Dancing in the Muddy Temple

Eline Kieft is an independent scholar, consultant and coach, combining her background as anthropologist, movement facilitator and shamanic practitioner.

Here is something completely different and quite unexpected. (Unless you have met Eline Kieft in person!) Curiously compelling with its ineluctable invitation to attend to a new way of practising, honouring, and celebrating embodied existence in the world. More so even than this, Eline offers a profound recognition of the ways in which life itself performs its ceaseless dance, drawing together each of its myriad expressions into an ever-newly improvised articulation of its holy life-giving sacredness. Using her own experience of life’s twists and turns, Eline explores the connections and spaces between movement/dance; spirituality/embodied wisdom; landscape/wholeness; soul/soil; ritual/journey. The overarching and wonderfully transgressive and transformative idea of the ‘muddy temple’ both guards and proffers, enfolds and reveals, an ancient wisdom that finds sacredness right before us – shimmering at the heart of aliveness itself.I have read this book three times now and, on each occasion, I have found something new, different, challenging, and stimulating. At the end of the third reading, I was struck by the thought that this is exactly the kind of book the celebrated Rhineland mystic Hildegard of Bingen would have written had she lived in the 21st century. It’s a masterpiece, a gem, of embodied, integrative, and healing thought and action for the people and creatures of today’s world that this human will return to again and again for inspiration.

• GratitudesPreludeOpening (Introduction)1. Existential Questions2. The Spirit of the Dance3. Body and Embodiment4. Movement as a Way of Knowing5. Immersion in the Land6. Expanded Consciousness7. Encountering the Spirits8. The Cauldron of Ceremony9. Towards WholenessClosing (Conclusion)Appendix: Six Practical Orientations Towards Dynamic WellbeingBibliography