Awakening Your Serpent Spine:

Dance as a Meditation for Your Chakras

By Adelaide Marcus

http://www.jadedragon.com/articles/chakrabelly.html

As a student of life and a teacher of dance, Adelaide Marcus has made the connection between belly dance and inner discovery. Becoming in touch with the body enlivens sensitivity, cultivates strength, and creates a sense of home. For Adelaide, insight through psychology, yoga, world medicine, and Qi Gong has brought forth a firm link between these spiritual practices and the body’s natural intuition cultivated through movement. The expression of dance can be extremely powerful and healing. Adelaide teaches how each chakra can be stimulated, opening up the potential in every human to move through difficulties and re-create themselves.

Belly Dancing with the Chakras

Root Chakra

Grounding into mother earth, as belly dance teaches, allows us to use her as a base to maintain control, balance, and stability, while protecting the body from injury. Planting our feet into the floor can help us feel a sense of oneness with our surroundings, while maintaining a foundationwithin ourselves.

In a grounded posture, through moving the pelvis and developing a sense of the perineum, we can gather the energy from our mother and move it up the spine, essentially embracing the flow of the serpent and beginning to dance merely from the connection with the source of our being, our mother.

Lower Tan Tien

By finding our center we can learn to spiral energy in and out from the core of our being. In life we may spiral out in many directions, yet having an awareness of our center allows us to recollect when needed. While exploring the dance of the serpent, using belly rolls and undulations, we massage internal organs and release stagnation. We store many of our emotional troubles in our bellies, thus independently moving the stomach helps build emotional stability. This movement aids in the flow of processing our emotions and, in digestion and bowel movements, by “waking up” the system and allowing chi or life force to flow through.

Solar Plexus

In conjunction with clearing stagnation, opening up the solar plexus chakra allows the inner-self to radiate like the sun. When we dance, we allow our expression to shine out through our body and movements. Opening the solar plexus in belly dance can help spread the rib cage, allowing for deeper, well-rounded breaths and further flexibility in the movements.

Heart

Lifting the chest, as taught in belly dance, creates a more open and proud heart. Through the control of our upper body we can gain power over the receptiveness of our heart. In belly dance we dance with the heart open and giving, yet realize that we have ownership over this chakra just as we do any other part of our body. Originally, as a rite of passage, mothers taught this dance to their daughters as a gift of the heart. Furthermore, dance feels good; we love and enjoy it as a gift to others and ourselves. Opening and dancing from the heart helps posture, self-confidence, and our capacity to love.

Throat

Dance, like words, is a form of expression, a way of explaining who we are. A dance can tell stories in a language that is sensory and more abstract than the human brain can break down. In belly dance the neck is long as the head floats up to the sky and the shoulders are relaxed. Through the dance we can speak and say things that may be too personal, deep, or buried to make out in words. By telling our story and simply saying “here I am in this moment” the dance speaks of feelings and thus helps us get in touch with them and know ourselves better. Opening this communicative chakra helps overcome conflicts sooner and can assist in taking the weight off our chest, so we can dance and live feeling light and free.

Third Eye

Using different imagery helps us explore a range of movement qualities. Using third-eye visualizations may actually open up sensations and channels in the body. For example, I often describe moving the arms as if I am surrounded in water. This creates a more deliberate flow of movement and cultivates chi. The third eye is about vision and creating. Dance gives power to the vision and can therefore help us accomplish our goals or dreams. By connecting our third-eye visions to movement, we can make them and their manifestations an everyday part of our life through dancing.

Crown

When the crown chakra is aligned and alert we can feel light as a feather. In belly dance the upper body and head is very light and flowing, given its base from the lower body. The top of the head is where the energy flows up and out like a fountain of abundance. This is a visual that I like to use. By opening the crown chakra and allowing our energy to rise up and explode out, we can refill our bodies with energy and life, continuously calling more qi in through our movements in a cycle of renewable creativity.

Awakening Your Serpent Spine

Adelaide teaches classes and workshops focusing on awakening the coiled snake that lies at the base of our spine referred to as “Kundalini” in the yogic philosophy of ancient India. The image of coiling, like a spring, conveys the sense of untapped potential energy. Adelaide uses sleek, serpent-like movements of the spine to tap into this creative potential, allowing Kundalini energy to spring and rise through the chakra system. Unlocking Kundalini will take you on a journey of sensory awakening, which will stimulate your life with new insights, energy, and creativity, helping you move through your inner and outer obstacles to living your highest potential.