Barefoot and Beautiful–Belly Dance

I recently received a message from a woman that said, “I don’t know if you remember me, but I was in your belly dance class a few years ago. I had been through a brutal divorce and your class is the first time I felt beautiful in years. Thank you.”

Recently a young woman came up to me after dance class and softly said, “Does belly dance make you feel beautiful? Because whenever I belly dance, I feel beautiful.”

“YES!YES! YES!” That’s my answer, and that is always my goal when I teach—to make each and every person in the class leave feeling more beautiful than when they walked in. I don’t have to work very hard—belly dance has that effect all by itself.

Did you know belly dance has magical powers? It can make even the most fragile and vulnerable among us feel beautiful. It doesn’t matter your age or weight or body type, belly dance looks beautiful on everyone. It also can heal broken hearts, breathe life where there was none, open doors where there were only stone walls, and create a sacred space for the transformations we encounter on life’s journey.

For me, belly dance has always been like a “power chamber”, and when I teach, I tell my students that I like to pretend I am standing in a column of light, except I’m not really pretending. I actually am standing in a column of light when I dance. It feels like my favorite scene in Wonder Woman. My girl crush (and probably everybody’s crush), Gal Gadot, is in the trenches of the war and both sides are shooting mercilessly at each other across a field called No Man’s Land. Neither side has been able to move an inch in months. There is a village on the other side being held captive with no food or supplies. While the men around her tell her to forget it, there’s nothing we can do, she takes off the cape covering her superhero truth, and puts on her crown, and fearlessly steps into No Man’s Land. As she runs straight into the line of fire, they increase their fire, but she deflects the bullets with unshakeable strength and courage. That’s how I feel when I dance. Bullets bounce off me. Nothing can hurt me, because I feel beautiful and powerful just as I am.

When I dance, I don’t have to lose ten pounds, or make more money, or squeeze into spanx, or hobble in sky high heels– I am barefoot and beautiful just as I am. I remember the first time I read the line “I am sufficient as I am” in Walt Whitman’s brilliant poem, One Hour to Madness and Joy. I remember thinking, is that possible? Does anyone actually think that? That they are sufficient as they are? Is it possible for me to think that?

But I don’t have to think at all when I dance—belly dance goes straight past words and transforms me. With my hips swaying, my cheeks flushed, my hair flying, and my 50-year-old body; this body that has birthed two magical children and lost one; my body with its past surgeries, random tight muscles, ridiculous creaking aches and pains (you should have seen me trying to get off the floor last night after writing for two hours in front of the fire–OUCH!), but with belly dance, I start to spiral and circle and shimmy and all the aches and pains disappear into magical movement, and I feel beautiful.

Belly dance is like being dropped into the most magical genie bottle where everything is beautiful and sparkly and it seems any wish can come true.

Now, divorce on the other hand, is like being dropped into the ugliest genie bottle, where the genie is dark and destructive and the people are shapeshifters who reach out their hands to shake yours but their fingers are razor sharp daggers and their goal is to leave you as bloody and bruised as possible so they win. After being a stay-at-home mom all these years, I find myself now a middle aged single mom with no career and a lot of rude voices yelling at me, saying things like—“How will you ever make enough money to feed your kids? How will you like being poor? How will you like turning tricks in a dirty alley wearing a stained housedress for $5? You are alone and poor. You are a loser.” (Like I said, these voices are sooooooo rude.) And when I say stop, they only get louder, but when I dance… well… they disappear.

I toss my hair and stand barefoot in all my juicy glory, swaying my hips and undulating my arms and those voices disappear.  Poof. Something about those ancient movements–the serpentine spine, the powerful hips, the mermaid arms… they awaken the soul so it understands and believes it is beautiful. Because it is.

I grew up dancing tap, jazz, ballet, and modern, and I loved them, but the moment I moved my body in the ancient shapes of belly dance, it felt like coming home. Last week, I taught a class in Manchester-by-the-Sea last week called “Belly At the Bar”. It was a demo class held next to the pool as the sun set and forty women ages 3-83 showed up. The women were tall, short (the 3-year-old was really short lol), muscular, toned, round, juicy, recovering from surgery, chasing toddlers, with short buzz cuts, long gray hair to their waists, ponytails, angular bobs… and each one of them was glorious.

