THE IMPORTANCE OF THE JOURNEY TO WHOLENESS ~ PART 3

The Journey from Pain to Pleasure is the Journey to Wholeness 💃

The astounding mass success of a book and film in recent history provides a great example of the universality of the truth of the ancient Indian adage:

“All humans live in a house with four rooms.

The head room. The heart room. The body room.

The spirit room.

If each room is not visited every day, if only to air it, the person will not feel whole at the end of the day”.

“Eat. Pray. Love.” is a true story that touched the hearts and minds of millions, first in a bestselling novel, followed by a blockbuster success of a film. I myself watched the film, and understood it to be a story about a woman, based on the life of the author, who woke up one day in her busy life in a major city in the United States, married and successful in her career, yet feeling frightfully empty. The emptiness takes over to such a degree, that she finds herself sobbing in her private moments and praying to a God she does not even believe in. The pain of the imbalance in her life leads her to disband her marriage, take a sabbatical from work, and travel.

On her journey out to the wider world, she discovers her much neglected inner world. This journey systematically shifts her imbalance from living in her head to an extreme, making decisions with her rational mind, making her choices using her logical brain and living life from the neck up - all in her Head Room, to first locating then gradually celebrating spending time in the other three dust and cobweb filled rooms that were so stifled they were literally suffocating her; her Body Room (Eat), her Spirit Room (Pray) and finally her Heart Room (Love). This is how I see the ancient Indian adage clearly portrayed through this story.

Respectively, in Italy, India, and Bali, the heroine first finds the key to the door of each of the neglected Rooms, turns the handle, and enters and airs the Rooms maybe for the first time in her adulthood. The initial mentally and emotionally painful disorientation she clearly feels (as she chokes on the dust and fights through the cob webs) subsides and gives way to sunshine, fresh new perspectives, and ideas, and ultimately comfort and joy pouring in, due to the newly unveiled curtains and opened windows.

The excruciating pain she felt was the pain of not feeling whole (living in her Head Room), and as a bridge to wholeness, she had to first locate, then maintain a loving relationship with, her other three Rooms. Only then did she find her personal power and her self-love, which led to finding the love of another that met her right there in that beautiful place of balance.

The Four Rooms in Belly Dance

After two decades of dancing and teaching the dance of my homeland, especially with a focus on dancing from the heart in improvisation, I have come to the firm belief that it really can help alchemise a woman’s life.

The ancient practice of Belly Dance offers us some gentle ways of reconnecting to each Room in our being and is especially powerful at helping a woman to find a more feminine way of living through awakening her female body, igniting her sensuality, opening her heart and finding expression for her spirit.

The ancient practice of Belly Dance offers us some gentle ways of reconnecting to each Room in our being.

For dancers, each Room consists of many inner and outer skills the dancer needs to learn and become proficient at. And so, Belly Dance is a great training ground to find ourselves and our power inside of each Room. Our Beloved Dance teaches us the following:

Belly Dance is a great training ground to find ourselves and our power inside of each Room.

The Head Room:

❖ Learn how to think on our feet - Fast clear thought processing.

❖ Integrate routines and choreography - Ordered sequential structured thinking.

❖ Understand & identify rhythms - Mathematical awareness.

❖ Learn patterns and sacred geometry - Spacial awareness.

❖ Learn technique and movement skills - Methodical & logical

collation of data.

Most teachers and most schools do this as standard. But in many cases, that’s where it ends. So you, as a student of the dance, will most probably have this covered to some extent in your learning journey.

The Heart Room:

❖ Learn emotional expression - Grow emotional intelligence.

❖ Feel all emotions while dancing - Develop emotional agility.

❖ Feel the emotions in the music and songs - Emotional expression and awakening.

❖ Connect through your dance to passion & joy - Elevating your emotional life.

❖ Learn to dance through the Heart, to Improvise with ease - Letting go of control.

The Body Room:

❖ Embody the dance - Empower & embody your femininity.

❖ Feel your skin, experience your moments sensually - Sensual awakening. ❖ Drop into your body, your belly, your pelvis - Claim the woman within.

❖ Love your feminine body, and learn to shine - Heal shame & body image issues.

❖ Presence, self-possession, physical awareness - Coming into your power. ❖ Grow your muscle memory range - Physical intelligence, strength & agility.

The Spirit Room:

❖ Connect with breath - Awaken your awareness.

❖ Connect with energy and move it through you, through the dance - Ignite your energetic system.

❖ Awaken your spirit if you are disconnected - Elevate consciousness.

❖ Connect with the source of your dance energy, be supported - Energise your dance & your being.

❖ Connect to your inner dancer wisdom, be guided - Express the artist within.

❖ Learn to go with a flow not created by your mind, be aware of the presence of your inner being while dancing - Creative Process training.

Most schools do not enter into these Rooms to cover these very essential elements of Belly Dance.

Likely you have missed training in these parts of the Dance and potentially are disconnected from these parts of yourself.

Learning to enter each part of your being and fall in love with it, is the function of the journey to wholeness.

If you have heard The Call to Teach our Dance, it is imperative that you learn how to do so holistically, in order to stay true to the Dance’s roots, teach it in its fullness to your beautiful students or future students, and help them grow their dance journey on the strongest of foundations.

I wish you learning, growth, and self-discovery in your journey as a teacher of our Beloved Dance, leading to a more joyous, powerful, and beautiful dance experience that will enrich your life for many years to come, and also help you have a fuller experience of yourself as a passionate, beautiful, capable, sensual, juicy, gorgeous, fully expressed and the whole woman.

May all love surround you.

Shemiran xo

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For Mentoring:

The journey to wholeness is a very intimate, sacred, shamanic inner journey. It requires training and being held by wise, knowing hands. Doing it on our own is not impossible, it’s just the hard, long, and gut-wrenching way of doing it. It can also be a dangerous way of doing it if it causes a major breakdown due to a lack of appropriate support. You won’t know if the Mentoring Journey is right for you without talking. When we talk, we process our thoughts and feelings.

Book a gentle, loving, and confidential Connection Call, and we’ll see if it can fulfill your needs.

CONNECT WITH SHEMI

For Teacher Training:

Belly Dancing from the Heart Method trains the whole teacher in you, in the head, heart, body, and spirit, and trains you how to teach the dance in wholeness to your students, staying true to our Dance’s roots, while building your roots firmly as a teacher, and growing wings to fly at the same time.

Go here for full details of the Belly Dance Teacher Training Program

PROGRAM DETAILS