Vajra dance – a Moving Meditation
Beginning September 2022!
Vajra Dance
Where did it come from?
Chögyal Namkhai Norbu(1938-2018), was a renowned scholar and widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest living masters of Dzogchen, the essence of Tibetan Buddhism. He first introduced this Vajra Dance to his students in 1990. It is mainly practiced in various places and centers of the Dzogchen Community all around the world.
What does it mean?
Vajra is a Sanskrit term that could be translated as “indestructible condition” with its symbolic images like a thunderbolt or diamond. In the Dzogchen teaching the indestructible condition or Vajra means our real nature, the real condition of all phenomena, which is beyond judgment and intellectual conceptual thinking.
What is it for?
Through sound and movement we are able to bring our whole being into a state of contemplation.
“Sound is the basis from which energy develops. Sound develops through light and color to a more physical level and then we have movement.” (Quote from oral teachings of Chögyal Namkhai Norbu )
The Dance of the Vajra is principally a practice to harmonise the energy of the individual.
How are they practised?
The Vajra dances, as transmitted by Chögyal Namkhai Norbu are practiced on a Mandala according to precise instructions for the steps and movements.
Twelve practitioners, six females and six males, dance together on a large geometric diagram, the Mandala, representing the correspondence and interdependence between the microcosm and macrocosm, between the internal dimension of the individual and the outer dimension of the world.
The slow, coordinated movements are precisely connected to a sacred sound and timing, and as we softly sing and practice awareness together they produce an experience of deep relaxation and consequently a calm state of mind.
In the Vajra Dance, sound and not intellectual meaning is the most important. Accompanied by music, we sing sacred syllables that resonate, harmonise, and purify our chakras and energy points in our body or the microcosm, which is interdependently connected to energy fields in our outer world, the macrocosm.
The main purpose …
In the Vajra Dance, the main realisation is to discover the nature of mind, which is beyond all limits. This experience of discovery releases our tensions, allowing us to let go, give less importance to our emotions and attachments, and enter a state of profound relaxation often also described as bliss.
“But beyond the mind, beyond our thoughts, there is something we call the ‘nature of the mind,’ the mind’s true condition, which is beyond all limits. If it is beyond the mind, though, how can we approach an understanding of it? Let’s take the example of a mirror. When we look into a mirror we see in it the reflected images of any objects that are in front of it; we don’t see the nature of the mirror. But what do we mean by this ‘nature of the mirror’? We mean its capacity to reflect, definable as its clarity, its purity, and its limpidity, which are indispensable conditions for the manifestation of reflections. This ‘nature of the mirror’ is not something visible, and the only way we can conceive of it is through the images reflected in the mirror. In the same way, we only know and have concrete experience of that which is relative to our condition of body, voice, and mind. But this itself is the way to understand their true nature.” Excerpted from Chögyal Namkhai Norbu, Dzogchen: The Self-Perfected State (Ithaca: Snow Lion Publications, 1996), 32.
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