Here are some some guided dance practices that I developed to help us to reconnect with nature and empower ourselves to become more effective change agents for a more peaceful world.  I hope you enjoy them!

Today on the Day of the Dead, I thought I might share a poem and a story I wrote over 15 years ago after a unique dance experience in nature. 

                   

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Bone dance crazy.
“Oh it’s much better to die before you die, it makes living much more fun.”
What is a bone dance?
“You should do a bone dance.”
The bones of the earth.
“The skeleton woman, the stars and the Earth are the true owners of our souls.”
Dancing between the worlds.
And the joke is on us.
We see how living people wiggle around
Thinking what they do matters so much:
Working, planning, struggling-
It is fun when they are singing, when they are drunk,
When they‘re in love.
It’s all funny.
We see their bones, like watching someone who doesn’t know
They are naked,
Or that they are wearing a Big Bird outfit.
Like someone who doesn’t know
They are going to die-
Who doesn’t know
They are already dead!

There is magic in the world-
See how the light moves.
The stars hold down the mystery.
There is a binding force keeping the atom together.
Love’s contraction
Keeping our hearts tied up with Everything.

And then there is the sacred entropy.
Watch it all disappear!
Bye!
Make love with your death!
It is the dancing ground of happy bones.
Mutilation, strangulation, and grey flesh-
A distant memory.
That heart attack day.
The crushed skull in the car accident.
Whoops!
The bones remember the time we broke through
To the other side.
The jaws of the mystery are opening and closing
With laughter.
Love lives side by side with what slips away.
They walk into the sunset arms around each others shoulders
Like childhood friends.

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My Bone Dance Story

This is the story of how I discovered the Bone Dance ceremony while hiking in the Sierra Nevadas in the summer of 2001.  I believe it was practiced long ago by people of that region, but still holds powerful medicine for today.  I hope it will find a place in your heart.

My journey began from a peak in the White Mountains, a few hours east of Yosemite National Park, in a group of about ten other adventurers in a workshop hosted by the Animas Valley Institute.  We descended into a lush alpine meadow at 10,000 feet where we stayed with minimal provisions for five days. During the course of the trek, we practiced different exercises to study the dynamics of soul encounter. 

During one such exercise, while I had been examining my fears about loved ones dying, I found myself in an internal dialogue with my spiritual mentor, Frank Natale.  He told me how, in his life, he had learned that the true owners of our souls are the Skeleton Woman, the stars, and the Mother Earth.  He put his hand on my back and when I felt the universe’s dismantling dance, I argued senselessly, “Why should I let go?  I’m not dead yet!”  He answered, “Oh it’s much better to die before you die, it makes living much more fun.”   I asked, “How?“ and he said “You’d have the f***ing balls to express your soul gifts with much less hesitation.”

At the end of this long and emotional night, I had a vision of my skeleton walking away from me through the sage and Indian paintbrush flowers which glowed in iridescent purples and reds.  The image left a vivid imprint in my memory.

Later in the week, we were told we had the option to create a final ritual.   We were given suggestions about ways to use symbolic language to communicate with our souls.  I was sitting in the circle, listening to the ideas, when I turned casually to the sage bush next to me, and asked silently, “So what should my final ritual be?”  The bush answered, “You should do a bone dance.” 

Mind you, I had been immersed in an isolated wilderness miles from civilization for several days by that point, engaging in ritual, trance, and ceremony.  It felt completely normal for a bush to talk to me.  It was only that particular answer that I found surprising.  I immediately remembered the image of the skeleton and wondered, “What’s a bone dance?”

The next day took an interesting turn- one of the group members was having an allergic reaction, so we all needed to head back to the city and Western medicine one day earlier than we planned.  I panicked.  I felt I was blossoming in that environment and I had already been anxious about leaving.  Having one less day was such a shock and disappointment, I tearfully and desperately suggested alternatives to the group, but I finally had to accept their decision.  I quickly ran to complete my final ritual in the few hours I had left.  It probably worked out better that way, not having the time to plan anything or figure it out beforehand.  I had to do it on the fly.  There was simply no time.

I hiked to a large field of sage brush with a backpack of basic necessities.  I called the four directions with some impromptu love poetry to each one, opening myself to the experience.  I invited my spirit guides including Frank Natale and others I had met earlier on the trek.  First things first: I knew I needed to die before I could do a bone dance. 

