You Can’t Control A Body That Embraces Its Own Delight

What The Dakini Knows About Transforming Pain

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Hi y’all,

Before I knew Tibetan Buddhist terms like rigpa and non-duality, I knew that I could somehow—and all at once—lose, find, and create myself through music. Had someone pointed out to me that non-duality was something I had already experienced dozens of times dancing to salsa and bachata and drum-and-bass, I would have been meditating every morning, come hell or high water, like I do now.

What I’ve always known is that a good beat stretches out the stiffest places in my mind like they’re pulled taffy. There is a light inside us all that is always there, and dancing while watching this light makes everything else appear brighter. I don’t think about much of anything while I’m dancing yet I perceive that I am very, very alive, and reach a place beyond thought.

Writing about dance and meditation brings to mind Zadie Smith’s essay, “Joy,” where she takes a man’s hand and dances to Q-tip: “The top of my head flew away. We gave ourselves up and we danced and danced.”

For me, there’s no practice more closely related to sitting down and meditating than standing up and dancing.

Because I love to dance, I’ve always been drawn to the dancing dakini. When you go to Western Vajrayana centers, you’ll often find beautiful thangkas of dancing dakinis (female Buddhas). These thangkas are used in yidam practice, where we experience ourselves as a Buddha form.

Vajravarahi, a dakini

With so many images of dakinis dancing, I started to wonder why we don’t find many people dancing like dakinis in these same Buddhist centers. In the Himalayas, there is plenty of Buddhist dance connected to ritual and meditation. But dance doesn’t have the same emphasis in the Western Vajrayana Buddhism.¹

I started asking myself why this is.

All this got me this got me wondering more broadly: Why do so many religious traditions throughout the world treat dance and somatic meditation as a spiritual practice? And why is this not as prevalent in European spiritual traditions?

In Dancing in The Streets, Barbara Ehrenreich explains that, for years in Europe, the dancing was tolerated within the Catholic church until it was finally banned in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. People still danced in European medieval culture—just not to connect with the divine. Group dancing and the joy that accompanies it was feared by the ruling class. I was reminded that, before Europe colonized the world, it spent centuries colonizing itself.²

Christianity—originally the religion of a marginalized ethnic group in Southwest Asia—was appropriated by empire to control and subject the bodies of European serfs who were bound to a land. Dancing was not holy because in imperial Christianity, bodies are not holy.

This has always been an effective oppressive tactic. When you take away people’s sense of the joy that they can find in their bodies, they become much easier to manipulate. Instilling a hatred of the body among a group of people is a way to dehumanize their experience and persuade them that their bodies do not belong to them, that bodies are the tools of both an authoritarian god and an exploitative colonial system. As Europeans colonized the world, they took their aversion to both dance and the body with them. Ehrenreich observes that this aversion to dance became a desired quality of the white Western mind, particularly the white, upper-middle class male mind.

Ultimately the colonial legacy of Europe’s hostility to dancing as spiritual practice still lives within Western culture, particularly the puritanical U.S. There’s a strain of religious illness that considers the vitality of the body as somehow tantamount to sex, as if dance was an inevitable gateway drug to coitus. My grandfather, a Christian minister, had a joke he liked to tell: “Q: Why don’t Baptists have sex standing up? A: They’re afraid God will think they’re dancing.”

Dance offers an outlet to relate to vitality of the body and of physical intimacy that goes beyond sexuality. It’s a kind of low-grade ecstasy. The word “ecstasy” itself comes from the Greek root word, “ekstasis,” meaning “to stand outside of.” When we stand outside ourselves—even it’s only every now and then—our clarity sharpens.

Whenever I dance—usually to a bachata or salsa playlist, alone in my kitchen, or after brunch with friends in the living room, or with my children on a rainy Sunday—I’m not as bothered by the state of our world or the problems in my own life. Nothing feels as impossible. I can respond to difficulty from a place of freedom rather than tightness and anxiety. I don’t forget how awful things are—but I remember that living in a perpetually stricken state of fear and grief does not help others or make things less awful. That delight, that low-grade ecstasy, gives my imagination the air and sunlight to grow new visions and possibilities. It is a kind of cleansing of suffering.

This is why dancing, a vehicle for the ecstatic, is so often oppressed by authoritarians. You can’t control a body that embraces its own delight.

Duende, Pain, and The Dakini

I’ve met so many people who are afraid of dancing. I’ve felt that too when—afraid of looking foolish or clumsy—and I wonder if the fear of our own appearance and bodies in motion creates a limitation within our minds as well. I wonder if this is also why the dakini dances. She’s unafraid.

Allowing yourself to be fully present in your body, as she is, is a relief from the surveillance and monitoring that so many of us notice within a society that sees the body as an object of labor, or an object of sexuality, or an object of fear. The people I know who love dancing the most are like those dakinis in the thangkas—those who have gone beyond the norms of limited social norms, of limited thinking, and who belong to themselves outside of the social order.

I’ve danced with dakinis in my first apartment, where opossums lived in the ceiling and strange dreams crowded our hallways. I’ve danced with dakinis in small town gay bars with blacked out windows. I’ve danced with dakinis with their hair drenched in sweat, in backyard parties on hot Texas nights, the grape Kool-aid smell of mountain laurel filling the air. I’ve danced alone in the prairie to discover that I wasn’t alone, but with the dakini of the red-winged blackbird, the vermillion powder of sumac crushed beneath my feet. Whenever we give ourselves up to that bright joy of our bodies, we’re with the dakini.

