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#2449 - Monday, April 17, 2006 - Editor: Gloria Lee    

"A mind of light is a mind that has fallen to its knees before the Heart and is open to Silence breathing through it."   

Ellen Davis

  Last week an issue ended with quotes about dancing, and now we have heard back from a real, live dancer, Ellen Davis. While she sent more quotes by Ruth St.Denis, I found her own writings also to be exquisite expressions of nondual truth. The following introduction is from her Yoga of Ballet webpage, all her quotes used by permission, please respect copyright. -Gloria  


  Former owner-director of Rozann-Zimmerman Ballet Center in Los Angeles, Ellen Davis danced with the Stuttgart Ballet Company and was a Ford Foundation scholarship  student at the School of American Ballet in N.Y.C. She is currently the artistic director of West Coast Conservatory of Ballet.
Ellen has taught beginning through professional level ballet for over twenty-seven years.  A choreographer, she has performed, choreographed and improvised works in California, New Mexico and abroad. She taught and lived for a year at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in India.
Ellen uses the teaching of dance as a way of evoking self-acceptance, beauty, balance, grace, a sense of unity and love for the process of learning.  She acknowledges and nurtures the "dancer within" in all of her students regardless of body-type, limited self-belief, or level of training.
She believes that along with proper placement and technique, the awakening of expressive truth, musicality and one's innate creative intelligence are equally important in empowering dancers to use the body as a means of creative self-expression and to extend the grace of dance to all of life.  While seeing good technique and the spirit of the movement as an integrated and inseparable whole, she evokes and encourages, right from the beginning levels, the expressive and musical qualities right along with the technique.  

http://hometown.aol.com/ellentd/page1.html
 


   

    What is Dance?

Dance is spirit tasting itself in form, from stillness to movement, chaos to harmony, cacophony to symphony, in all of its infinite diversity. Dance is what we call it when we see the movement and rhythm that is always already there. Dance is what we do when we let our bodies breathe our being into becoming and our becoming into being. Dance is the soul's love and laughter as it breathes into time. Dance is a heart explosion making love to the air. Dance is form and formlessness endlessly getting it on. Dance is the merging of sound and movement, where each feel like they are causing each other. Dance is God's living in time, as us, through us. Dance is a celebration of and total immersion into process. Dance is the manifestation of the fluidity of spirit in form. In that sense, dance is the resolution of paradox in form. Dance is a noun that is a verb that is life. Dance is our heart fire as it expresses itself through the body. Dance is a celebration in form of Now.
  Ellen Davis  


  Ellen sent some more quotes by Ruth St. Denis:    

The real message of the Dance opens up the vistas of life to all who have the urge to express beauty with no other instrument than their own bodies, with no apparatus and no dependence on anything other than space.


We shall sense our unity with all peoples who are moving to that exalted rhythm.


We should realize in a vivid and revolutionary sense that we are not in our bodies but our bodies are in us.


You and I are but specks of that rhythmic urge which is Brahma, which is Allah, which is God.

 
 


 

Ellen Davis    

Essentially, there is only Love and what does not know itself yet as Love.
As Love meets Love in form, as it recognizes itself, it spreads everywhere waking itself up to its own glory!
We are here as God in time, experiencing ourself in infinite diversity.  
~~~
Enfolded in mystery ground is groundless and groundless is everywhere making each now home.  
~~~
The hour of God is now as we step into the timeless eternal and know ourselves as that which we have aspired towards.
~~~
A mind of light is a mind that has fallen to its knees before the Heart and is open to Silence breathing through it.
~~~
The heart is what connects the One to its many faces in relationship without forgetting its essential unity and oneness with all.. The heart as it breathes through life is a living tantra, weaving its nondual suchness through relationship with all.
~~~
Transcendence is not a transcendence of the experience but a transcendence of the resistance to it. It is actually a total immersion into and embrace of the experience.  Doing that transforms the experience and the appearance of it.
~~~
by Ellen Davis ©1999 - 2006  http://hometown.aol.com/ellentd/myhomepage/business.html  


 

Inquiry, Aphorisms and Poetry by Ellen Davis

  If you go deep enough into what you gauge as a center point of emptiness or silence, you will find no center point. Your notion of center point is where you are referencing from in relation to somewhere else. It is what gives you your sense of self.

~~~

The Play never ends, just changes. The process is its completion. Manifestation is God's dance of self-realization and experience in all guises. The awareness of "always already" does not preclude manifestation as a medium of time and process but infuses its eternal now reality into life.

