And a little bit of healing too – Shakti flying through Shiva’s hands…

I am still wet and the goose bumps are up on my skin but I can’t stop to find a towel or to change into my clothes because I have to tell you about the first time I felt that I was an acrobat soaring through the air, a firefly dancing in a cathedral, weightless, perfectly formed and capable of anything, Shakti flying through Shiva’s hands… 

I knew nothing about Healing Dance when I volunteered myself as a model yesterday afternoon but I thank the gods for the openness that yoga has given me that I did not hesitate to offer myself up.

I ask your forgiveness for my lack of real knowledge about this healing modality, but after I finished my demo session with Michael I was so overcome that I had to run away here to my computer, and now that some time has passed I can’t find him in the gorgeous throng of kids and adults which is Hari Cinta Keluarga at the Bali Spirit Festival.

I had booked myself in for the watsu session– which Kerstin has already blogged about – seeing it as an opportunity to let slip from my shoulders some of the excess of the last few weeks, and after the soft surrender into the hands of another that I encountered there I was keen to try just a little bit more. 

Michael is a Master. I can tell you this without knowing anything except that to be held by him in the water is to find perfect trust, to surrender the mind completely and to let the body speak. My body spoke loud in his hands and he listened, floated and spun me, twirled and arched me, ‘til I was lost and me, the merged self, boundary-less, spoke. My body bent and weaved and flew through the water, eliciting groans that had no centre and delight in my guide.

Our session ended in the spontaneous applause of all of the people who had gathered to watch, incredulous smiles and a heartfelt – “I saw you, I just saw you, the real you, arise” from a new friend.

And later, as I roamed the grounds in the wake of small children, wandered without intent, I was stopped and my appearance commented on at least four times, about how soft I looked, how I looked like “a different woman to 3 days ago”.

The session with Michael was definitely the culmination to the Festival for me, but my festival started in a pretty inspiring way as well.

With only two hours to spare from life commitments on day 2 I decided to take in the Healing Huts, and booked a session with Bob for the telluric pulse reading.

Whilst I don’t want to go over what Kerstin has already said, I can’t stress enough how the ability to let go of preconceived notions and to surrender to what is given is the most profound lesson that yoga has taught me over the years.

As I lay in Bob’s pyramid and gave myself up into his hands the incredible pressure that had built up in the preceeding days began to shift, almost immediately.

I’m a woman who has tried a lot of things and I have no hesitation in articulating when something does not work for me, but from the moment I relaxed myself onto the bed I felt an energetic force embrace me, as if I was floating, cacooning me.

Do you know me? I have to stress to you now what an over-the-top analytical brain I am, how many things make me cock an incredulous eyebrow, how I’ve been known to guffaw at the most inappropriate times.

Bob’s bed – as I will irreverently nickname it – took me out of my over-active intellect on one of the busiest, most ridiculously fragmented days of my life.

And then he began to speak. With his hands gently on the back of my neck and later my feet Bob began to speak about some of the images he was getting. He spoke of a flower blooming straight out of a rock, an intelligence that had not been valued that I was finally learning to sing, the project I had known about since earliest childhood that I needed to begin.

“You don’t need time,” he said, “just do a little bit each day.”

In Bob’s hands I remembered things from more than a year ago that made so much significance to what I was about to embark on now, that made the road I had travelled and the direction in which it leads so clear.

I experienced a coalescence in that space wherein all of the things I had studied, all of the little historical tangents, my trips up mountains into the history of the Western Church, fragments from comedy skits I saw as a teenager, all came together into a cohesive whole: I got me and I got great confirmation of where I was going.

How does it get any better than that?

Michael Hallock holds Healing Dance sessions at Fivelements Healing Centre, just outside of Ubud, Bali. : +62 361 469 206 fivelements.org

Bob Supernant can be found at Taksu Spa, just off Jl Hanuman, in Ubud. Ph: +62 361 971 490

Written by : Harriet Gaffney