Community dance rituals have historically held an
essential place in the good health and functioning of
traditional cultures around the World. Such dances have
allowed members of a village to experience communion
with each other, their ancestors, the earth and the cosmos.
with each other, their ancestors, the earth and the cosmos.
Ancient cultures have used dance rituals for vision questing, honoring deities, affecting weather patterns, celebrating birth, grieving the dead, and seeking answers to complex community dilemmas.
A healing context is one where you create a swirling of the life force, an amplification, a movement, a transmission, an energy field so that when another person steps into it, an awakening of their own inner healing sources is encouraged.
Bradford Keeney, Ph.D, author of Bushman Shaman: Awakening the Spirit through Ecstatic Dance
As we have seen with the Sun Dance, dance is often used to bring ordinary members of the community into contact with the spirits. In ritual and dance, non-shamans can enter the spirit world and interact with its inhabitants, or the spirits can possess ordinary human dancers and bring their power out into ordinary reality. Perhaps because of its very physicality, dance seems to open the channels of communication to the spirits for people for whom this contact is not normally possible.
