Solstice is a time of spiritual renewing, of going within and connecting with Source… of listening and letting go… of manifesting our hearts desires. Every winter I spend a week immersed in meditation and yoga with 800-1,000 Kundalini yogis in Lake Wales, FL. It is the highlight of my year and a time of immense spiritual growth.
Four years ago I walked in a very early morning class of Shakti Dance™ at Winter Solstice. I had no clue what to expect and had never heard of it. I was curious to see what it was and why it was being taught at a Kundalini yoga retreat*. I didn’t know that meeting Dharma Devi would change my life.
It was a short and energetic class. A taste of nectar I just had to get more of. While most sleepy heads were sipping their morning tea or brushing their teeth: we were wide eyed, grinning, sweaty and screaming for joy! The atmosphere was intoxicating and our energy filled the camp with blissful happiness. Every passerby asked us: “What was THAT?!” I told the teacher: “I need to learn this.”
At the time Dharma lived in Italy and was getting ready to move to Los Angeles to open her studio and start teaching in the US. It wasn’t quite the right time but I promised myself: “One day. One day I’ll dance again.”
For most of my childhood I danced ballet and had dreams of becoming a professional ballerina. I had forgotten the freedom and total abandonment of self, one can feel when entranced in dance. What happened? I grew up, stopped dancing and forgot about the magic.
10 years ago I started practicing yoga. Finding Kundalini yoga for me was a life changing: it healed my soul and found a way to bring spirituality back in to my daily life. Yet I was still longing, I needed something more but I didn’t know what.
I found it in a Shakti Dance™ class. My wings. Past the corporal sense of limits and restrictions I was able to fly again. Free as a bird with no awareness of time or space, free to connect and express my immense joy of being alive, skipping and jumping, moving and stretching, shaking, twirling and swirling. I was longing to self-express using the only thing I came in this world with: this beautiful body we are all given.
In class I could do all of that and be in total communion with Source, the elements, my guides and the past Masters. Dancing, meditating, aligning, opening, healing and chanting, helped me connect with my soul on a level so deep that the boundaries of the other realm would fall and I could fly.
Last winter solstice I lost my journal. I looked everywhere around camp and was really bummed out. A friend walked by and said: “Have you looked in the tantric shelter? I said: “No, there’s a class going on and I didn’t want to disturb them.” She answered: “You should go in; its Shakti Dance™! The energy is AMAZING in there!” I said: “Oh wow! That’s my friend Dharma! I’ll go in and see!” Guess where I found my journal? On the ground in the middle of the tent with a roomful of smiling faces, dancing and raising their energies. It had spent the night there through gong meditation, morning sadhana with hundreds of yogis meditating, and now had transformed itself in a sign from my guru: YOU NEED TO BE HERE.
The synchronicity of all the events leading me to become the Florida organizer and promoter of Shakti Dance™ goes even deeper but this is another story. I could not be happier and more thrilled to be taking the teacher training starting this August. Now is MY time. I have my wings back and I’m learning to fly.
If you want a taste of this celebration of life, join me July 10, 11 or 12 when Dharma Devi will come again to teach classes and share her amazing practice.
She will guide us to unlock the door to our inner world and explore our vibrant being to the sound of enthralling music and mantras. We will gracefully move through sets of floor exercises, following sacred geometry, into standing kriyas, then ecstatic dance, before going deep into meditation and doing celestial communication. We will fill the room with generations of light beings expressing their divine love for the Mother of energy. The creator and manifestor of life. The greatest Shakti… that which lives within each of us.
Travel Light ~ Spread the Light ~ Be the Light
~Nam Karan Kaur / Carole Fontaine
*Yogi bhajan, Master of Kundalini yoga, has blessed the creation of Shakti Dance™ in 2001.