In a nearby creek I had noticed some insects shaped like clumps of pine needles living on the rocks in the water.  I imagined/ felt they were nibbling my skin, tons of them, eating away at my flesh, little by little.  I anticipated the throes of excruciating agony, until I realized that it didn’t have to be so fearsome or dramatic.  It was simply happening.  My flesh was rapidly disappearing. 

Soon I could feel my bare bones left.  I made little movements to see how different I looked with just my bones moving.  I played my shaker.  Loudly.  I started to dance.  I found a groove, swung my arms, shook my hips, and stomped with my usual impressiveness.  The eyes of the sage were on me, waiting for the dance to happen.  I kept trying, but I could see through their eyes I was not getting anywhere.  I was taking myself too seriously! 

With their roots deep in the earth, geared up for a show, the sage bushes wanted entertainment. They wanted dance that was a cosmic stand-up comedy, telling the joke of existence again and again.  The joke of all human action.  The joke of reality.  I wasn’t sure I knew the joke, but I wanted to move past my limitations.  I didn’t want to go on without knowing the joke.  So I worked harder.

I heard a chuckle or two.  I was beginning to move really silly now, like a vaudeville act.  Raunchy stuff, over-the-top, tongue-in-cheek movements.  I heard the laughing get louder.  They really wanted to laugh, so I just had to find the right button and keep pushing it.  Flailing, thrusting, wiggling, bopping around, the goofier the better.  Scratching, pecking, wagging my jaw.  Soon they were all rolling on the ground- Frank joining the sage bushes-  falling on top of each other with uncontrollable laughter. 

It was challenging to sustain the energetic output and mental focus required for a successful bone dance.  I had a few more waves of steady laughter, and soon I was ready to return to the world of the living.  I wished I had been able to go on much longer, but I knew that my first try did not need to be perfect.  My flesh and skin reappeared spontaneously. 

The sage bushes were very sweet to me afterwards.  They said they hadn’t seen a real bone dance in so long that they were sincerely grateful to have even my little attempts.  It was the clearest affirmation I’d ever received that nature, the spirits in nature, and the Earth, all long to reconnect with humans and re-establish our loving and harmonious balance. They relish in our age-old relationship, based in music, dance, and ceremony, and they are also lonely and saddened by our growing estrangement. 

They indicated that sometime in the past, ceremonial bone dances were actually performed by the native people of that region.  It was a way for us to temporarily borrow the detached, pain-free perspective of the dead so we could look at life and laugh about it, and also so we could walk freely in the spirit world.  The rituals around the Day of the Dead in Mexico bear a strong resemblance, as do the traditional skeleton dances of Tibet which share the objective of finding humor in the cycle of life and death. 

The Legacy of the Dance

My experience clarified for me the relative insignificance of my life, giving me the courage to act without second guessing everything or being overly cautious.  It dismantles pride, ownership, and the fear of death which equates with the fear of life.  With renewed energy, I can ultimately experience more love and have a more positive effect in the world.  Dying before you die does indeed make living more fun.

As someone who has been exploring the overlap of spirituality and movement for many years, I feel this ceremony to be uniquely beautiful and beneficial.  It needs to be brought back to life.  The earth needs it, and we need it.  We need it to have a sense of humor about ourselves.  We need it to have the courage to embrace our soul gifts by facing death, our great teacher.  And most of all, we need it to redeem ourselves and renew our connection with our friends in the natural world. 

Bone Dance Fundamentals

The bone dance can be practiced as a solo ritual among nature spirits, as I did, but I believe it was meant to be practiced in a group, as a celebration within a spiritual community or family.  It can stand on its own as a single ceremony, or it can be incorporated into other ceremonies.   It is not limited to any particular religious tradition, and can supplement any form of spiritual practice.  

A bone dance consists of the following elements.  There must be a demarcation of sacred space to which ancestor and nature spirits are invited.  The selected dancer(s) must undergo a simulation of death, a symbolic act or visualization for the dancer to let go of all attachment to the material world.  The dancer must become his or her bones, either symbolically or with costuming. 

