Description

Pose guide is included——————————————————————————————————–Yoga Trance Dance™ is an exploration of the eternal flow of natural movement through yoga. Beginning with sahaja prana yoga or the experience of prana initiating yogasanas, yoga trance dance flows into an exploration of free-form, breath driven movement to liberate one’s creative life-force and cultivate embodied freedom.Evolving since Shiva’s first offering in 1994, Yoga Trance Dance has ignited people of all ages and backgrounds at Yoga Conferences, Festivals and Studios around the world:    * Esalen, Omega, Kripalu, Yoga Journal, Northwest Yoga Festival    * Yoga Studios around the world from London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Edinburgh, Tokyo, Hong Kong, New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Vancouver, Seattle, Chicago, Boston, Memphis, Atlanta, Miami, Dallas, Phoenix, Chapel Hill    * Retreats in Kerala, South India, Hawaii, Costa Rica, Turks and Caicos, St. John, Joshua Tree, Sedona, Yucatan, and Bali Yoga Trance Dance™ is a meeting of two great rivers, yoga and dance, which come from and are united at the source. That infinite creative source is the One, uniting us all. Yoga and dance are two of the oldest paths back home.Like lovers, they can get separated. Even though we are all born as natural dancers (just watch a toddler instinctually respond to rhythm), dance can easily get swept under the seeming demands of 21st-century living. It is actually the fragmenting effects of modern lifestyles that inspired the union of Yoga Trance Dance. Due to all that sitting, standing, driving, cell phoning, computer or cyber time, we have this strange combination of being more physically bound while mentally scattered ­- a body/mind split. Some of these effects can be felt as stiffness, rigidity, limited range of motion (even when exercising ­ as on the treadmill or weightlifting), or disembodiment (the “living from the neck up” phenomenon). The antidote: Our body needs to move and our internal state needs to be rejuvenated through meditation and ecstatic embodiment.Dance and yoga, particularly hatha yoga, are ways of calling us back into our bodies to irrigate our being with life energy known in yoga as “prana.” Prana is the animating force ­ the energy of being alive ­ and is most clearly felt through breathing. From the yogic view, the great breath flowing through us all is intelligence or consciousness itself. With flow yoga, we let the intelligence of our breath lead movement ­ the way a sailor tacks with the wind. Trance dance has a similar focus. Rather than emphasizing an outward performance, the goal of trance dancing is to let your creative energy move through you ­ to be guided by spirit (or “spiritus,” which is the Latin root for inspiration ­ the place where life breath ?and enlivening creativity meet). Thus, in yoga trance dance, form serves spirit, structure supports intuition, yoga prepares you for free-form dance, and your dance opens your being for a greater experience of the unified self that is yoga.This whole meeting of yoga and dance has deep roots within yoga as well as cross-cultural branches. Within yoga, all of the different energies of the One ­ – the gods and goddesses ­ are depicted as dancing. The universe is viewed as the Cosmic Dance of Shiva ­- Nataraja. Shiva Rea was given her name by her father, inspired by a powerful image of Nataraja. Lord Shiva is seen as the first teacher of both yoga and dance, the consummate yogi and prime mover, sometimes sublime, at other times wild, and always free. The Yogin follows the pulse of the inhalation and exhalation, the dancer, the beat.The contemporary explorations of this state of rhythmic-induced meditation are reclaiming “trance” as an accessible experience of embodied communion where the?observer dissolves into the power of now, the flow, the dance. Yoga Trance Dance aims to provide you with a “sadhana” (practice or means of realization) so that you can explore for yourself the potency of free-flow yoga and dance as well as music that can continue to water your life. Our intention is to bring greater fluidity, breath, range of motion, stamina for life, and embodied joy into our being and lives. In the words of the dancing mystic, Hafiz, “Now sweet one, be wise, Cast all your votes for dancing.”ENJOY!!!!!!!