Made Some Friends

So, I realize that slowly, I have made some friends here. It feels good to not be so totally alone. Osho talks about being alone versus being lonely. He says lonliness is manufactured by our cultures to manipulate us.

I spent some time hanging out and laughing and even drinking wine! with a few folks and skipped a couple meditations. It's all a meditation anyway. And I'm having it all.

Then I went to a Nataraj Meditation. You'll love this one. You dance for 40 minutes to incredible music and then you lie down for 20 minutes. And then you get up and dance again for another 5 minutes at the end to clamer music. Cool, no? I loved this one. Oh, did I mention that the dance was eyes closed or blindfolded? I did every dance I ever learned and then some. At some point I turned it all over to free form and let the body create. Just fantastic.

The DJ here has made me a great dance CD as well. They play a really groovey funk, disco, reggae here when you attend the dancing in between everything else. I am dancing as much as my heart calls for and that's a lot. I haven't danced this much since I was a teenager or in college. And you know that I do dance a lot with Salsa and now Tango lessons. But this is something else all together. It's a lightness of being that brings about dance and then the opportunity presents itself almost always to dance since there is always music playing somewhere and people dancing.

For days I have been watching this one woman dance and dance. I first spotted her in the Buddha Grove spinning and turning just with herself. Then I saw her again the first day I did Whirling Meditation and now I see that she is everywhere where there is dancing. Today, after the dance groove at around noon, I sat down to write in my journal and watched her instead. She just danced and danced even after the music was over, spinning around and around, sometimes eyes open, sometimes closed, even balancing a bottle of water on her head. She has a techniques of incorporating spinning with some kind of devotional dance she makes up as she goes. Then she even got her lunch which seemed to be cut fruit and kept dancing while eating. In our world, we would probably think that she is slightly mad, but as I watched I saw that she is in ecstasy at all times. This has truly inspired me.

Like I ask myself, what if in my courses we had big dancing breaks incorporated into every section of the course?

Really I am having such a time with myself. It was just what I needed. I had no idea how much. I cannot wait to share with you all that I have learned in terms of our work. Oh my god!

And I feel as though I never want to leave here.

Here's another thing that happened for me today. I was spinning outside and the facilitator put on a Hebrew song. As I was spinning, tears were streaming out of my eyes. At the end of the song, I laid down flat on the white marble floor facing down and I cried and cried. It felt so good to cry for being a Jew. It was so good for me. Of course I will buy this song to see what it does for some of you.

So, that's my "up to the moment" space. It just keeps getting better and better.

I know I promised to write to you about the culture here in the ashram, but I'm putting it off because my impressions change every day. I'll do it soon before I leave here.

Much love,
Laurie