Then the bones must dance to evoke laughter in all who are present, and give one hundred percent of his or her energy to the hilarity of the movements.  Going beyond shame or ambition, he or she must enact the cartoon of life, reminding us of the ridiculousness of all existence.  When the dancer’s flesh reappears, the ceremony concludes as the witnesses express their gratitude for the dancer’s offering.

I encourage you to take the bone dance ceremony into your spiritual groups, your drum circles, or your personal practice. It is an excellent way to strengthen our community bonds, commune with the spirit world, and renew a commitment to being present in each moment. I look forward to sharing a bone dance with you!

Woo-hoo!  I'm going to be presenting at the International Expressive Therapy Association Conference in San Francisco in February 2019!  The theme of this year's conference is "Rise UP!  The Evolution and Revolution of Expressive Arts."  For more info, visit  
https://www.ieata.org/2019-ieata-conference

Check out my proposal below!

Title:
Culture Therapy: Creative Collaboration for Envisioning Diagnosis and Change

Description:
What would it be like to be a therapist for an entire culture?  How do we perceive of and respond to the sea of culture in which we swim?  What creative processes support root-level cultural re-patterning?  You are invited to journey through three inquiries: diagnosis, change models, and the self-culture interface.  Each segment includes a brief introduction, individual art-making, small group sharing, and multimodal group collage.  Our goal is to energize our roles as active players in a vast social network in a validating and inclusive environment.  Come play with metaphors in this hivemind exploration of cultural change! 

Learning Objectives:
* Experiment with various frames through which to view of our social dilemmas and mechanisms for cultural change
* Increase awareness about the relationship between individual and collective activism
* Practice collaborative, creative problem-solving in an inclusive and eclectic visioning circle

Abstract:
Since the United States presidential election of 2016, social media and news outlets have been flooded with one crisis after another, overwhelming the senses.  Numerous grassroots social movements have sprung up to work toward social and environmental justice in the form of marches, demonstrations, and nonviolent resistance.  This year's IEATA conference theme is an opportunity for change-seekers to wield the expressive therapies to inform and strengthen these movements.  This workshop, “Culture Therapy: Creative Collaboration for Envisioning Diagnosis and Change” is intended to provide an experience of creative encounter with colossal questions of how to engage with the cultural problems in which we find ourselves immersed.

According to Brewer (2016), culture design is a growing field that conceives of social and environmental problems as profoundly linked through underlying systemic currents. Brewer recommends an experimental approach to effect cultural evolution, comparable with improvisational theatre and rapid prototyping. In this era of broad access to world events, humans may develop an increasing need to interact with the whole network of relationships that we sense through large scale trends. Having a context for this work can innovate new cultural structures that drive social change.

This workshop will move through three segments: diagnosis, change models, and the self-culture interface. In the first segment, we will experiment with assessing our cultural ills, including frequently referenced DSM diagnoses, such as addiction, narcissism, or post-traumatic stress. Other frames may be drawn from nature, such as invasive species, climate change, or loss of habitat. Proposals for renaming our species is yet another lens, such as homo imaginens, homo insectus, homo economicus, homo irrationalus, and homo chrysalis. As we consolidate the grief, rage, fear, and hope we may feel about social and environmental crises, the task of our first group collage is to view and en-story our complex and layered predicament.

In the second segment, participants will generate metaphors for social change, which may include images related to resistance, fighting, healing, evolution, conservation, survival, community-building, ecological integration, or a cycle of collapse and regeneration. While some of these metaphoric actions may appear contradictory on the surface, participants will be encouraged to envision the multiple change models as complimentary and dynamic, as individuals can move between various groups and methods. By expanding our repertoire of metaphors for social change, we increase our capacity to build coalitions and recognize allies in our work.

In the final segment, we will reflect on the the interface between our individual and collective mythologies.  Can one person make a difference? Does organizing locally affect the larger world? How can individuals navigate intersectional identities and multiple affiliations?  Metaphors may include themes of ripples, replication or viral effects, water droplets that move in waves, and other microcosm-macrocosm relationships. While acknowledging experiences of apathy and powerlessness, we will also invite hopeful images about leadership and agency. By exploring the relationship between our individual and collective activism, we can more consciously negotiate resources that contribute to a mass sea change.

