Dancing In The Light

by Shirley Maclaine

  “You can see absolutely no one in the audience. It is alienatingly black. Then you realize it is all up to you. You are a performer. The long years were worth it. The miraculous magic of expression overrides everything. Once again you realize you are everything you are aware of. You are part of the audience. They are part of you. You and they are one expressing talent. The talent of giving and receiving, of resonating to a greater spirit by means of the body; the talent of souls appreciating one another creating life on a larger scale. The talent of understanding the shadow awareness that makes us all one, part of a divine perfection which is the essence of sharing. You are dancing with God. You are dancing with yourself. You are dancing in the light.”

  —Shirley MacLaine

  Bantam Books by Shirley MacLaine

  Ask your bookseller for the books you have missed

  DON’T FALL OFF THE MOUNTAIN

  OUT ON A LIMB

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Part One - The Dance Without

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Part Two - The Dance of Male and Female

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Part Three - The Dance Within

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Part Four - The Dance of the Red Thread

  Chapter 19

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Dear Reader,

  From the time I was very small, I remember having the impulse to “express” myself. At the age of three I attended dance classes because I wanted to express myself physically. As a teenager, I went from dancing to singing, which seemed a natural and logical extension of that self-expression. Later, as an adult, I carried that impulse for expression even further, into acting, and experienced a greater form of expression. I loved the intricate mystery of being another character, sorting out background and motivation and meaning, exploring my own feelings and thoughts in relation to another person.

  Then I found writing—an outlet that enabled me to express more intricately and specifically my experiences. I wrote to know what I was thinking. I wrote to understand my profession, my travels, my relationships, and, in fact, my life. Writing helped to whet an already insatiable appetite to understand the why and how of everything.

  I like to think of each of my books as a kind of map depicting where I’ve been and where I’m going. Don’t Fall off the Mountain described how I learned to spread my wings as a young artist and began to take charge of my persona] destiny. In a series of expeditions to Africa, India, the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan, and to the land of my daughter Sachi’s namesake, Japan, I first reached out to touch the unknown—and was changed by it. The personal period profiled in You Can Get There From Here was one of great internal, intellectual, and political growth for me. The star system had come to an end in Hollywood, so I ventured into the quicksands of television. The result was disastrous and the impact on me profound. It drove me to test myself in the political arena during the presidential election of 1972, when I campaigned for George McGovern against Richard Nixon. That experience motivated me to pursue a desire few Westerners had been allowed to fulfill in the early 1970s. I led the first women’s delegation to China to study the remarkable evolution of a brand-new culture from the ashes of an ancient and little-known land. The experience of adjusting to an alien culture brought us smack-up against ourselves. We learned about our own evolution as well, and even more about what the human will, properly directed, can accomplish even against great odds. All of this prepared me to return to my performing career with a greater enthusiasm and appreciation for the craft by which I earned my living, and to explore what new levels of creativity I could bring to it. I believe this experience also helped to drive home another lesson: Anything is possible if you believe you deserve it.

  I thought for a long time before I published Out on a Limb because it is the written expression of a spiritual Odyssey that took me further than I ever expected to go, into an astonishing and moving world of psychic phenomena where past lives, the existence of spirit guides, and the genuine immortality of the soul became more than concepts to me—they became real, true parts of my life. I think of this book as my spiritual diary opened to the eyes of those who also seek an inner understanding, and as my statement to those who taught me and opened my eyes that I accept their gifts with gratitude and humility.

  I like to think of Dancing in the Light as a celebration of all my “selves.” It was a fulfilling and satisfying exploration of the promises I made to myself in Out on a Limb. In it I look with pleasure, humor, and some contentment upon my experiences as a daughter, a mother, a lover, a friend, a seeker of spiritual destiny, and a voice calling for peace in the world. I think it expresses my great personal joy at reaching this important point in my life, as well as the strengthening of my sense of purpose. But the story is not yet finished, for I am still a woman in search of myself, the lives I might have lived and the inner heart of my being.

  If my search for inner truth helps give you, the reader, the gift of insight, then I am rewarded. But my first reward has been the journey through myself, the only journey worth taking. Through it all I have learned one deep and meaningful lesson: LIFE, LIVES, and REALITY are only what we each perceive them to be. Life doesn’t happen to us. We make it happen. Reality isn’t separate from us. We are creating our reality every moment of the day. For me that truth is the ultimate freedom and the ultimate responsiblity.

  Love and Light,

  Wu Li = Patterns of organic energy

  Wu Li = My way

  Wu Li = Non-sense

  Wu Li = I clutch my ideas

  Wu Li = Enlightenment

  Master = One who begins at the center, not the fringe

  To dance with God, the creator of all things, is to dance with oneself.

