Living in a bush sanctuary you get many opportunities to connect with the animal kingdom, horses, spiders, wallabies, birds with all kinds of wonderful plumage, parrots, ducks and owl. My Beloved spotted some movement over in the bush outside the garden as we sat on the back verandah above the water hole, it turned out to be a koala! It was quite big and moving much faster than one usually sees them going, not that one sees them very often in the wild, those that are managing to survive in the changing environment spend about 20 hours a day sleeping up in a tree. No wonder we don’t see them much!
I looked up the meaning of koala and wasn’t quite sure how it might apply to my Beloved and I, seemed to me that we were pretty relaxed already and very focused on the things that truly matter to us. It took a few days and a medicine journey, and a day of celebration with my Beloved of our six month anniversary to understand the message that was coming through. It is a message of doing without doing, being in the world but not of it, of following the path of the heart and the body’s desire for bliss, the soul connection to everything that is.
And that happens when you find the still point within you, the dark womb of creation where a field of energy is rippling with potential. It is the ultimate paradox, both still and moving, filled with light and the dark, the polarity of the masculine and the feminine, Shiva and Shakti. There are many paths towards ecstasy but for me they all come through my body sense even if my physical self is not moving. So it is fitting that the first event my Beloved and I facilitate together should be an ecstatic dance night, the night before the shortest day of the year, leading us into the energies of the Winter Solstice.
Gabrielle Roth.
Gabrielle Roth has this to say about moving the body:
“If you put the body in motion, you will change. You are meant to move: from flowing to staccato, through chaos into lyric and back into the stillness from which all movement comes………..The spirit in motion heals, expands, circles in and out of the body, moving us through the layers of consciousness from inertia to ecstasy. Open to the spirit, and you will be transformed.”
Maps to Ecstasy, Gabrielle Roth, Nataraj Publ., Novato, CA, 1989.
