She thanked me with tears in her eyes. I started crying. We hugged. Then the floodgates in my heart opened and I sobbed profusely. My mind didn’t have words for why I was crying. It tried to stop me. But my heart felt this was a safe space so I let the tears flow. I don’t recall her exact words. I only know the feeling that washed over my body like a warm shower on a very cold day. I finally felt seen and heard, in my raw pain. A side of me that I rarely share. I shared it with a dance. A dance of celebration nonetheless. Yet, she saw beyond the dance: The little girl who’s crying every day praying for the world to wake up. On the verge of giving up on humanity a thousand times a day. Then came her words that cracked open my heart: “I see the little girl in you. I want for your people to celebrate and dance!”
We were at Sexibility Festival in Brazil. Learning and practicing how to be our authentic selves, sharing from the heart and decolonizing our hearts and minds from patriarchal values. My authentic self feels a huge amount of pain. Despite living my dream life every day, there’s a constant backdrop of anger, sadness and rage around the ongoing genocide of Palestinians and Arabs and the complicity of the Western colonial powers. As an Arab American, I feel that one side of me is murdering the other side and I’m dying inside every day. Every morning I wake up hoping that it was just a nightmare yet it keeps getting more real and more brutal. So I dance.
One of my Tantra teachers warned me once “The more you open up to pleasure, the more you open up to pain. You can’t expand one side without the other”. Her words didn’t hit home until recently when I experienced the hypocrisy of my adopted country, the USA. How manipulative, narcissistic and brutal it is. Yet it’s part of me and I’m part of it. So I dance.
On the last day of Sexibility Festival we had a party and I danced. After my solo show, for the audience participation segment, I chose to do a Palestinian Dabke instead of my usual Egyptian Bellydance. Almost everyone joined and we created a Palestinian wedding atmosphere. My heart was pounding, my spirit was souring and my dance prayers were magnified by every beautiful soul who joined me on the dance floor.
The following morning as we were offering gratitude. She came to me and thanked me expressing what my dance meant to her. I couldn’t have asked for a better gift. I simply said “what comes from the heart, goes to the heart”. Then the tears of joy came flooding down. The joy of being seen. Someone, in this immense darkness, gets how much I’m hurting. She didn’t need to fix or change anything. Just letting me know that I’m not alone was a huge gift.
There is hope. Don’t give up. It’s worth every disappointment and heartbreak. As Rumi said: “Dance, when you’re broken open. Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you’re perfectly free.”
So I keep loving. Keep dancing. Keep sharing. Otherwise, we are lost!*
* German dancer Pina Bausch once shared that when she was in a gypsy camp in Greece, people started dancing and invited her to dance with them. She was shy and did not go at first. Then a 12 year old girl aproached her, pulled her by the hand and said: “Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost!”.
#dance #sexibilityfestival #brazil #brasil #palestine #palestinians #palestiniandance #dabke #palestiniandabke #celebration #authenticity #tantra #joy #rage #anger #pain #travel #travelblog #travelstories
Unconditional Love 