Paulo Coelho

Stories & Reflections

Dance!

Author: Paulo Coelho


 
I have no solution for Learned Helplessness (check the post and the moving comments)
But I know one thing:

Everything moves. And everything moves to a rhythm.
And everything that moves produces a sound; that is happening here and all over the world at this very moment.
Our ancestors noticed the same thing when they tried to escape from the cold in their caves: things moved and made noise.

The first human beings perhaps looked on this with awe, and then with devotion: they understood that this was the way that a Superior Being communicated with them.
They began to imitate the noises and movements around them, hoping to communicate with this Being: and dancing and music were born.

When we dance, we are free.

To put it better, our spirit can travel through the universe, while our body follows a rhythm that is not part of the routine.
 
In this way, we can laugh at our sufferings large or small, and deliver ourselves to a new experience without any fear.
While prayer and meditation take us to the sacred through silence and inner pondering, in dance we celebrate with others a kind of collective trance.

They can write whatever they want about dancing, but it is no use: you have to dance to find out what they are talking about.

Dance to the point of exhaustion, like mountain-climbers scaling some sacred peak.
Dance until, out of breath, our organism can receive oxygen in a way that it is not used to, and this ends up making us lose our identity, our relation with space and time.

Dance!

__________________________

This text wass taken from my book The Witch of Portobello

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