Belly dance scholars have traced the origins of belly dance to ancient times, and when I teach certain workshops, I like to say, “Come learn the ancient secrets Cleopatra used to bring nations to their knees!” I say this because I think it’s funny, although I have no idea what Cleo used to seduce Caesar and Marc Antony although I would guess it was her vast wealth (golden trunks full of jewels!) and intellect (she spoke 13 languages!). But I like to imagine she could also seduce the emperors with the sway of her hips, the roll of her shoulder, or a shimmy vibrating with ecstasy–my favorite kind of shimmy always involves vibrating with ecstasy–try it. (Also I love the story of her ship with purple silk sails scented with rose oil and I like to imagine ancient people would smell roses and know their magnificent queen was near.)

Many researchers have found evidence supporting the theory that belly dance was created as a fertility dance done by women for women, encouraging, emulating and celebrating childbirth and maternity. Scholars have witnessed women in rural villages in North Africa using belly dance to prepare their bodies for birth. The pregnant mother dances, and the local women dance around her while she labors and literally dances her baby into the light. Then they keep dancing to celebrate. When I was pregnant I taught belly dance classes up until I gave birth, and I also took prenatal belly dance classes from an OB who taught us how to use belly dance isolations and shimmies to have mastery over our pregnant bodies.

Long before I had babies, when I lived in LA, I made my living dancing for an endless parade of birthdays, weddings, baby showers, Bar Mitzvahs, and Bat Mitzvahs. I danced barefoot in marble palaces, by candlelit pools, on the beach and in the mountains, for a famous composer (Danny Elfman! I’m so bad at being discreet!) who’s girlfriend wanted to have me carry a breakfast tray on my head to him because he hated mornings, and for elderly women in wheelchairs with missing teeth (which I discovered when they laughed in raspy delight next to me). In the 90’s you could find me dancing on table tops at Lebanese nightclubs, Moroccan restaurants, wild Armenian parties, endless Persian Jewish rituals and celebrations, onstage with Egyptian superstars, and for Saudi royalty. I danced for the birth of new babies and I called myself the “High Priestess of Sacred Moments” as I went from celebration to celebration, marking a girl’s passage into womanhood, a boy’s into manhood, a couple into married life, a woman into motherhood. I was surrounded by belly dancers, and we danced when one of us got pregnant, when our daughters started to menstruate, when Layla got her law degree and when Angela lost her father. I led many brides and grooms into the room for the first time as man and wife along with a parade of dancers, one pretending to grind sugar for sweetness, one swinging incense for purity, and two balancing lit candelabras on their heads, while the wedding guests threw money at the bride and groom to wish them prosperity. I led a bride and groom into the room in Panama with my very own drumming parade. I danced in a Turkish restaurant in Amsterdam, in a stone cottage restaurant in a tiny village in England, and on a table at a Greek place in Paris. I danced in Mexico City for a month and was escorted by an armed guard after each performance back to my apartment above the nightclub.

I also danced at the bedside of many children at Children’s Hospital in LA, and once I got called to Cedars Sinai to dance at the deathbed of an elderly man wearing a party hat, while his massive family stood around the bed with a small boombox, moving their bodies with me around his pale still body. He did open his eyes once or twice and smile at me. The doctors and nurses heard the commotion and ended up crowding into the room and joining in. Like I said, High Priestess of Sacred Moments.

I’ve seen women dance on their knees with sheer black scarves over their heads, writhing and throwing their heads around, pounding their hearts with their fists to the beat of drums. I’ve seen women throwing their heads in such a wild way, that they enter an altered space and have to sit down and drink water to recover. (This dance is called Khaleegi and I performed it for many years, ending up at the chiroprator’s office nearly every time! I have attached a clip of the dance below so you can see the wild head-throwing.)

When I danced with my Arabian dance company in LA, three of us choreographed a dance called Drum Chant and it was our prayer to the sacred power of dance. When Kim, my best friend/soul mate died last Fall, we performed Drum Chant at her memorial, which seemed appropriate–a sacred prayer dance. I didn’t feel like changing, so I danced wearing my tutu dress, fairy wings, and cowgirl boots. I fell down sobbing more than once during the dance, and the other dancers helped me back up and we all kept on dancing with tears streaming down our faces and sobs shaking our bodies, but still we danced.

I remember years ago, walking into the dressing room of a belly dancer friend of mine, Jillina, at a nightclub in LA. On the wall, she had taped a small piece of paper that quoted the most beautiful Psalm, “You turned my wailing into dancing. You removed my sackcloth, and clothed me in joy.”

Wailing into dancing transforms into joy.

