On Dancing

This interchange was excerpted from a talk given by senior teacher Acharya Allyn Lyon during Thanksgiving Weekthün 2012.

STUDENT: So I wanted to speak to the question of – how do we play. I really appreciate the talk about Eternalism and Nihilism and what I thought about was just the sense of – I don’t know how to put it but there’s this sense of when we let go and that feeling of emptiness that we feel and there’s some wisdom to that. There is a sense of nothingness when we let go but at the same time there is this sense of, you know, when I think about my parents or when I think about people that I love there is this hint of Eternalism in the sense of like it feels like there is something that is good that exists that feels so real and there’s this loving feeling part of it. So when I thought about play, I just think sometimes there’s this dance between the two. There is definitely this sense of love that I feel, that I think we all feel, that exists and it has a sense, a quality that seems like there’s a possibility that especially when we experience our basic goodness there’s this absolute right feeling about that we can feel really good about. But then the dance of it, there’s also this sense of impermanence and nothingness and emptiness that’s kind of like a dance between the two at least thats my experience.

ACHARYA LYON: Yeah. Dancing is interesting. Recommended. There’s trance dancing which is intentionally dancing to create an altered state of mind. There’s group dancing like the square dance and the line dances of Nova Scotia and that creates community. And in olden times that was it. There was trance dancing and there was that which created community. There wasn’t all that much sexual seduction dancing in public. Who knows what people were doing in private. Certainly it has changed into more of that than the others. But the idea of dance is that its not solidified; its learning to coordinate together. Without a solid this and a solid that.

Acharya Allyn Lyon is a senior teacher appointed by Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, and acts as his personal representative in teaching Shambhala and Buddhism.