Dance Me Free

I’ve been incorporating Energy Medicine Dance into my weekly workouts, especially the moves associated with the Radiant Circuits.

The Radiant Circuits, as Donna Eden, a pioneer of Energy Medicine describes, are energy pathways that predate the meridian system of Chinese Medicine. Similar to the meridians, the Radiant Circuits help us with the flow of energy in our body, and tune us into the present as well as our capacity to heal ourselves.

What’s very unique about the Radiant Circuits, however, is that they don’t just run on a single pathway. Once they are turned on, they can travel to whichever area of the body they are needed the most. And the result is that they allow us to feel into the awe and wonder and vitality around and within us.

I’ve seen many demonstrations by Donna of various exercises that can help us turn on these pathways. And I believe that they can be powerful. But I wasn’t keeping up on doing them consistently until her daughters Dondhi and Titanya, who are also energy medicine practitioners and bellydancers, turned the series of exercises into a simple routine in dance with music! Now we’re talking my language!

The more I have been doing Titanya’s dance routine around opening up the different Radiant Circuits, I’ve been realizing that one in particular- the Belt Flow- is exactly the concept I wrote about in my last blog entry that I first discovered through tango.

The Belt Flow is about stretching and opening up the area around the waist- between the second and third chakras. It’s the same area I wrote about when describing what I called the Oil and Water of tango.

When the area around our waist is blocked, it can lead to a lot of problems emotionally, physically, and energetically. It can literally hurt in that area if we are holding a lot of stress, fear or trauma there. It can also cause us to be very disconnected between the lower half and upper half of our bodies. This can lead to physiological imbalances, coordination issues, fatigue, and more serious illnesses.

One of the best ways to open it up is to make sure that we are grounded in our lower bodies- with a heaviness and presence from the waist down, while simultaneously having a rising up feeling from our torso.

This is exactly the concept I learned through tango years before I knew anything about Energy Medicine. How amazing that I was practising doing this through the beautiful tango dances and classes I was taking back then, without realizing what benefits it was doing not just to my dancing, but to strengthening my overall alignment within my energies.

Donna explains how stretching that mid section- with those two seemingly contrasting earth (downward) and heaven (upward) energies, allows the energy to flow again. And the Belt Flow literally governs this opening. New connections can be made that were lost at some point, and a bringing together of the upper and lower bodies can be reestablished when we know how to turn on The Belt Flow.

I personally know what it feels like to have this Radiant Circuit turned off. After dealing with mold toxicity while having MS, my body is trying to figure out how to work together again. Besides my left side being weaker and slower than my right, my upper body now also has to compensate for the lack of grounding in my lower body.

My walking is staggered and has me dragging feet, unable to walk in a straight line, while my shoulders and back take on what my legs should be doing. My torso appears lopsided instead of growing tall. The overall result in my belly area, where my Belt Flow sits, is a kind of bulging of the belly, despite my small frame. It makes it hard for me to engage my core, and my upper and lower half of my body try to figure out how to work in unison.

To know that there is a mechanism here- a Radiant Circuit, an energy pathway that can be reawakened through repetitive movements that mimic the Oil and Water concept in tango I learned so long ago, excites me. It gives me hope. It allows me to reimagine what that feeling was like in tango classes and at milongas.

Knowing that I was able to create it without even knowing its power way back then helps me to believe that I can do it again. That a muscle memory was created years ago that sits under the many layers of toxins and weakness that accumulated in my system over the past couple of years. Underneath that, there is a strength. There is a pathway. There is an energy that could be stimulated into action again. That it will bounce to where my body needs it the most to get me back into healing, into alignment, into flow.

Here’s to dancing myself back into a balanced Belt Flow, into vitality and joy. Thank you, Tango, for giving me a taste of what it felt like long ago. And the workings of my energy body to recreate it, to bring it alive again. To trust and let go.