The medicine is IN the dance.

It's 4am and I am in my new era of being awake in the middle of the night...

Awakened by a hunger... at first literal and then creative...

A necessity of needing to tell story by candlelight, to tend to the soul of my being.

And so, I have a story to share with those of you who wander through here.

As if we've found ourselves at a lowly cavern on a windy, rainy night... with nothing to do but listen to each other's tails of adventure and tribulation.

I am remembering my last Moondance - La Danza de la Luna - which happened to be my fourth dance-the dance that would fulfill my four year commitment when I began this journey which feels somehow like a lifetime ago.

Mama Mount Shasta, where this dance takes place. There are other Moon Dances happening all over the world, originating and still being held in in Teotihicuan, Mexico.

La Danza de la Luna was channeled by a council of Grandmothers indigenous to Mexico, from the same codex that the Sun Dance was channeled from. The Sun Dance has been held by the Lakota people for many years.

A Moondancer once told me the story that the Lakota people were chosen to carry these traditions, until they were ready for the wider world again.

The Council of Grandmothers decided that the feminine counterpart of the masculine Sun Dance was to be inclusive to cultures from all over the world, because they received a message about the medicine of UNITY...and that that we, the wider world, were ready.

If we were going to make it through these dark times, we would have to do it together. So every womb carrier was welcomed to dance, for our wombs unite us all - deeper than cultural ties - the original bloodlines of humankind.

The Moondance is designed to challenge you physically so that your spirit can grow strong. We fast on sleep and food and dance for four nights. Our sweat, blood, tears, and fasting is an offering to spirit... food for the divine... while we dance, sing and meditate our prayers for ourselves, our families and the planet... particularly for the waters.

With my husband post Moon Dance ceremony this summer. Men are invited to support the ceremony by tending fire, serving tea and more. My husband has been fully committed to the dance these past four years. It is a part of what solidified our devotion to one another.

Every year, I have been given a window into my spiritual work through the physical form, mysteriously showing up in different parts of my body. My first year it was intense bloody noses, my second it was the most painful tooth infection I'd every experience, which led to the extraction of a molar the very day I left for the dance, my third year it was a mysterious ankle injury that showed up on the way to the dance, causing me to limp onto the grounds and change the course of my ceremony.

As a somatic practitioner who studies the body as a site of personal and transpersonal mythology, this particularly fascinated me. Every part of the body holds universal metaphors that are like clues pointing me towards my work - at once personal, ancestral and collective.

This past year, I entered the dance unscathed and not on my moontime (period) either, which was a relief. Still, the ceremony is designed to challenge the physical form so that we discover new layers and levels of strength and resiliency, and this year would be no different. When you are exhausted and hungry, your masks simply do not have the energy to hold on. You become raw, open and highly sensitive.

My pelvic bones ached, drawing my attention down and into the pain of being in a body. A woman's body. A body who's trying to hold so much on its own. 

The pain would draw me into what Eckhart Tolle calls the "pain body" - the unconscious part of our psyche that feeds on negativity - and I would swirl in thoughts of doom and victimhood. Questioning everything, especially my belonging.

Eventually the design of the ceremony cracked me right open to the core thread that needed to be seen: 

A deep seated belief that I was not worthy of this. Of reverence. Of ceremony. Of indigenous rites.

The shame that bloomed like mold form the damp, darkness surrounding colonization, leading to the white-washing of my ancestors' cultures to raise me in a "culture" obsessed with safety and playing the victim in order to survive.

A culture so betrayed by religion that the art of ritual itself was stamped out as evil, not to be trusted. Especially if women were involved. 

So here I was dancing under the moon with 100+ women, preparing to be honored for completing my four-year commitment, feeling like I utterly do not belong and do not deserve it.

The tears fled from my eyes, opening the chasm of my heart wider still, shining light on the dark, damp places that have touched my lineage... our human lineage.

Feeling the truth of my pain was the way through it. The necessary shadow work we sign up for when we enter into a ceremony designed to illuminate the places that have not known love.

And as my body continued to ache and I spiraled in the land of story and belief, I knew I had a choice to make. Ritual makes us sensitive to awareness of our own thought patterns, and the power that they contain. Wallow in pain, or choose another focus point.

Pain is also not seen as a bad thing - often it is a cleanse. Like the tooth infection that alarmed me of something rotten and hidden in my mouth, the pain shows us what needs clearing.

So while on some level I can trust the pain that rocked my pelvis, upgrading or clearing this part of my body as I prayed to conceive life, I chose to lean into the medicine of this ceremony: the dance.

In some indigenous healing ceremonies, you or the healer ingests plants that are the carrier for the healing. In this ceremony, it is the dance itself. It is the drumming, the song and the sisterhood. It's the moon and the stars, and the designs we make with our bodies as we dance in unity together.

As I would choose to get into the dance, moving and singing with more gusto, the pain would evaporate. 

Ahhh, I found myself thinking. The medicine is IN the dance! 

Hahaha. But of course.

Everything suddenly becomes funny.

We are dancing! Under the moon! Besides the mountain! To incredible music! And we're alive! Holy shit! We are ALIVE.

The medicine pulses through me and I am once again christened by the miracle of life. This one precious life. This one moment. This one dance. This one great love I have been offered. This devotion.

And once again, I am dancing my spirit dance. My soul is singing along. The threads of my being are unified within and without. There is no question if I belong. I am made of dirt and and blood and spirit. Of course I belong.

I share this story because I am a dancer who is devoted to the dance of body and soul. And this life has asked me to honor that. To serve that.

Our souls cannot be colonized. Our minds absolutely can. It takes training, practice and vigilance to continue unearthing the wisdom that is of the Earth and Spirit. That cannot be owned or manipulated.

Indigenous healing ceremonies show us that it's not all about comfort, love and light. It's about truth. And digging deep to remember our resiliency.

"You are stronger than you know," the ancestors tell me.

They pick up my bowed chin and say, "Look me in the eyes. You are on your way to being one of us."

They want us in our dignity. And dignity comes from seeing ourselves through the struggle. Not outsourcing our power and thinking that we can saved by someone else.

My soul work is to create spaces for us to remember this...

To remember our bodies not as something to numb, suppress or manipulate, but to see as messengers and allies.

To free ourselves from the colonized mind of perfectionism, and instead channel our God given right to artistry for good... for healing... for truth.

And when I forget and the pain of life starts to swallow me whole... remember: it is IN the dance.

Get into it.

*Author's note:

My take on the Moon Dance is my own, and is not verified by the elders of the dance. Please take it with a grain of salt, and understand that this is a subjective sharing that comes through my own filter.