I was raised in a Baptist home, so dance was not something I observed within my world as a young child. I recall jumping up and down on my bed to the blare of God of Thunder by KISS on my Fischer-Price turntable, a wiley 8-year-old kept too long inside the cage.

They made us square dance in the gymnasium in 6th grade, a grueling ordeal of sweaty faux-handholding and anxiety induced nausea. The mortal terror at the thought of some girl I was crushed on feeling my hard-on press against her belly was enough to keep me glued like a magnet to the wall at the few junior high dances I attended.

In my adolescent years I embraced death metal, no dancing required, only angry head-banging and fist-pounding. I transitioned into punk-rock music, which taught me the release of the primal war dance of disaffected suburban youth known as the slam dance. I swore I would never dance any other.

It was with my son that I first learned to dance with joy. In the living room with the beat-box thumping on a Sunday morning, there the circle dance of rage became the ring around the roseys. There I saw the opportunity to pass along a love for life and freedom and beauty and health through my example of natural, spontaneous movement.

Through my vocation as a US Marine scout-sniper I developed a connection with Shiva, the Destroyer, also known as Nataraj, Lord of the Dance. The sense of freedom precipitated by a near-death experience in training broke the bonds of a lifetime’s repression. While traveling overseas I lost all inhibition and let loose on the floors of many nations with my courtship dance, proudly displaying to entice the ladies. The results surpassed all expectations.

In the strip clubs in town I was struck by the powerful energy of erotic dance and would religiously attend what my buddies and I referred to as “church” to give witness and make generous offerings to the lovely priestesses practicing this modern incarnation of the sacred temple dances of antiquity.

In junior college I decided to take some dance classes to develop discipline in my movement: social dance to develop non-verbal communication skills to facilitate working with partners; African dance to work with complex rhythms and learn movement forms; modern dance to explore creative self-expression within the constraints of choreography.

During this time I was introduced by a lover to house music at a weekly club and became addicted to the driving beats and the high energy generated by the crowd. Ecstatic dance became my new weekly release and spiritual recreation.

Dance has become my primary yoga form, holding the tension between the polarities of disciplined and spontaneous movement to develop consciousness of my being in my environment. I ride the music and the movement to heights of bliss and ecstasy paralleled only by tantric sex and falling in love. Whirling like a dervish to the humming spin of the universe, I feel through my dance a connection to the primal source of all being, the movement of spirit within matter, that manifests in rhythm, warmth, and love.

take care-
tosh christopher
*love is the law, love under will*