Dancing in the Muddy Temple

In this book, Eline Kieft creates an embodied spirituality that is based in improvised movement and embedded in the land. Weaving between theory and practice, this innovative work explores fundamental interconnections between self, surroundings, and the sacred.

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Dancing in the Muddy Temple traces ingredients for an embodied spirituality based in movement and embedded in the land. Drawing from nature immersion, dance, anthropology, and shamanism, Eline Kieft explores improvised movement as a pathway to insight, healing, transformation, and direct interaction with source. This inspiring book offers an intricate road map to explore and strengthen the interwovenness of various layers of self, surroundings, and the sacred. Kieft seamlessly moves between her personal, professional, and academic background, creating an unusual scholarship in which bodily and autobiographical narrative are neatly interwoven with interdisciplinary literature. The work crosses boundaries between cognition and intuition; matter and spirit. Its uniqueness lies in a radical integration of theory and practice, which brings an aliveness to the material that stirs an inquisitive desire to move. Its language inspires confidence and creates a safe space for personal inquiry into a rich and complex territory. This book provides a much-needed medicine for scholars and seekers, dreamers and dancers, philosophers, and artists at a time when the earth and its human and other-than-human-people are hurting. It skillfully distills tools for a practical spirituality of the everyday that explores what it means to be an embodied human on this planet.