Near noon I received a text from a friend about two tickets she had to that evening’s dance concert being performed by her students and herself that very evening—would I like to come?

This friend happens to be a world-renowned and beloved belly-dancer, dance teacher and choreographer, whose dance I had only seen on video but not yet seen in person. There was no notice, no heads-up, just the immediacy of two tickets tonight on what was the coldest night in NYC yet this season.

The invitation was from Kaeshi Chai, a friend who I know through an international group of which we are both members, known as the Evolutionary Leaders Circle started by several world-class thought-leaders, such as Dr. Deepak Chopra, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Neale Donald Walsch and Jean Houston through a group called The Source of Synergy Foundation.

It consists of dozens of luminaries and leaders in their respective fields from around the world, doing their part to create a better, more beautiful, peaceful and conscious world.

Chatting our way to friendship

Both Kaeshi and I participate frequently In one of the Circle’s weekly events along with about a dozen others who meet weekly in a casual, on-line “lounge atmosphere” to discuss any number of areas of interest and “topics of the day”.

We laugh and talk and listen and enjoy each other’s company, with only small glimpses of our professional lives really shining through as our focus is on the topics at hand.

After one of our sessions, Kaeshi called me the next morning to invite me to hear a musician friend of hers and her husband’s, who was playing around the corner from me in the East Village, in fact, at a friend’s restaurant. I accepted and later bicycled down to East 6th St. to meet Kaeshi, husband Brad, the performer and their other friends for a lovely and very musical evening at Caravan of Dreams.

From screen world to real world

In a world of screens, the opportunity to meet people in person is a rare and wonderful one, bringing much more reality and dimensionality to a relationship.

It happened that just the following evening not far from where they live in Queens, I was giving a talk and now they accepted my invitation.

A real pleasure to have a friend and no less, a member of the Evolutionary Leaders attend one of my talks to a psychologist friend’s group. What fun: We’ve been stepping out from “behind the screen” and into the Technicolor of real life two nights in a row.

Today’s text from Kaeshi was the next invitation, this time to see her perform as well as her students, the Belly Queens. There was no way I wasn’t going to be there.

As said, everything is now entering the land of “in person fun” and what a difference it makes.

Let the dance begin!

Kaeshi and her many students, some consummate professionals, embodied a spirit in their movement such that I daresay that everyone in the audience felt streaming through them.

I know that words on a page cannot express the exhilaration of even a single moment of the joy of seeing/feeling the power of the performance but I have to try. I know that it’s not unlike the meaning of the old Sufi saying “It’s like sending a kiss by messenger.” It just isn’t the same….!

At least something of this relationship of writing to dance, expressed by the inspired the words of choreographer Bob Fosse: Choreography is writing on your feet. I tried but please forgive me—I’m still writing with my hands.

And using the art of words as best I can to convey emotions that stream through everyone when they are in the presence of beauty is a real challenge. James Joyce referred to these moments of experiencing such beauty as ”aesthetic arrest”.

Belly-dance is a refined & sexy art

Belly-dancing is a fine and ancient art that is nearly everything you’d want dance to be. It doesn’t quite have the grace of the ballet or the Argentine Tango, no. It creates its own rich and rhythmic aesthetic: it is fluid, beautiful, sensual, sexual, flirtatious, uplifting and even at moments, erotic.

The art of belly-dancing exalts the Feminine.

It stirs both excitement and passion in both dancer and audience.

With Kaeshi’s choreographic skill and direction of her students, we were uplifted to mesmerizing heights, exhilarated by the beauty of the human body, primarily this evening, a woman’s body, and the magic that occurs when a series of women dance in concert, in harmony with one another celebrating the joy of the body.

They were really celebrating the liberation of the women themselves from so many of the rules, laws and religious dogma that have held women down for millennia through today from the natural and beautiful self-expression of their womanliness and femininity.

Feminine beauty & expression may be oppressed but cannot be held down for long

It’s paradoxical that belly-dancing, largely sprung from cultures in the Middle East, perhaps the sexiest of all dance forms, are the most oppressive of women’s self-expression. Perhaps its emergence there is an expression of Nature’s dance, her balancing act, her antidote to such an oppressive culture.