The transgressive, fearless natures of the dakini is symbolized through her nakedness, her dance upon corpses in charnel grounds, and the skull cup of blood that she holds and is about to drink, the severed heads of delusion around her neck. The element of fear and even horror is intentional in these images. The fear, however, isn’t her fear—it’s ours. We fear that we shouldn’t be enjoying ourselves as much as she enjoys herself, especially not in conditions as loathsome and unclean as the charnel ground, especially not in a culture that, like ours, is preoccupied with purity and correctness. Only those obsessed with tidy lives, under the spell of illusory control, would shrink at the unkempt nature of existence.

Witnessing the dakini, I think of the Spanish poet Gabriel Garcia Lorca’s writing on duende—an aesthetic quality Andalusian music. He writes of a singer “tearing” her voice hoarsely, to convey the nakedness of her emotion, as a “jet of blood worthy of her pain and sincerity.” Duende, according to Lorca, is not unique to a particular culture. It’s everywhere, but often I find it at the fringes of everywhere, existing at the edge of culture. I’ve often found that it’s often in the domain of the outsider.

I associate that sense of “tearing” the voice as the sound of grief has been silenced, a pain that we may carry in us every day but which does not find relief in the voice of ordinary conversation.

Recently, I had the harrowing experience of cutting off contact with someone from my family of origin who has been emotionally and verbally abusive to me for years. The story is complicated and unimaginably sad. The experience has pushed me outside my own sense of order and my own conditioning of what family is supposed to look like. I could not organize the experience into sense. It required an admission of failure. No matter what I did, I could never change or help the person who was abusing me.

Going “no-contact” means going through a kind of death that has no name, no ritual, and no comfort in the universal. Most people haven’t lived through what I’ve lived through. And yet I know I’m not alone. So many of us have grief in our lives that feels secret—moving below daily experience like a hidden underground stream. When I’ve tried to hide this pain from myself I’ve only ended up operated by shadows.

To not allow pain, and to instead compartmentalize feeling, is a fear of moving through the chaotic churn of deep emotion. The expression of deep emotion—of singing while tearing the voice with hoarseness—is so often the labor of the female. Like duende, you can find that deep emotion in the tradition of Irish keening—a kind of lament for the dead that was usually written and sung by women—that was nearly wiped out by the British empire.

Here again, I think of the labor of the dakini. The horror of life, and the carnality of the body—the fact that we are all sacks of bone and meat—does not arrest the dakini in frozen terror. It does not stop her dance. This is the ground where her dance arises.

Duende, like the dakini, is not born out of the harmony of beauty but rather out of life’s raw unreason. It is an aesthetic of ugliness. Hers is the kind of wisdom that is acquired when you have not known life as particularly nice, fair, or orderly. She is present for all the shit we can’t control—which is most everything. She doesn’t sit upon a lotus or meditation cushion. She dances upon a yellowing corpse, because the decay of life supports her dance of vibrant, exquisitely clear awareness.

It is that quality of awareness that allows us to watch, without flinching, the chaos around us, the pain within us, with utter clarity, to know what is unimaginably sad without it distorting our own sense of power and joy. The curved knife, the shape of a crescent moon, is held aloft in her right hand, ready to cut through.

Lorca also writes that duende “loves the rim of the wound.” She makes her home at the edge of this wound. The center doesn’t hold, but the edge always does.

Those dancing dakinis in the thangkas are what’s happening inside us when we give ourselves up. When we quit trying so hard. When we act in a state of presence, without expectation and without fear. We can remain open while allowing our true natures act through us: I’m going to let this work through me, I’m going to let it unravel me.

I’m going to let it move me.

My vibe lately: Pina Bausch in Bluebeard. Photo by MartMaarten Vanden Abeele, 1977.

Dance and Dakini Inspiration

Kentucky Carla’s tutorials and historical explanations on Appalachian flat-footing make me proud to be where I’m from.

sarah.lamorena breaks down bachata into easy-to-follow moves on Instagram reels.

Bachata Crew shows how diverse and personalized everyone’s bachata can be.

I suck at arms and upper-body movement in salsa which is why I watch Katerina Mink and dream a dream.

And since I wrote about duende, I think it’s appropriate to include this video of the legendary flamenco dance, Carmen Amaya. (I cannot do any of this—my duende is on the inside, quietly seething passion.)

Wim Wenders’ movie, Pina, a tribute to the choreographer Pina Bausch, is absolutely incredible.

Dakini’s Warm Breath by Judith Simmer Brown is excellent and explores the dynamism of the dakini in Tibetan Buddhism.

Currently reading and inspired by A Dakini’s Counsel, a collection of Dzogchen teachings by the yogini Sera Khandro and translated by Christina Monsoon.

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1. The one place that I could find dance emphasized in Western Vajrayana was in Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche’s sangha, and the vajra dance, which was revealed to him in a terma. The dance looks lovely and reminds me of Sufi dance.

2. A lot of Ehrenreich’s work reminds me of insights in Cedric Robinson’s critique of Marxist theory in Black Marxism, a book which explores how the West African belief systems led to organized revolts of enslaved Black people in the Americas. He argues that modern-day concepts of race have roots in the European Middle Ages, and that before Europe colonized the world, Europe spent centuries colonizing itself. In Robinson’s theory, the beginnings of modern-day concepts of race started with the racialization of the European peasantry. This was kind of a warm-up act to the colonization of Africa, America, and Asia—the global majority.