Life is a dance. You’ve heard that before. Every moment offers a new set of rhythms and flows to interpret. Sometimes the dancing is done with beauty and grace, and sometimes not. The question is, in this tango of the intertwined, who is the one who leads when the tune is called? Is it I or Other?
In the ballroom of human experience, attunement and trust are essential. This is not achieved, however, when the ego is in control. Unfamiliar with when, why and how to make the right moves, it can quickly turn the tango into an ungainly tangle instead. As comic relief, this can be entertaining, but not in a way that serves the choreography as designed.
I have been amazed at times at how many of us, myself included, still find it hard to surrender the floor, even to the Other who knows better, namely the Guru. Thus, when resistance occurs, the dancing is apt to quickly devolve from smooth to painfully awkward.
When we were kids, most of us were probably afraid of the dark. In bed alone, cringing under the covers at the slightest unfamiliar sound, we might have imagined the worst: an unseen presence that was out to get us. Our thoughts would race like stampeding horses, and turmoil would churn inside us until rescued by the soothing comfort of a loving parent.
Darkness, in some ways, may frighten us more as we advance in years. In the shadows of our imagination, monsters of a different sort may gather, worries that we could lose what we treasure most: loved ones, our mental abilities and physical health. Maybe we worry, too, that death will find us unprepared to meet it. Only in daring to confront these unruly intruders do we come to understand what is really going on: that instead of trying to get us, something in our experience is trying to get us out! That is when Other, who knows the moves that can glide us again into grace, needs our unqualified trust.
Ultimately the object of the dance is for Other and I to unite, becoming a seamless expression of blessing and communion. Saints and ascended masters have assured us that in this life or later on, we are all destined to reach that final state of Divine Bliss, more swiftly attained when Other is given the lead, helping us to become the dance itself.
A true story in just a few sentences captures the essence of this more eloquently than any long treatise could. “This year began badly,” a woman wrote in her journal. “One day I woke up and started having seizures. They got worse and worse. It looked like a brain tumor, but it turned out to be epilepsy. Serious epilepsy. Now I am on medication for the rest of my life. It makes me clumsy. It makes me forget things. It makes me throw up.”
The author slumped into a pall of self-pity. She stopped dancing altogether. And then in a single epiphany, she turned the whole experience right side up. “Now I realize this was a great year. It was the year I didn’t get a brain tumor.” What she got instead was a deeper love of life and all that it offers. With understanding and acceptance, she transformed her disease from a dreaded Other into the gift of a new, expansive I, and it took her to a place within herself of peace and light.
Life is a dance. You’ve heard that before.
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