Firebird Trance Dance , Shamanism and the Vision Quest of the Soul
Posted: Friday, June 15, 2007
by Leo Rutherford
Eagle's Wing
Trance-Dance is an ancient healing path, perhaps as much as 50,000 years old. The rhythm of the drum the heartbeat of Mother Earth guides the dancer deep within. Dance takes us naturally and effortlessly from thinking to being, melting into oneness with existence. The deeper we connect with the rhythm of the dance and the less inhibitions and self-concern we hold onto, the more we can enter into the magic healing place of deep trance
Trance-dance, as therapy, is totally non-judgemental and has no expectation of you. It is an invitation, an induction into the Spirit of the Dance, and it is The Goddess of the Dance that will do the rest. All you have to do is let yourself go fully into the rhythm…..
The Firebird Trance-Dance is derived from the traditions of West Africa and the Afro-Brazilian cultures, specifically the Candomble and Umbanda, and also the Gnawa Moroccan tradition, all of which have their roots in West Africa .
Traditional societies all over the world dance. They dance to celebrate, to bring their society together and they dance to enter the spirit worlds and receive guidance and help. Dance is as important a gateway to the spirit worlds for traditional shamans as is the shamanic journey. In fact there is little difference other than one is in movement and the other supine. One can dance to find and retrieve a power animal just as effectively as by journeying.
The Tungus people of Siberia (where the word shaman comes from) dance to travel to the upper and lower worlds. To travel to the lower world the shaman will call his reindeer helper and engage in a complex dance to embody the process of the journey. And yes – shades of Father Christmas whose earliest origins come from these northern lands where the reindeer was considered a valuable spirit helper as well as a practical assistant in the everyday.
The !Kung bushmen of South Africa dance to channel a healing power they call !num which comes to the dancers as a boiling heat. It seems that initially the dance is agony but as they come to harmony with the power, it becomes ecstatic and they can bring the power to the sick and heal with it. West African traditions have used dance since before recorded time and many traditions have their origins there such as the Gnawas of Morocco and the Candomble and Umbanda of Brazil.
The Sun Dance, as practiced by the Lakota and other Native North American nations, is a community prayer dance which usually goes on for three or four days and involves considerable sacrifice by the participants. It is a dance of thanksgiving for being alive and is also a seeking of personal and community vision in which the dancers push themselves beyond ordinary physical limits into an ecstatic state.
Another Native American dance is known as the Long Dance. It is a ceremonial dance in which the participants usually dance in a circle, often around a fire, and which goes on a long time, typically from dusk till dawn. I have participated in many British versions of this and found them to be wondrous, uplifting, celebratory, energy moving and sometimes transcendent happenings. Like a hiker getting to second wind, one has to dance through the pain threshold until the dance begins to do the dancing, the barriers of self and energy melt and the space begins to move around the still point of oneself. Then Existence-Is and ‘Self’ is just a concept of a part of that all embracing, throbbing, vital being that is the Dance-Of-Life.
In Europe the Tarantella was a form of trance-dance in which the participants would shake and tremble. Then there was the group of white Christians in America known as the Shakers who danced and sang and shook but unfortunately they were infected with such strong anti-sexual ideas that they stopped making love and all died out! More recently there is the wonderful work of Gabrielle Roth, who got me started on the dancing path back in 1978 from which I am more than glad to say I have never looked back.
First experience of Afro-Brazilian Trance-Dance
I first encountered the Afro-Brazilian trance dance in 1984 when I attended the European Association of Humanistic Psychology Conference that year in Guildford , Surrey . One of the sessions was Trance Dancing with Dr Jacques Donnars (of Paris ) and Professor Arnold Keyserling (Of Vienna). They needed music and I supplied them with my ghetto blaster and a tape of Olatunji’s Drums of Passion.
What I experienced at the session was extraordinary. In quite a short time demure people who one might expect to be shy and inhibited were dancing with crazy wild abandon. Professor Keyserling kept telling me to turn the music up louder and I remember struggling with my player to somehow extract a bit more volume. In those days I was somewhat more inhibited than I am now so I waited some time before trying the dance myself. Finally I dared to have a go: Jacques told me to keep my eyes closed and then he held my head firmly and turned it around a few times and then spun my whole body. Soon I found myself dancing on a world which seemed to be tilted by about 30 degrees. When I began to fall someone would support me and I spun around in this crazy world dancing wildly until in a moment of panic I blinked my eyes open. The spell was broken as I saw the dirty concrete floor and people’s legs.