  The Dancing Wu Li Masters

  Gary Zukav

  Chapter 1

  On the morning of April 24, 1984, I woke up in my New York apartment to realize I was going to be fifty years old at 3:57 that afternoon. I felt there was some kind of dramatic flair to reaching the midcentury mark in 1984 and of course I couldn’t, anymore, accept the synchronicity of my personal event as merely accidental. As I had told everybody I knew, I no longer believed there was any such thing as accident. Everything that happened was a result of some form of cause and effect and therefore had an underlying reason.

  For example, the slight headache I now had. I knew it was from the prebirthday bash the night before.

  My friend, the lyricist Christopher Adler, had thrown a party for a few thousand of my closest friends. Since I had to work the night of the twenty-fourth, we pretended my birthday was the twenty-third. Chris had decorated the Limelight with white and crystal. The invitations required white dress, and a few people came in jogging togs and sheets because white was not part of their city wardrobe.

  The Limelight was an old church done over into a hot, Fellini-like disco. After the church owners had moved out, it had become a drug rehabilitation center for a while, and it was the Limelight people who prevented the building from being torn down. Due to my spiritual proclivities, I thought it very fitting that my birthday party was being thrown in a rescued church. Perhaps we could help add a new dimension to its original purpose. To dance in a church seemed
to be as good an idea as praying. In fact, they were the same thing to me. As I remembered, it seemed to me no dancing was allowed in the basement of the Baptist church in Virginia where I grew up. My Catholic friends, on the other hand, could dance and even drink beer in their church basements. It was a sort of double standard both ways. The Baptist church was informal upstairs, and formal downstairs. The Catholic church was the other way around. But my so-called Baptist background (which was actually negligible) never really influenced me. After my first church picnic, I opted for necking on hayrides instead. So my religious propensities were determined more by my libido than my higher self. But then everything depends on how you look at it.

  However, my disco prebirthday party was an event, religious or otherwise, in anybody’s language. Each guest was met at the door by a white-clad escort (some decorated with sequins or crystals) who then ushered us through the passageways from rectory to library to meeting rooms all bowered in white flowers. There was laughter, warmth and joy ringing through the rooms where crystals hung from eight-foot floral arrangements of white lilies, white roses and white freesias, while clouds of white balloons drifted about the ceiling, rippling in the air currents. The walls were draped with crystal studded white silk. Eighteenth-century chamber music reverently accompanied us into the cocktail reception room. I privately wondered how long it would take before the night cut loose into what, I was sure, would be a full-blown exercise in la dolce vita.

  I turned over in bed, stretched my legs, massaged the place on my right foot where some overly religious photographer had dropped his camera. I thought of Elizabeth Taylor’s description of her experience at Mike Todd’s funeral. She told me there had been people eating their lunch off the gray slabs of tombstones while waiting to get pictures of the grieving widow. There had been a hot, ghoulish reeling of excitement—the same kind of excitement that is generated by bad accidents. Accidents? Was Mike’s death in a plane crash an accident? Oh dear, tell the one who’s left alive it isn’t. What possible good could death play? I wished I had known then what I knew now. Perhaps I could have been more help to Elizabeth.

  I gazed out my bedroom window across the East River. Images of the night before still skipped in my mind … the friends who had come in from various parts of the world to help me celebrate being half a century old, the toasts of endearment they had offered me as, shyly, they stood to declare what they thought of me. It was one of those nights when you are faced with whether or not you have the grace to accept compliments without self-judgment, without false deprecation, and without embarrassment. But my daughter Sachi really did it to me. As only children, who basically speak from feelings and not from intellect, always can, she brought the tears fully spilling from my eyes when she stood up and said, all in a breath, “Happy birthday to my mother whom I love more than I can say and she is also my role model.”

  Mercifully, Christopher wheeled in the birthday cake (I had asked for carrot—my favorite), and as I blew out the candles I found myself struggling with how to thank everyone. I stared down at the cake for some time. The room was silent. I was deeply touched by the tributes of these, my dearest friends and colleagues, and was having trouble clearing my throat. Also I wanted very much to say something meaningful, for this was indeed a special occasion, a special time for me, a special outpouring of love. Then I got a picture in my mind and spoke it out loud—after I blew my nose. “Friendship is like a ship on the horizon,” I said. “You see it etched against the sky, and then as it moves on, the ship dips out of your vision, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there. Friendship is not linear. It moves in all directions, teaching us about ourselves and each other.

  “That’s why, over the period of long friendships, as with most of the people in this room, we are there for each other, even if we are not always seen.” I wanted to say more, but choked up and so came to a stop. And discovered I was very hungry as we all plowed into white asparagus in pastry shells, roast veal, green vegetables I had never heard of, morel mushrooms, and mixed salad with herbs only a health food store would recognize, all topped off with that divine carrot cake.

  Dinner over, we repaired to the public rooms to join a cast of apparently thousands thronging the nave of the ex-church. From a floodlit balcony overlooking the milling, shouting, cheering, singing audience we watched delightedly as a roster of extraordinary entertainers joyfully tore the night apart.