I think this is likely due to the feminine power that is unleashed through women’s undulating, freely expressing bodies that these men feel overwhelmed and intimidated—and thereby seek to contain and restrain. The power of Mother Earth is great, perhaps nothing greater, which the Feminine by definition symbolizes and embodies. Mother Earth is the archetype of the Feminine, or in the spirit of the great, Swiss psychologist, Dr. Carl Jung, called “the anima”.

Men are best off according immense, humbled respect for this power, and best off letting it move as it is moved to.

The multi-dimensionality of the dance

There were many dimensions being explored and expressed through this extraordinary medley of dance pieces Kaeshi helped to arrange for her and other choreographer’s students this fine, wintry NYC night.

On one hand, these women were unabashedly open in the expression of their sensuality and their body’s readiness and eagerness to express. It was like “letting women loose” to do as her Spirit moves her to.

In a world in which there happens to be so much gender dysphoria and confusion, to see the free expression of the beauty of the feminine in its glory, its overt sensuality, curves, movement and sexiness, aroused the attention of all present and their own sensuality too by osmosis was nothing short of deeply inspiring.

Dancers, come one, come all!

One of the other dimensions expressed through this dance troupe was that there were women from every cultural background, age group and body type. Some were young and gorgeous, some were quite large and advanced in years, yet all these distinctions aside, they were in tune with each other and themselves. There was a beautiful appreciation of all. The joy of movement was what was important—all else was left behind.

The joy of the dance united everyone present and brought out the best in all. This group embraced women from everywhere and together they created beauty, sensuality and magic.

It showed us that when people allow themselves to be vulnerable and their beauty to shine, no matter the age or size, there is beauty to see and to be enjoyed.

It was obvious that all women dancing were encouraged to “be themselves” and to their fullest—the result was unbounded magnificence.

Belly-Dancing creates a unified dield of pleasure, excitement, sensuality & love

We bore witness to a liberation. One could see how people from anywhere, all backgrounds, ages and types could get in touch with their human spirit and let it be expressed through their willingness to be themselves and allow their body be their means of expression.

The audience, possibly especially me, was crying and laughing at the same time from delight. The music too, which was rhythmic, Middle Eastern and enchanting, carried us along the whole evening.

I sat next to a gentleman of Persian descent who was going through the same emotional excitement as I was, and here is yet another dimension uncovered. He said that this kind of dance was illegal in Iran. The women are prohibited from dancing, moving like this, they cannot express themselves, or risk being arrested by the “Morality Police”.

They live behind a burqa. Their sensuality, sexuality, sexiness and free womanly expression is morally unacceptable. Can you imagine? So he was beside himself beholding such free expression and the joy that is born from it as it isn’t only legal here in America, but encouraged and deeply appreciated.

Yet another cultural breakthrough from something seemingly so simple as “an evening of dance”.

Male belly-dancer in on the act as well

In the performance, one man danced. He danced while balancing a hookah on his head, making some pretty interesting moves, even getting down on the ground, all the while, in perfect balance. The hookah did not topple.

People loved it.

Belly-dancing can be done by all and enjoyed by all, because it is the human spirit coming alive through movement.

"Dance is the hidden language of the soul", said the great choreographer, Martha Graham.

Our world, our daily life, has become so left-brained, digitized and screenified. Unless you are a bit of a dancer or an athlete, movement largely consists of getting up and down from places to sit. There is a lot of sitting in our culture and among the masses, not a lot of graceful movement.

Yes, some of us play sports, are athletic and exercise which is moving in the right direction and indeed, a form of dance. But to see so many dancers from all over the world, young and old, big and small, so alive, so focused, was nothing short of powerfully inspiring.

Speaking about dance and the ecstasy available for both dancer and audience, we would be remiss not to recognize that so is the same with music. While seeming to be the very fabric and nature of the Universe itself, it is the heartbeat behind dance. Music will be its own future article.

For full health & liberation: dance and sing a bit every day

Thankfully, there is a wonderful contingent that dances but proportionate to our population, it isn’t big. After this dynamic performance, it became clear to me that the world would be a better place, people would be a lot happier and healthier if they made sure to dance a little every single day!