After introducing each segment with a brief lecture and visual presentation, participants will be encouraged to explore perceptions of these topics through individual art-making, sharing and witnessing in partners and small groups, and improvised performance with the whole group, including movement, poetry, music, and visual imagery. Discrepancies between our personal stories and cultural narratives will be integrated by invoking the larger stories that include both. By validating each others' understanding, vision, and response to our cultural imbalances, we can energize our roles as active players in a vast social network.

Brewer, J. (2016). The predicament of knowledge: A challenge for culture design.  Kosmos: Fall/Winter. Retrieved from https://www.kosmosjournal.org/article/the-predicament-of-knowledge-a-challenge-for-culture-design/   

Here is a shortened version of my presentation at the International Ecopsychology Conference in Uruguay in 2017.  Thanks for watching!

Here are some additional links for dance practices for rewilding:

Nature Mimicry
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mip5C_VXfwI

Civilization Detox
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IctNv6wEupc

In the fall of 2015, I started a doctoral program in Psychology at the University of West Georgia because I had hopes of finding new ways to support positive cultural change at a macro level, instead of only through individual or group counseling work.  After the first year, I discovered that my interests were not aligned with the program, and I decided to return to counseling work while still pursuing my interests outside of the Academy. 

In one of my classes, we were instructed to keep a blog of writings about a mind-body practice we would practice throughout the semester.  I decided to focus on "rewilding" practices and wrote about my experience at feralanimal.blogspot.com.  It was a very impactful process for me that actually contributed to my decision to leave the doctoral program.  I share it here because I often used various expressive therapy modalities, including creative writing, movement, and image, as a way to explore themes of rewilding, and it is one example of how the expressive therapies can be applied to a wide range of inquiries.

I first want to thank all my readers who have visited my website about 3000 hits per day!  I dare to hope that my efforts have helped create more avenues of connection through the expressive therapies throughout the world.

I wanted to address a very important topic in the expressive therapies: how to engage a client in a creative process if they are uncomfortable with it?  I first want to affirm that there are many understandable reasons why people are uncomfortable with creative expression, not the least of which is a socialized insecurity about artistic skills, product value, or any deviation from normative behavior.  Even more sensitive may be the cultural stigma of mental health treatment, including the feeling of defeat that some feel when seeking services.  Expressive therapies can appear infantalizing in the way they may resemble childhood activities, adding insult to injury.

My goal as an expressive therapist is not to make someone become creative in some arbitrary way that I deem appropriate, but to find out how my client is already creative and help them to grow in that area of strength.  Most people are creative in some area of their lives already.  It reminds me of the theory of multiple intelligences, where we learned not to ask, "Are you intelligent?" but "How are you intelligent?"  Similarly, rather than ask, "Are you creative?" we should ask, "How are you creative?"

For example, some people modulate their fashion by using different colors or styles to express how they feel or want to feel.  Some select home or garden furnishings by making altars, decorative walls, or creating distinct environments in their home or yard to create a certain mood.  When cooking and baking, a wide range of intentions can be expressed through the selection of foods, the rhythm of combining ingredients, and the presentation when the food is served.  Any craft or trade that involves personal preferences can express feelings and desires, such as woodworking or knitting.

Probably the easiest way to engage in a creative process with a client is through the vicarious crystallization of feelings through the creative work of another.  Clients can respond to favorite songs, poems, art, or films from their own aesthetic sensibilities.  Video games have become a ubiquitous form of recreation whereby countless hours are spent in a fantasy world.  Some games have an objective to subvert authority while others are aimed at serving and protecting others.  Some games incorporate mythical figures and supernatural forces while others reenact historical events.  All of these themes are relevant for a client's imaginal world as fertile ground for further discovery.

Dreams and visualizations are non-performative and unintimidating ways of bringing creative imagery into a session.  Clients can be invited to listen to music with guided imagery to visualize scenes associated with different feeling states, either from their memories or through imagination.  Clients can be gradually given greater leeway to select and create their own images during the visualizations with opportunities to depict or explore the images further through art or dialogue with the images.  This affords the clients total privacy with their creative process happening within and can be a gateway to taking greater risks with creative processes in the future.

I hope this is helpful, and I welcome your feedback or questions.  Thanks again for your interest in the expressive therapies, and thank you for your service!

