Flautist and composer Terry Oldfield and his wife, Australian–born Soraya Saraswati, have spent years traveling across the globe, giving workshops that combine music with meditation and holistic healing. Dancing Through the Chakras is a single-track CD, a long, beautiful path to the ecstasy of increased mind-body-spirit awareness through dance and focus on our bodies’ seven “spiraling vortexes of energy.” With her sweet Australian accent, Saraswati opens Dancing Through the Chakras with some basic intent and guidance to visualizing our seven spinning circles, noting which instruments call us to which chakras before stepping back to begin the thunderous tribal celebration of the first chakra, with call-and-response shouts and incessant ceremonial drumming.
As Oldfield and Saraswati’s music moves up the chakras, an earthy sound expresses sensuality and seduction with romantic string swells rising even as the chants of the first chakra continue and morph. Arab vocalizing and snake-charmer flutes guide you through the sinuous movement of the heart sacral chakras to the solo flute that signals the spiritual awakening of the third-eye chakra. What does it feel like to be in a human body anyway? If you close your eyes and feel, where do you sense your nerve endings? What signals constitute your sense of being awake in the body? If you pay attention you realize there are actually not very many; maybe the ache in your feet, nervousness in your pelvis, rumbling in your stomach? Dancing Through the Chakras can help you find a better way to feel yourself existing inside your body; it’s like living life tied to the earth with a safety cord, free to bounce around anywhere without ever falling down, and wrapped in a snug blanket of love wherever you go. These energy sources are you, the aspects of yourself.
Like most things in life, Dancing Through the Chakras gives back what you put into it; you can just have it on as background music and be moved and inspired, or immerse yourself fully into dancing meditation with deep focus on Saraswati’s instructions, and come out finding yourself in a new realm of calm and focused energy. Focusing on and working with our body’s energy centers can’t help but lead us deeper and deeper into awareness. Every bit of effort to let go is rewarded, and if it’s as easy as following the call of the flute and the guidance of the words, then you can dance your way to a perfect freedom of self, one movement at a time.
