DANCING ACROSS THE GREAT DIVIDE
with
Ya’Acov Darling Khan
Co-Founder and Co-director of
School of Movement Medicine
21 years ago, at midday on a sweltering
summer’s day, a few miles outside the village of
Snowflake, Arizona, I crawled out of a sweat lodge into the harsh glare of the
desert sun. It was even hotter outside than it was inside. And this was the
fourth lodge we’d done in as many days as we prepared for the Deer Tribe’s
Sundance. We had an hour to recover.
And then fully dressed in our ceremonial gear, all of us, men and women, in
long skirts and fringed shirts, circled the Sun Dance ceremonial ground. We
danced for 20 hours a day for the next three days and nights. We each had a
lane and we danced backwards and forwards up and down that lane to the
repeating rhythms of four Sundance songs, without food and with a tiny
amount of water.
We were dancing for life. We were dancing for our families
and we were dancing for our dreams.
I had left our young son at home with his mama and I had lots to pray for.
We were right at the beginning of our professional journey, having been
teaching for four years, and we were just about breaking even. Things were
tight. We were a young family and we were reliant on making the work we
were teaching known and accessible in order to make a living. And so we
travelled and set up lots of dancing communities in as many places as our
young bodies could take us. We worked hard. We prayed hard and we
played hard too.
There was an edge to those times. Many times, I experienced the cold pit of
fear in my stomach as we struggled to make ends meet. We were super
passionate about what we were doing. And we had experienced its benefit in
very tangible ways.
Gabrielle Roth, one of our central teachers at that time, had a love of the
artist inside everyone. The dance was the pathway to discovering the vast and
untapped reserves we had inside us. And so tap we did. I practiced like a
man possessed. Maybe I was. The dance had taken hold of me and there
was no way back.