Learning to Dance

I have always loved to dance. 

I didn’t set out to learn to dance. There were no lessons, no plan, no determined effort.  My Big Fat Greek Family had lots of weddings and parties with Greek dancing. My mom taught me to Polka. American Bandstand taught me the Monkey and the Twist. 

I was drawn to dancing. I danced whenever the opportunities arose and my “moves” evolved.

When I started my spiritual journey, I didn’t even know I was ON a spiritual journey. I didn’t set out to grow spiritually. But I was drawn to it like I was to dancing. Something about it just felt right.

In the beginning, I read a lot of spiritual books with no real plan, no goal and very little understanding. I figured it was like learning stuff in school. I had always been good at school - my brain easily made sense of math and English and history. I just needed to read about it and it would all make sense, right?

Ha! No.

In my 40s and after my divorce, my friend Sherri and I started going dancing again. We had danced together through our 20s. In our 30s we took a hiatus for marriage and kids. Now we were ready to “Boogie Oogie Oogie” again!

One night we were at our favorite place with our favorite band, dancing to all our favorite songs. A man asked me to dance. The music started and he took my hands and proceeded to spin and dance me around like a pro. And I kept up. It was beautiful!

Afterwards, Sherri said, “I didn’t know you could dance like that!” 

But here’s the thing with dancing. Once you know how to dance, you can dance. To almost anything. Especially if you have a strong leader. It’s about allowing the music to flow through you, move you. There was very little effort on my part to “do it right”. He led, I followed. We had a blast!

The spiritual journey is like dancing. There is a rhythm, there are steps. But even more than that, there is a flow - an opening up to the “music”, allowing oneself to be carried away, allowing the heart (instead of the head) to lead. 

And once I realized that, my journey became much easier - more relaxed, more enjoyable. 

I’m still working at not working at it. I still have to remind myself to let it flow. To let my heart lead. But it’s better. 

I think I’m getting to be a pretty good dancer.