  I definitely was treated to a coruscating birthday in a Love and Light temple out of one of my old Atlantean lifetimes!

  I gazed out at Welfare Island as I thought about the night before, wondering what other people’s perceptions of the party had been. I always loved to speculate on whether others were seeing through their eyes what I was seeing through mine. Truth and reality were so relative, I mused, residing only in the mind’s eye. I wondered how others felt about being fifty. Did they look back and inward as much as I, wondering how life to that point had happened? Did others also speculate on lives they might have led before which brought them to the life they were leading now?

  I rolled over and lifted my legs out of bed—my dancer’s legs—my two-shows-a-day-on-the-weekend legs—my twenty-five-years-apiece legs. I knew the reality of these legs in this life, this morning, all right. They were killing me. They needed a hot shower to make a transition into a less painful reality.

  Jesus, I thought as I shuffled like a fifty-year-old toward the bathroom, was pain real or something I just figured I should have because I was working hard and was half a hundred years old?

  I looked full-face into the mirror. Pretty good, I thought. Clear, translucent-pink skin ever since my last hicky disintegrated just before my daughter, Sachi, was born, and hardly any wrinkles, except the laugh lines sprinkled around the eyes which I considered my badges of positive thinking. I tilted my head downward slightly so I could observe the part in my hairline. Did I need a touch-up; how visible was my own streaked red hair from Clairol’s version? It was fine. I had another week or two. My mind flashed to the pared-down basics I enjoyed when traveling, out of touch with the technology of twentieth-century beauty aids, and challenged to rely on my own resources. The experience of living in huts in the Himalayas, or the Andes of Peru, or in tents on the plains of Africa, or in shacks in the backwoods of the American South, was etched in my memory—a sharp contrast to the life I was leading now in New York as a musical-comedy performer in my own show at the Gershwin Theater.

  I flipped the shower curtain closed and turned on the hot water. Hot water is a dancer’s trump card. I hadn’t learned how important it was to me until the last ten years. It worked liquid miracles on the body. And fast too. I didn’t have to contend with the scheduling of the eucalyptus steam room in a health club. I had an immediate hot, wet therapy in my own bathroom as long as I knew how to use it.

  I checked the positions of my four quartz crystals sitting on each corner of the tub. I had been learning to work with the power of crystals and that discipline had become part of my daily life. I stepped into the tub and let the steaming water run over my face, hair, and body. I could feel the sleep congestion in my chest loosen up and the muscles along my spinal column become more pliable. I did a quick chiropractic back adjustment, feeling the vertebrae slip into place, and breathed deeply, inhaling and exhaling the steam about ten times. I leaned over and poured some sea salt into a warm glass of shower water and began another disciplined ritual which I did every day. I put my nose to the edge of the glass and sniffed in the salt water. My grandmother, and several other people’s grandmothers, had used this method to purify the nasal, throat, and sinus tracts. It worked, too, as far as I was concerned. Whenever I did happen to catch a rare cold, sniffing the salt water usually nipped the cold in the bud the first day. Natural, holistic approaches worked better for me than medicines or drugs. In fact, I no longer had a family doctor. Experience had taught me that orthodox Western medicine relied far too heavily on drugs.

  I touched my thumbs and forefingers tog
ether and prepared to do my chanting mantras. By closing the thumb and forefinger together, the energy circulated through my body in a cycle, nourishing each cell as the frequency of the sound waves of my chanting increased. I loved the feeling of sound waves coursing through my body. I had first understood the power of the frequency of sound when I began singing lessons years ago. The vocalizing during warm-ups actually made my body feel more aligned than before. Physical therapists had used diathermy (circulated sound waves) on any injury I had incurred as a dancer. It was quite effective. So it made sense to me that one could use sound therapy on oneself without a machine by simply chanting as the Hindus have done in their temples for centuries, or, for that matter, as thousands of people have done, joyously caroling in bathtub and shower for generations, ever since plumbing was adopted by the West. And no doubt the Romans did it too.

  As I chanted my Hindu mantras I visualized white light flowing through my bloodstream. It made me feel centered and balanced. I had learned to draw in white light that I visualized coming from some source above me, and with the sound vibrating through my body, the light traveled through me causing a sensation of calm alignment. I had no doubts about what the AMA would think of my morning discipline as a contribution to maintaining health, but some members of even that august body were using visualization techniques with their terminally ill patients—when there was nothing to lose.

  I rubbed some salt on my throat and down the front of my chest. Salt is a basic purifier. Nature knows what it is doing. Any negative energy I was carrying from the tumult of the night before I would purify while chanting with the salt. Again, it might nave seemed “new age” faddistic, but it worked for me.

  I chanted and visualized the white light for about five minutes. That’s all it took. Five minutes out of my morning life every day. I don’t think I would have continued with these techniques if I hadn’t gotten practical, functional, concrete, solid results from them. I have always been a pragmatic person. When you’re trained as a dancer, you have to be.