I can relate.

I didn’t dance at my father’s funeral but I did speak about the fact that he and the rest of my family were my biggest cheerleaders. My parents bought me my first costume when I was 19 and I started taking lessons. I danced for every family party, and with 55 people in my family, our parties were epic. I gave all 25 of my nieces and nephews belly dance costumes for Christmas one year, and one of my nephews was such a gifted performer, he ended up performing with me at a belly dance festival and one of my nightclubs. In fact, my nieces and nephews attended many of my shows and would run around and pick up the tips that had been showered over my head while I danced. I have an amazing family.

After fifteen years of dancing professionally in LA and around the world, and teaching dance to terminally ill children, I decided to go to Harvard. I created a multicultural dance program that taught academic skills to preschoolers and taught two-year-olds at Cambridge preschools. Then I spent a year teaching preschool on Martha’s Vineyard. I’m a city girl, and I now found myself on an island at a nature-based Waldorf school filled with farm children. I had never even thought about where fabric came from—in LA I went to the mall or the garment district and bought endless velvet and feathers and sequins. Now I was on a farm with a sheep named Peaches, learning how to wash and card and spin wool into yarn that I then knitted into hats. WTF?? I knew vaguely in the back of my mind that wool came from sheep, but I had never really thought about it and the only thing I knew about spinning wool was that Aurora had pricked her finger on a spinning wheel putting her to sleep for a hundred years and I had never even really questioned what a spinning wheel actually was spinning? Straw into gold maybe? Gasp!! Belly dance is also like spinning straw into gold!! it turns negative thoughts and feelings into golden light and beauty!! YES!!!

But I’m mixing my fairy tales, the point is that fabric was something you bought in a store, not made from a sheep named Peaches. (There were also pigs on that farm that they slathered in sunscreen—who knew pigs get sunburnt?”

The Waldorf children started the day by grinding wheat into flour! (Really? Flour is ground from little kernels of wheat that grow in the groun?! So wild!) Then we took the flour and made bread!! I learned a lot teaching Waldorf.

I lived in a treehouse and collected my own firewood wearing the snow boots and coat my little sister had given me. I had lived in LA and hadn’t owned a coat in 15 years. For me, alone without family or friends, the island was lonely, but also so stunning it left me breathless several times a day. There’s so much lush beauty on the island—everywhere you look is a scene that will break your heart with its gorgeousness. And something about the light reflecting off the ocean on all sides makes everything sparkly. You can drive your car up to a pond and swim by yourself with hawks flying overhead, take long walks in moss-covered forests, run through rolling green fields that roll out to the electric blue sea. It’s just so enchanting. It feels like anything can happen there. There’s a reason the island is filled with artists, musicians, writers, actors–it attracts creativity and offers endless inspiration with it’s sweeping beauty.

So after a few months of teaching preschool on the island, I decided I wanted to teach belly dance. I didn’t know if anyone on the island would be interested, but it turned out they were. Forty women from all over the island came week after week to dance with me. They trudged through massive blizzards and eight feet of snow and we danced in a candlelit yoga studio in the woods of West Tisbury. They were the mothers and grandmothers of my preschoolers, groups of friends and loners who decided to give it a try and stayed. I held Arabian nights at my treehouse where everyone came over and drank wine and I played Arabic music for them and told them about the different rhythms and beats. They were magnificent in their spirits, women who could withstand the long winters of isolation on the island and had chosen walking in the woods and swimming in the ocean over restaurants, museums, and shopping. There are no malls or fast food chains on the island, there’s not even a stoplight. There’s something very special in an island community, especially that island community. People grow up there, leave, and return to raise their own children. People go there to heal, to grow, to create, to think.

At the end of the year, one of the women handed me a glass heart with a pink spiral in the middle of it and said with shy smile as she pressed it into my hand, “Because you made my heart dance.”

It’s been 18 years and I still have that heart where I can see it several times a day because it makes me happy. Also, I picked it up today and it smelled like rose oil!! Cleo had a ship with rose-scented purple silk sails; I have a rose-scented glass heart! Kismet!

Years later I returned with my daughter and we belly danced together for the summer dance festival on the island.

Next week I’m teaching belly dance in NYC at a sanctuary, and the week after that I’m teaching at a University in Boston for 150 students who are studying world arts and cultures. My goal each and every time I teach, is that every single person in the room leaves feeling beautiful, and maybe, just maybe, their hearts will dance, and so will mine.