The Divine Dance of Life

….if the body were not the Soul, what is the Soul?  

–  Walt Whitman, I Sing the Body Electric

One of my favorite things is waking up to a summer breeze caressing my skin, light filtering through gently billowing curtains, my body alive with possibility, open to the divine dance of life.

We all have ways of opening to the divine or, if you prefer, higher consciousness. Some use the mind through study and thinking. This is approach is highly regarded in our culture, and though I, too, love learning, read and write books, study and teach at universities, the more I work with the horses, the more I realize how language can be a buffer between me and the deep knowing of felt experience.

Spiritual exploration is another form of connecting with the divine, a no-brainer, perhaps, in a Judeo-Christian culture like ours. Growing up Catholic gave me a lifelong interest in the mysteries of the spirit. But when heartfelt spiritual exploration gets tangled up in the barbed wire of rigid dogma, it creates divisiveness and restricts access to the soul.

I have always loved, touched, cared for and ridden horses. I revel in their bodies, in my body, in the beauty and lovely functionality of the physical body. I revel in my body’s ability to transport me to deeper dimensions of awareness through the horses and also through physical activities like yoga, dance, sex, martial arts and massage.  As an avid practitioner of all these things at various times in my life, one day I understood. I wasn’t running away from anything in all my physical activity. I was moving toward. The body, I realized, though often relegated to secondary status, admonished as a thing to be monitored and controlled, when allowed, as Mary Oliver says “to love what it loves,” is a gateway—my gateway—to the divine dance of life.

As my body awakens to the breeze on my skin this morning, I feel my mare, Blue Angel, still under me from yesterday’s ride, my blue-jeaned seat on her strong bare back, my legs around her warm sides. I carry in my cells my body and Blue’s, her feet on the ground, my arms to the sky under the warm summer sun. We are one body connected to all that is, an embodied holy moment alive still in this early morning light.

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In what ways does your physical body open you to the divine dance of life?