I will be presenting at the International Ecopsychology Society conference in Uruguay this fall!  My abstract and description are below - I am really excited about sharing this work!  For more information about the conference, visit http://iesconfengl.ga/  I hope to see you there!

Title
Incubating the Future: Integrating the colonialist shadow of our industrial-wild hybrid identities to access embodied revelation

Description  
Dance is a creative modality that can facilitate the re-wilding of culture that is desperately needed in our current global crisis. The “trance” dance orientation is especially valuable in its capacity to generate embodied insights and innovate relational patterns through focused and receptive intent. Industrialized lifestyles have severely impaired this facility in humans, and efforts to recover our wild natures are further impeded by an avoidance of our conflicting identities. Through acknowledgment of shame in our complicity with cultural toxicity, we glimpse the arc of possibility in dance forms that depend on authenticity and humility in order to access non-rational, visionary, and medicinal revelations that can seed new cultural directions.

Abstract
      Dance is a vast territory. In our longing for solace in a chaotic world, much of the creative movement we see today serves as a recreational escape with some hopeful opportunities for re-wilding culture through social and transcendent orientations (Mahin, 2013). Underworld journeys that delve into the “ecological unconscious” (Roszak, 1992) are more risky, inviting ancestral memories of both benevolent interdependence with the natural world as well as horrors of abuse and loss. Through "spiritual bypassing," many of us have attempted to sever these shadow aspects due to feeling helpless about our dependence on industrial civilization. However, without proper integration, premature imaginings about sustainability may be sabotaged by our split loyalties.
      Arguably one of the most essential legacies of the wild human, the trance orientation of dance is also the most endangered because it depends on an active human-earth covenant, which is founded on intimate knowledge of the energy flows of one's landbase. Our conception of "nature" often removes humans from the equation and distorts our authentic and involuntary embeddedness in the world. To awaken the dissociated threads of interconnectedness, we must accelerate our learning about the mind-boggling complexities of human consumption and fully reclaim our rational commitment to replenishing the places we have divested. When the human-earth covenant is intact or repaired, trance dance is the internal communication mechanism of our shared circuitry within the living systems that contain us.
      Violations of sacred covenants with our landbase are experienced in the body as shame. Though shame has been used in some contexts to subjugate our wildish heritage, shame can also provide visceral biofeedback about our adherence to our ethical standards. Within each of us lives both a wild, indigenous nature and a colonialist mentality, the latter of which is constantly perpetuating our self-domestication in the name of survival (Prechtel, 2001).  A compelling internal pressure during a movement practice, shame activates a desperate impulse to bind together the gaping holes of the psyche through sheer willpower to achieve ecological wholeness. It forcefully reroutes excess attention that indulges in pleasurable embellishments, personal healing, or showmanship. By owning our stumbling incompetence without letting it destroy our willingness to stay engaged, we reset our target to a much farther end point and are thrust toward unforeseen potentials in our dance.
      The trance dance orientation culminates in nonverbal brainstorming within a nonlocal council of an ecological community. The insights produced by trance dances are charged nuggets of non-rational, visionary, medicinal messages. They are emergent, moving patterns that apply themselves to the world through the interoceptive awareness of the dancer's enlarged biomic self.  These kinesthetic stories ripple through our relational matrix as opportunities for adaptive mutation. Rather than an escapist or symbolic performance, trance dance propels evolution toward sanity by generating the healthy root from which we can grow. The trance dancer calibrates her body to the vectors in play so it can fulfill its role as a saturated sensory compass and incubate the future, heartbeat to heartbeat.
      Through lecture, visual presentation, group discussion, and an experiential activity, this workshop is an exploration of dance as a vital medium for cultivating cultural wisdom. It will incorporate references that examine the lived material relations of supply chains, “White guilt,” the Jungian shadow, and religious and psychological perspectives on atonement. Most importantly, the purpose of this program is to enhance our ability to listen for the dances that have the power to move our cultures, including ourselves, into balance.    

References
Mahin, G. (2013).  Dance orientations for re-wilding the self and the world. Retrieved from www.expressivetherapist.com.
Prechtel, M. (2001).  The disobedience of the daughter of the sun: A Mayan tale of ecstasy, time, and finding one's true form.  Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.
Roszak, T. (1992).  The voice of the earth: An exploration of ecopsychology.  Grand Rapids, MI: Phanes Press.