~~~

  On Enlightenment

I generally do not like to use the term "enlightenment" because it tends to stigmatize or specialize within our awareness what is our "always already" true essential being thereby separating ourselves from the experience of it more. It is a term of assessment which employs the comparative, measuring mind in ways that I have noticed has tendencies to pull an aspirant into separating themselves in their belief and identification from that for which they aspire.

As soon as you speak of the "real" as being what one thing as opposed to other things are or the "enlightened," you speak from awareness that sees also what is other than real and other than enlightened. In other words, it is a term of measurement from a dualistic and relative place of awareness. There is nothing wrong with this and it is what we do to create markers for ourselves in differentiating within our Self-experience. But what happens is that the markers become bars rather than gateways to that realization when we believe ourselves to be other than "real" or that there is something to do to become "enlightened." As soon as we act out of the belief that we are other than that which we aspire for, we concretize that belief and create tension obstructing the realization of the always already nondual suchness.

Enlightenment can be seen as the spacious awareness of what is prior to all conditions and conceptions and is not the end of Becoming which is the nature of manifest existence, but the (perceptually) unobstructed or unobscured unfolding of that unconditioned being, our true nature, as Satchidananda within manifestation.

We might ask, what is it in me or us that sees what enlightenment is and what is it in you that recognizes it? Is it not enlightened awareness itself? Only enlightenment itself can be enlightened. There is no one separate from anything to be enlightened in relationship to anything else. In that sense, the terms nondualist and enlightened are oxymorons.

In addition, enlightenment is not some measure of great knowledge attained. In fact the Truth Consciousness is birthed from the unknown and nothing previously conceived. So it can be said that in essence enlightenment is not knowing (and being at peace with it) and living in the realization of being no one. ;-) [...]

~~~

  Form and Formlessness Getting it On

Towards the One, using the relative to bridge to the non-relative as these bodies temporal in their belief find themselves suddenly breathing into the now, their matter, mater, Mother transparent, shining essence's luminosity, reflecting new light, new appearances and new worlds as consciousness reveals ItSelf, as mater remembers HerSelf and lets go of old decision creating identities, relaxing, rendering Her more malleable to the Divine Will in action - and we see that all of these realities are real as they cannot be but That and the illusion is in their immalleability and the immalleability is the Divine playing hide and seek with ItSelf, experiencing ItSelf in Its infinite diversity - and as the stars are variables in the creation of probable realities, so are the archetypes, so are the you and the me forgetting and then remembering that we are One and then remembering that we are the many, the none, the All and any other measurable and immeasurable variable, each of our individuated signatures in their dance together creating the perfect alchemy for Self-realization and healing the scars of separation making whole the One Body that can play with every speck of ItSelf as the whole And as the part, where veils are lifted revealing every movement as dance and every sound as music until all knows itSelf as Love which It has always been as It waits for deeper recognition and clarification of ItSelf in time and space, this medium of becoming, this glorious expression of the Isness, the Sat expressing It's inherent Chit and Ananda, as Chit and Ananda also express each other and Sat, refining Self-recognition from cacophony to symphony without changing a sound and the ugly to the beautiful without changing the appearance, seeing the Divine Perfection of absolutely everything where the consciousness can then reflect ItSelf with new appearances, new symbolic representations of ItSelf circling back into and out of time and space, a spiral of Love, ascension and descension, involution and evolution spiraling to Self-knowing, removing the veil off of the spiritualization of the material substance as we in more and ever-expanding ways materialize the spiritual substance until these statements of differentiation no longer make sense because all is That, until the Divine wants to again say hello to itSelf but this time, who it says hello to recognizes who is saying hello and that the all-blissful has birthed Its pain and tortures and the all-knowing Its ignorance and confusion for the pure enjoyment of the Play, the Truth Consciousness infiltrating every pocket of matter, every cell knowing itSelf within the eternal embrace, spirit and matter endlessly making love.

