By Swami Anand Kul Bhushan.
Run away from the towns and cities. Go out into the wide, open spaces in the lap of nature. When you take it all in – the unending horizon, the whispering wind, the swaying trees, the gliding clouds, the moving sun or moon – you find that it’s all a dance! If you just ‘let go’ for some time, you will feel that everything is constantly celebrating life, dancing around you.
Deep inside you, something stirs – a dance awakens. And you want to dance with the wind and the trees and the clouds and the sun. It all becomes sacred. Not to be happy is to be ungrateful to existence. So, you just let go and dance in thankfulness to nature, to the Supreme Being that you are alive to experience this. Happy Ho organizes best Meditation and Tarot classes in Noida and Delhi NCR area in India.
The same feeling comes to you in meditation. When you have exhausted your body with vigorous movement and can take it no more, you become still and let it all settle down. The mind stops for a time. Then peace descends upon you. You loose count of time and go on floating into the beyond. You do not want this to end – ever. But it does and then you want to celebrate and by itself the body breaks into a graceful dance.
In ancient India, this dance was represented as the Natraj – when Lord Shiva became the Grandmaster of Dance. This ‘Natraj’pose is the defining portrayal of almost all Indian dance performances down the centuries. Each ‘mudra’ or gesture has a deep meaning and is well-worth understanding and following.
Throughout the centuries, mystics have been dancing in this ecstasy. The so-called normal people who live by their heads cannot understand this: ‘Why is Mira, the total devotee of Lord Krishna, suddenly dancing?’
The Sufis dance. They get so drunk with their whirling that they can go on dancing for hours – as if in a trance. The Emperor of the Sufis, Jalaludin Rumi, whirled non-stop for 36 hours, it is said. Then he fell face downwards and woke up as a new man. While whirling, all Sufis are totally aware, alert and very focused as they whirl at a single point. Throughout the Middle East, North Africa and North India, the Sufis sing and dance when they cannot hold their elation anymore.
The Baul Mystics of Bengal dance. They sing and dance in West India to express their bliss. They dance on their own by themselves as they are so full of the juice of meditation.
Then there was George Gurdjieff, the Russian Mystic Master, who lived around 50 years ago. From North Africa, the Middle East to Afghanistan, he searched and influenced by the Sufi dancers, he devised his special dances known as Gurdjieff dances as the centerpiece of meditation.
Ultimately, Osho incorporated all these dancing techniques into the meditations he created. The most important of them is called – no wonder – Natraj. Osho’s other major meditations revolve around dance to celebrate.
All these dances are an essential part of his meditations which become a celebration. With these techniques, Osho enables us to experience the joy, the bliss, the ecstasy of dance to reach the unreachable, know the unknowable. Except man, the whole of existence is dancing. Come, become a pagan, a Meera, a Sufi, a Baul, a Gurdjieff and dance your way to God.
