Dancing with Dharma:
Mindful Movement, Sacred Dance

Harrison Blum

1-5:30pm

Movement and dance offer a uniquely immediate window to invite awareness into expression, and expression into insight.  Join us as we engage the dancing body as a support for Dharmic practice.  This half-day workshop will include seated meditation, a Dharma talk, hip-hop warm ups, creative movement exercises, and a Dharma-themed improv dance jam, or Dharma Jam.

The day’s practice, both seated and moving, will be informed by the Satipatthana Sutta on the Foundations of Mindfulness, with specific attention to fostering both internal and external mindfulness, i.e., mindfulness of self and other.  The first two thirds of the Dharma Jam will focus on feeling and moving with one’s own embodied experience.  The final third will invite greater awareness of and relation with the others in the space.  No experience with dance or Buddhism is necessary.

Harrison Blum, Moving Dharma founding director, is studying Buddhist ministry at Harvard Divinity School and is a participant of Spirit Rock Meditation Center’s fourth Community Dharma Leader program.  He is committed to exploring how Dharmic arts can be allies to the oppressed in addition to entertainment for the elite, and toward that end he has started working in mental health and at-risk community settings.  Harrison has also worked as a Buddhist chaplain at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham and Women’s Hospital.  He has been an inspired dancer since seeing the world premier of Michael Jackson’s “Bad” video in 1987.  More info at movingdharma.org.