Everyday Canvas

Rumi's Dance

Prompt: “Dance, when you’re broken open. Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you’re perfectly free.” Rumi
What do you make of this quote? What does Rumi mean when he says, “dance”?

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The way I see it, Rumi is all for setting one’s soul free and for paying little or no attention to what happens in the world because he believes in the eternity of the soul and in the fact that the earth or any planet or solar system or anything material is not eternal. He believes in transcending what is material as, for him, being wounded physically or emotionally, fighting and wars, negative feelings and actions, or wordly pleasures and joys are all material things.

By the word dance, he means the ritual of love, to rejoice in the soul and to concentrate on what is totally transcendental. Although one has a body and that body and all the other material things that support the body cannot be denied, the rejoicing in the soul of what is eternal can elevate the quality of what is material in one’s life, and thus, the dance and its perfect understanding can become the totality and the power of the Whole.

In this way, dancing becomes a way to unite with the cosmic powers and eternity. For this poet, knowledge is beyond the physical and this can be attained through the understanding of the soul and giving in to its joy. This is because the soul works through the freedom of love, and the thorough thinking is not the way to the freedom of the soul, as it is mistakenly understood by the western philosophers.

According to Rumi, concentrating on the essence of what one searches for and reaching beyond the burden of the material is the way to go because using the body as an instrument of this dance can release the person from the mind’s domination to let the soul have free reign on the dancer.

In short, he says, "Dance with the ecstasy of the soul to let yourself dance the dance of love successfully through anything that exists in the material world."