They called it Terpsichore Trance Therapy, or TTT for short. Terpsichore is the Greek Goddess of the dance. This experience made me determined to follow up and learn more and this I was able to do when one of Dr Donnars’ trainees came to London and gave a workshop. I then began to experiment with the dance myself and learn more by trial and error.
In the late 80’s, the Trance Dance helped me find an entryway into more passionate living and it brought about some transformative moments for workshop participants, yet I felt the need to know more and understand it at a deeper level. In 1992 I went to an International Conference on Trance and Healing in Marrakech at which 250 people from 25 countries were present, including Dr David Akstein, the founder of TTT, and representatives from the Afro Brazilian traditions of Umbanda and Candomble which were his primary source inspirations. The local Gnawas, who come from the melding of West African and Middle Eastern Sufi traditions, were present too and I had my first experience of their night-long ceremony, the Derdeba, and of their extraordinary trance inducing music. The conference rekindled my enthusiasm for the whole field of Trance Dancing and so called ‘spirit possession’ as a path to accessing healing altered states of consciousness and experiences of hidden aspects of Self and the Universe. There were many sessions on TTT with Dr Donnars and his son Alain, at which I took the opportunity to enter the dance as many times as possible. There was a wonderful ritual with Carlos Buby of the Umbanda tradition from Sao Paulo , many other experiential sessions and numerous intellectual discussions on the meaning and value of these ancient ways.
I have worked with the Trance Dance since then and found it an amazingly powerful tool. It can move a stuck person into release, surprisingly easily and quickly and without the struggle through ‘resistance’ usually encountered when working in therapy mode; it can take someone to amazing places of cosmic light and laughter; it can liberate aspects of a person they didn’t know existed and hadn’t encountered before.
Trance Dancing is almost as old as humanity, nothing could be further from some New Age new fangled cure-all fad-therapy. Dancing is natural, the beat of the drum is primal, stomping on the earth is basic to human beingness, rhythm brings order to life. There is a wonderful quote, I forget where from, which says “The lords of chaos hate rhythm"! That’s right - rhythm entrains the brainwaves and helps us into a state of consciousness where the natural laws of the Universe are more easily assimilable and where our own true natures come to the surface from beneath whatever repression we live.
And we Westerners live under plenty of repression. We are like a nation of control freaks, terrified to let go and let the Spirit enter and take us where it will. After all, who knows where that may be? We are forever trying to impose our own conditions upon Spirit and say ‘ yes but - I’ll change so long as it can be like this - within my known parameters - within my self-chosen limits’. But change means change - it means entering the chaos of the unknown, and by definition that means the future cannot be known, controlled or bargained over! Sorry - Spirit will accept no pre-conditions. We cannot know who we will be after change until we get there!
African traditions, and many other indigenous cultures, have worked with ‘spirit possession’ for centuries. It sounds scary but if I reframe it as ‘ego dispossession’, then it is perhaps easier to comprehend. It means having the willingness to enter the unknown where the Spirit and not the little ego-mind rules. In our religious history, ego control has got associated with ‘God’, and an ordered rational Appollonian Universe full of repressed people has been labelled ‘godly’, while wild Dyonysian letting go, natural uninhibited dancing and drumming, liberation into the realm of unbridled Spirit, has got muddled up with evil and ‘devil’. It is no wonder this is a hard culture to live in happily. To be a ‘normal’ person we have to bottle up so much of our self, of our true Spirit!
In this day and age much is happening to help people to greater freedom from the belief systems which brought about the mental, emotional, physical and spiritual slavery of the past. Trance-Dancing is a way of reaching back to our ancient indigenous roots in order to help us present day people touch the freedom of Spirit, the right to our own life choices, the passion of life fully lived. Or, as the Native Americans might say, to ‘ dance our dreams awake’.
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Top-level comments on this article: (1 total)LOVED IT! You are an inspiration. Please do stay in touch. I think we have similar views in the world. I would be honored if you would take a peak at my website. LifeDanceCenter dot com. Warmth and blessings always, Francesca
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