The inner cringiness of letting something so fleeting as a boy dancing away from me knock me off center.

I was stuttering in my dance. Struggling to keep the mind body connection that was fueling my movement. My hips and neck and spine where no longer in conversation, the flow was leaving my essence.

But then I re-membered, this is my dance floor.

The same floor where, every Sunday morning, I meet something sacred inside myself. The place where the god and goddess in me stop being ideas and become sensation. breath, sweat, movement. The place that has brought me home to myself, again and again, without fail.

So I softened my gaze. Closed my eyes just enough to blur the edges of the world. Let the music find its way into me instead of trying to find my way into it. Let my body lead, the way it knows how to , when I stop interrupting it.

And slowly, I returned.

Back into my rhythm.
Back into my body.
Back into that quiet, glowing current that runs underneath everything

It’s not performative, not something you offer to be seen or approved of. It belongs to you and to whatever moves through you when you are fully there; unguarded, unedited, alive.

And only then, only after I found my way back to that place, to that zone, did the others begin to appear.

Dancers drifting closer, catching onto my rhythm, responding without words to the vibration ushered into the space.

And that was a reminder of why dancing is such a potent spiritual teacher. It helped me re-member this truth:

You don't attract the dance by looking for a partner. You attract partners by becoming the dance itself.

Sacred Pause

It’s the same in life and in love. You don’t attract love by looking for it. You attract love by becoming it.

And no, I am not repeating that terrible lie they say about being “unable to love someone until you love yourself.”

As a cancer-rising who wants nothing but to love, nourish, and heal, I can tell you with certainly, that you can deeply, profoundly, painfully, love someone without ever having loved yourself first.

Anyone who has ever been in love knows this, not just cancers and water signs.

I mean, haven’t you ever been lying in bed thinking about how thirsty you are but feeling too lazy to go get yourself a cup of water? You just lie there, parched, negotiating with your own body, waiting for the thirst to pass.

And yet, place someone you love beside you. Let them murmur the same need, and watch as you suddenly rise to the occasion, to bring this perfect, beautiful person you care about so much a cup of hydration.

No hesitation. No negotiation. You bring them water as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

That gap, that quiet, invisible gap between how I care for others and how I care for myself is where so much of my suffering lives.

And standing there, in the middle of the dance floor, feeling myself come back to life without anyone choosing me first, I understood something gently but clearly:

It’s not that I must love myself perfectly before I can love others.

It’s that I must learn to include myself in the love I so freely give away.

To become both the one who is thirsty
and the one who rises to bring the water.

To be just as excited about dancing with myself, as I am excited about dancing with a particular lobo.

I haven’t mastered this. I won’t pretend the dance floor cured me. The shoebox is still under the bed. Still bleeding.

But I danced my way back to myself that night. And that was enough.

For now, that is everything.