Dances with Chaos stems from the premise that, all creation is born of the inherent chaos of the unknown, stretching perpetually at the precipice of Now.
It is a desire to unlock and ignite potential, by bringing awareness, and active participation, to this meeting at the edge of Mystery, manifesting in the embodied experience of this fleeting existence.
This is the Dance of Life: my life, your life, our life is the meeting of this as the potential of authentic expression, which when met with awareness and active participation becomes a dance. It’s both my personal dance, and something I offer and share.
Over the last two decades I’ve enquired, explored, learnt, experienced, taught, fucked up, withdrawn, broken, reflected… rinsed and repeated, in no particular order and often in parallel. In a sense, the same was happening prior to that, but blindly and without actively developing a capacity for self-awareness.
Whatever ‘this’ is. it feels like an unescapable calling I’m forever drawn back into, to continue clearing the debris and (un)learning as I do. Much like the path of the shaman in certain traditional cultures, this calling is not something I decided to do from a platter of career options – I get dragged into it, kicking and screaming from a place of illness, until I accept, surrender, and honour the pain that is otherwise the unique gift of my own potential.
Perhaps this is true for all of us: being called to do whatever it is we are compelled to… fortunate enough to face the agony of our longing and deepest desires.
Stillness, Breath, Sound & Movement
Reflecting on all I’ve been called to bring into practice over these years, they appear to fit broadly into four ‘qualities’ of stillness, breath, sound and movement. These I see as a flow-state continuum of creation, between ‘Spirit’ and embodiment: nothing manifests as form and expression, returning back to nothing.
There are many different ways to experience each of these qualities. Any experiential practice most likely focuses on developing or expressing an aspect of one quality, tapping into at least one of the other qualities as support.
As an example, BlissDance is primarily an embodied, somatic practice of movement, holding the potential of being a deep meditation, traverses qualities of stillness, using both sound (typically music) and an awareness of breath to support this movement expression.
With a guided awareness, these come together as Foundation Practices, to hold and support the unlocking and igniting of potential in our dance with chaos.
A Conscious Separation with Your Conditioning
The original impetus for becoming a willing and active disruptor of my own constructs was a blind impulse towards potential, without knowing what that could be. Pretty much somewhere along the lines of jumping off a cliff and learning to fly on the way down (and being willing to ‘fail’ in the process).
I want(ed) to find out what would find expression through this being I refer to as ‘me’ if I released my grasp on security blankets, again and again and again.
Sexuality, Intimacy & Connection
Initially, this flowed towards an exploration that was largely focused on sexuality and relationship, as obvious aspects of my personal experience that required attention.
That focus is still there as aspects, among others, of opening to ‘connection’ (to give it a word that is most encompassing), with the sense that, while theoretically there is no ‘upper limit’ on potential, potential is exponentially impacted by connection, and that connection, and the quality of connection, is inherent and fundamental to the nature of our human experience.
In ‘connection’, I encompass connection with: another (relationship, however that looks), community/tribe/collective, self/identity, emotions, culture/beliefs/consensus-reality, our history/ancestry, our future becoming, Source/Gxd/Spirit/Mystery, Gaia, our bodies (as portals of conscious experience), energy, archetypes, polarities.
Or (not so) simply, the awe, wonder and mysterious magnificence of this gift, of a conscious and embodied experience if being.
With (Abundant) Love
Underpinning connection: Love (along with surrender/humility, gratitude, curiosity, and celebration), with an awareness of ‘this’ being a quantum-level, holographic, reflective experience between the inner and outer dimensions of our perceived reality.
And, to complete (for now) this reflection of the fundamentals of Dances with Chaos, as it’s showing up for me now, there is a notion of ‘abundance’: a sense that:
- we have everything we require,
- it is available to us in any given moment,
- we do the very best we can with what we have and know in each moment, and
- the quality of our connections impacts the manifestation of potential along the creation continuum.
I ‘see’ this, in its optimal, as being in an effortless state of flow, as we bear witness to the choice-less choice of Now, revealing itself in all it’s glorious splendour.