  ~~~  

On Faith

My faith is in the fact that no matter what the appearances and outcomes will be, they are a gift of God waiting for my embrace. I do not believe that you will keep your word. I do believe that God acting through and as you will give me what I am to face. That includes your honor and your betrayal. There are beings that I have faith in but my love for their freedom and my awareness of the unpredictability of the Divine Will in Action has shown me not to have any attachments or expectations about their actions. I act with others "in good faith" that they will keep their word, and choose carefully who I interact with. Still, whatever does happen regardless of the appearances is meant for my embrace or full presence with it. I may hold people accountable, but God is innately so, and I surrender to that. I relinquish my human ideas of fairness to rtam bhrat (the vast Truth of knowledge and action). God's ideas of fair and right, I have found, are very different from human ideas of fair and right. I have learned not to second guess God except in the sense that I am faced with exactly what I am supposed to be faced with at any given time. I believe that God will take care of me, but I have no idea of what that will look like or whether it will feel good or not. That is my faith.   ~~~

Defending Ourselves Against the Unknown

In my view, to validate our place in the world and give ourselves a sense of worthiness and security, so many of us habitually see or create ourselves as meaning makers. We define ourselves in relationship to our world. "I am here and not there. I am fat and you are thin. I am fast and you are slow. I am bad and you are good. You are this way and I am that way. I used to be this way and now I am that way. I believe this and you believe that."

We define ourselves through our conditions: "I am hot, I am cold. I am tired. I am old. I am young. I am hungry, I am horny. I am happy. I am sad. I am angry. I am depressed."

We define ourselves in opposition to the world or in identification with it: "You are this way and I am not like you. The world is this way but I am that way." It is a heyday for the comparative mind.

Then, to make it even more meaningful, we create reasons to feel these ways. And the more reasons we have, the more it gives us validity or justifies our existence. And if we do not have reasons, we judge ourselves as shallow or crazy. The way we think that we will know where we are is in relation to something else.

In not being comfortable with the unknown or in not knowing where we are, we defend ourselves against NOW, against what is and the unknown, by layering on top of it meaning and stories and beliefs which place us in a context to where there is an appearance of knowing and an appearance of identity. When we surrender to the now without fixating in identity through relationship to something else or our own conditions we see that there is no one there. If we do not see ourselves in relationship to something else we cease to exist as a separated self-sense. And if there is no one there, there is no doer. Paradoxically, when we as awareness, without a fixated identity surrender to the Now through a Silence without our preconceptions/stories/beliefs layered on top of the now, we can really see where we are, what arises and what to do much more intimately. This is awareness.   Approaching life with all of our preconceptions and self-referencing in relation to the world around us is like looking through glasses which are colored with designs and polka dots on them rather than through clear ones. [...]   If we had nothing to measure or reference ourselves in relation to, where would we be? Who would we be? I am not pathologizing this - it has created its own field for Self-experience and exploration. But I also see that doing it obscures an experience of freedom where Truth flows unimpeded and stories Divinely intelligent unfold (supernovas, galaxies) without our adding stories to them that direct life in ways that mind and fear cannot with all of its gumption ever hope to. Those who are awake to this living here are living eternity in time or in nondual, prior to conditions awareness within the conditions of duality. There is freedom there.

~~~  

and much more.... from http://hometown.aol.com/ellentd/myhomepage/diary.html     www.ellendavis.org sunyalila.blogspot.com Yoga of Ballet

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