Werner Erhard said: “Health is a function of participation [in life].” I’ll go a step further and say “Health is also a function of self-expression and dance is human’s highest somatic expression.”

The best-played sport or gymnastic is at its height when it looks like dance. Even fingers on a piano.

In another way, tonight’s performance was quite personal for me, something that Kaeshi couldn’t have known, that gave the concert a more personal meaning related to my own background.

Dancing in my teens & beyond

Growing up in Westport, Ct., there was a dance school, Bambi Lynn, where girls went to study ballet and modern jazz. There were no boys. Boys were entirely too intimidated or egotistically concerned to consider it. Not a thought, not a chance! If they were to study dance with the girls, they probably have “other tendencies!” There were no boys, well, until… us!

There were two guys, my friend Danny and me, who were the only ones courageous enough in a high school of a few thousand students to join the girls. Not only were we not intimidated by the fears and projections of other guys—not at all—we went further and instructed them to “stay away”, this wasn’t for them!

As a result, it was a teenager’s dream-come-true: only two guys in a room of cute girls freely dancing about wearing tight-fitting leotards! It may sound funny now but back then, we were “in Heaven”.

But it just began there. We were both genuinely “into” the movement and joy of both jazz and ballet, the pleasure and the discipline. We were both athletic so this was yet another dimension through which to express our enjoyment of our bodies in movement.

Staples H.S., Westport, CT. was ahead of its time as was bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY

It was a high point of high school. It was an exceptional high school in itself. An expression of that was that the Alvin Ailey Dance Troupe came when we were seniors to perform there. Talk about inspiring.

Later on in college at Bard in upstate New York, while I majored first in psychology, then literature and comparative mythology, theater and dance were my minors. I took almost as many dance classes as I did literature. Dance became deeply rooted in me and essential to my own development.

In a junior year abroad in France, I had the opportunity to see Alvin Ailey again, this time in Paris at the Theatre Champs-Elysee. I was a poor student abroad back then and had to spend my week’s food budget on a ticket. But it was worth every franc. Judith Jamison (who just recently passed at age 81) dancing to Laura Nyro in Cry was and is one of the most magnificent dance pieces of all time and indeed, made us all cry from joy.

Sufi dancing

A beautiful, humble, soft-spoken Sufi teacher named Adnan, originally from Iraq, came to New York every year and taught a Sufi meditation-in-movement class. It involved each of us dancing with large, beautiful scarves which he asked us to hold and move with. All the scarves were different, brilliant colors, so to behold the sight of people moving gracefully, with the scarves following the human movement created an ambience of a delicious, divine delight.

Again, the power of dance and movement flourishes in an atmosphere where spirit is triumphant.

Ecstatic dance

Another genre that has emerged in the last decades has gone by the name of Ecstatic Dance. People gather in large spaces, an interesting mélange of sequenced musical choices and people “dance their hearts out” in free-form movement. The endorphins released are indescribable.

This ecstatic joy of movement, of breaking up somatic patterns and forming new neural patterns brings a new level of life and vibrancy to the dancer. A different style altogether than belly-dancing or other more formalized forms like the Argentine Tango, it still brings a level of joy that celebrates the beauty and magnificence of life itself.

Ecstatic Dance evokes the earlier genetic memory some of us feel when remembering the Dionysian celebrations and mysteries of Ancient Greece. Here it is again in the 21st Century. It’s part of the human spirit and doesn’t die.

Kaeshi Chai’s troupe

So on this special evening, to see Kaeshi dance herself, a wonder to behold, and the bevy of dancers she teaches, perform, flooded me with memories of earlier times in my life and withremembering how seminal and important this art is inside my own body and my love of life.

Kaeshi gave me a gift that she doesn’t even know she gave. She and her students gave a gift to the audience that will resonate for a long time.

In a world of great harshness, anger, confusion, strife, suffering and war, to remember how beautiful life really can be and is, how great the human spirit, how magnificent the human body, how grand the power of feminine self-expression through movement, we can re-align our lives and spend more time in what is deeply nourishing and meaningful.

Thank you Kaeshi and thanking the magnificent, graceful art of dance for helping to evolve our human community.