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Yoga Trance Dance                Artwork by Anahata KatkinSince we live where everything is music, everything is dancing. Watch the dust grains moving in the light near the window. Their dance is our dance. We rarely hear the inward music, but we’re all dancing to it nevertheless,  : RumiYoga Trance DanceYoga Trance Dance is an exploration of the eternal flow of natural movement through yoga. Beginning with sahaja prana yoga or the experience of prana initiating yogasanas, Yoga Trance Dance flows into an exploration of free-form, breath driven movement to liberate one’s creative life-force and cultivate embodied freedom.Evolving since Shiva’s first offering in 1994, Yoga Trance Dance has ignited people of all ages and backgrounds at Yoga Conferences, Festivals and Studios around the world:    * Esalen, Omega, Kripalu, Yoga Journal, Northwest Yoga Festival    * Yoga Studios around the world from London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Edinburgh, Tokyo, Hong Kong, New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Vancouver, Seattle, Chicago, Boston, Memphis, Atlanta, Miami, Dallas, Phoenix, Chapel Hill    * Retreats in Kerala, South India, Hawaii, Costa Rica, Turks and Caicos, St. John, Joshua Tree, Sedona, Yucatan, and BaliYoga Trance Dance is a meeting of two great rivers, yoga and dance, which come from and are united at the source. That infinite creative source is the One, uniting us all. Yoga and dance are two of the oldest paths back home.Like lovers, they can get separated. Even though we are all born as natural dancers (just watch a toddler instinctually respond to rhythm), dance can easily get swept under the seeming demands of 21st-century living. It is actually the fragmenting effects of modern lifestyles that inspired the union of Yoga Trance Dance. Due to all that sitting, standing, driving, cell phoning, computer or cyber time, we have this strange combination of being more physically bound while mentally scattered ­- a body/mind split. Some of these effects can be felt as stiffness, rigidity, limited range of motion (even when exercising ­ as on the treadmill or weightlifting), or disembodiment (the “living from the neck up” phenomenon). The antidote: Our body needs to move and our internal state needs to be rejuvenated through meditation and ecstatic embodiment.Dance and yoga, particularly hatha yoga, are ways of calling us back into our bodies to irrigate our being with life energy known in yoga as “prana.” Prana is the animating force, the energy of being alive and is most clearly felt through breathing. From the yogic view, the great breath flowing through us all is intelligence or Consciousness itself. With flow yoga, we let the intelligence of our breath lead movement the way a sailor tacks with the wind. Trance dance has a similar focus. Rather than emphasizing an outward performance, the goal of trance dancing is to let your creative energy move through you to be guided by spirit (or “spiritus,” which is the Latin root for inspiration, the place where the breath of life and enlivening creativity meet). Thus, in Yoga Trance Dance, form serves spirit, structure supports intuition, yoga prepares you for free-form dance, and your dance opens your being for a greater experience of the unified self that is yoga.This whole meeting of yoga and dance has deep roots within yoga as well as cross-cultural branches. Within yoga, all of the different energies of the One ­ – the gods and goddesses ­ are depicted as dancing. The universe is viewed as the Cosmic Dance of Shiva ­- Nataraja. Shiva Rea was given her name by her father, inspired by a powerful image of Nataraja. Lord Shiva is seen as the first teacher of both yoga and dance, the consummate yogi and prime mover, sometimes sublime, at other times wild, and always free. The Yogin follows the pulse of the inhalation and exhalation, the dancer, the beat.The contemporary explorations of this state of rhythmic-induced meditation are reclaiming “trance” as an accessible experience of embodied communion where the observer dissolves into the power of now, the flow, the dance. Yoga Trance Dance aims to provide you with a “sadhana” (practice or means of realization) so that you can explore for yourself the potency of free-flow yoga and dance as well as music that can continue to water your life. Our intention is to bring greater fluidity, breath, range of motion, stamina for life, and embodied joy into our being and life. In the words of the dancing mystic, Hafiz, “Now sweet one, be wise, Cast all your votes for dancing.”back to top Teacher IntensivesFor yoga teachers and yogadventurers who are interested in the interconnections of yoga and dance, this Trance Dance intensive provides the basic tools to explore the foundations of Yoga Trance Dance.The intensive includes:    * Nataraj Cosmology of Dance within Yoga    * archetypal themes of Yoga Trance Dance    * connection to manashakti and pranashakti, the creative and vital life forces    * prana yoga opening exercises and kriyas    * breath-initiated movement    * talas or primary rhythms    * guiding free-form ecstatic dance    * communal movement    * choreographing the musical wave of Yoga Trance Dance    * safety and injury prevention    * the poetic language of guiding movement    * Yoga Trance Dance Reader and Music list    * and two guided Yoga Trance Dances on Friday and Saturday eveningback to topYoga Trance Dance BioShiva Rea is a leading teacher of prana flow and Yoga Trance Dance worldwide. She came dancing out of the womb and was given her name by her artist father. Yoga Trance Dance emerged in the early 1990s through Shiva’s intention to bring contemporary exploration to the cellular dance of our life force, pranashakti, at the heart of yoga’s ancient unfolding. She is a lifelong student of Tantra, Ayruveda, Bhakti, Hatha Yoga, Kalarippayatu, Odissi Dance, and Yogic Arts.Her passion for ritual dance was realized as an essential part of individual and collective healing, communion, and transformation while receiving her B.A. and M.A. as a student of dance anthropology and movement therapy in UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures. As a global adventurer, her award-winning research on ritual dance has initiated her into dance cultures while living in India, Nepal, Jamaica, Ghana, Kenya, Zambia, Mali, and Bali. Yoga Trance Dances continue internationally. She lives with her family near their favorite surf break at Sunset Beach in Pacific Palisades, California.back to topDVD /CDYoga Trance Dance DVD from AcaciaShiva Rea has been teaching Yoga Trance Dance formore than 10 years. Now, for the first time, her mostpopular workshop is available to anyone who wants toexperience celebration, rejuvenation, and creativejoy through movement.Appropriate for all ages and experience levels, Yoga Trance Dance begins with prana-initiating yogasanas, flowing into an exploration of free-form, breath-driven movement to free your creative life force and cultivate embodied freedom. It features the Yoga Matrix format, which allows you to customize your practice by choosing and organizing portions of the program to suit your needs every time you use the DVD. Filmed at White Sands National Park, the program was shot in HD by Hollywood’s Sion Michel (Memoirs of a Geisha) and directed by yoga teacher and fashion photographer James Wvinner for an inspiring look and feel unlike any other yoga or fitness video.