Nancy and I met about nine years ago when she was facilitating a shamanic workshop called ‘ Reclaiming the Dragon Path’ near Guildford. It was the first time that I had met an inspired shamanic teacher, who embodied dragon energy with the Divine Feminine wisdom of the Goddess, through the expressive arts, including movement, ritual, and nature connection.
This article has been written as a result of bringing together letters that Nancy has written to the Moving Mandala Teachers and a film that we made when she was last in the UK, as well as an interview I did with Nancy in 2014. I want to share Nancy’s story and how the Moving Mandala came into being.
Please also see Parts 1 and 2 of this interview posted as part of my blog.
How does the Moving Mandala help in the community?
One of the best community healing aspects of the Moving Mandala practice, is that it can support us when we’ve scattered, or we’re feeling fragmented, or we’re discouraged by what we’re hearing outside of ourselves. When we come together in a community of people, with a healing intention on a particular piece of land, often aligning with a season, an intentional time of year, or a full moon, we have many alignments, and this goes all the way from the heavens to Earth.
The Mandala Dance supports change in all of us. It’s a place where time and the timeless meet, where we forget to be self-conscious and join the collective energy of the moment. The resources of the Mandala Dance in the community have been to create a life-changing opportunity, to gather and direct energy for the greater good.
With trained people, the Mandala Dance, which is a form of journeying, can bring a whole community to another level of awareness together. The courses I have been teaching in the last couple of decades have made the mandala principles accessible to people on the shamanic path who might not be familiar with it.
Focused community experiences are necessary to build the strength and courage needed in this century. When we leave the Mandala Dance, we are more aligned within the light, in soul and body, and with all those in the energy field within which we participate. An extension of the actual mandala journey is the mandala of our individual lives and the mandala of our shamanic community.
It takes a lot of trust to take the Mandala because it isn’t all figured out beforehand. It isn’t all choreographed exactly. What happens is we’re working with spirit and so we’re leaving space for spirit to inform us in our bodies and our souls. And therefore, the alignment comes in much more than we’re used to doing, so then people have experienced a lot of change.
Most people when they leave the Mandala for the first time, can’t explain exactly what happened because the mystery is that it’s a process. And so you take it home, and you integrate it, and then it works on you, and then it’s changing you. And so gradually, gradually, it sinks in, it starts to affect your life. It seems to support whatever you’re doing in your life. You don’t have to come as a dancer, you don’t have to come as an artist. You can come from another practice, or five other practices and the holistic part of the Mandala is that it pulls it all together.
How did you start working with dragon energy?
The dragons are honoured by many cultures, including Celtic, Buddhist etc. Dragon energy can be gentle, it can be fierce and wild. A dragon’s potential can be born out of the roots of the world tree.
The dragon brings creativity to the Moving Mandala, as well as the elements. It isn’t a harmful thing, although it can warn you off, sometimes it has to be firm. That’s when the dragon can help us because just allowing a whole thing to happen isn’t always helpful to any of us.
I sense that the dragon is wanting to be integrated into our experience because it’s large enough to contain the elements, the primal energy that creates us into being, during a time of huge change.
Why is the Moving Mandala Coming to Glastonbury this September?.
The energy of the mandala allows us the potential of space coming into being, through practice and relationship. It encircles us with the protection we need, whilst going into vulnerable, deep places within ourselves. It’s not a socialised-polite practice; it’s married to the wild and free, within the sacred geometry that augments intention.
The Glastonbury landscape, dedicated to the sacred, brings us back into alignment with the movement and flow needed to come out of our ancestral stories of limitation and fear and to create something new and not yet seen.
With the pandemic, many of our natural flows have been disconnected, cut off, stretched to the breaking point, and so the MM, which was created for embodying change in the 21st Century has come along in a timely fashion. The nature of the wells reminds us all, that we are about flow and healing. These openings in the earth help us to access her primal energy.
This kind of dance or movement and sound comes from the Source and is birthed by something known as “crazy wisdom” in the Tibetan Buddhist culture. The sudden, inner knowing challenges our acculturated ways of being and doing. Since we have not had thousands of years of unbroken preparation within a landscape like Tibet and the system of lineage-teachings that they had, we are joining the wisdom of the mandala with the wisdom of Glastonbury and a different culture. It takes a constellation of dragon-sized energy to hold the mandala circle. The mandala energy is tantric. It’s about life energy, which comes from a large heart.
For all Our Relations. Nancy Dancing Light and Ali Rabjohns.
The Moving Mandala Residential Programme will be running a retreat at the Earthspirit Centre From 16-20 September 2021. Please see this link for more details.
For further information about the Moving Mandala and its history, go to www.travellersjoy.ca
