My hope for every dancer is that they feel and are accepted into the Sisterhood of bellydance early. That bond is what makes the bellydance experience so special to all of us. I was lucky to have found an amazing teacher and an outstanding group of women who I bonded with and made my pack. It is in our nature as women to want to be a little wild at times. we crave creativity, we crave expression of self. Very much like wolves, women need to run with a pack of like minded women who love and support them. Part of being in a troupe is being a member of a pack…and that is the power of dance.

“If you say to a woman how lovely she is, or how beautiful her art is, or compliment anything else her soul took part in, or was inspired to help with, something in her mind says she is undeserving and you, the compliment-or, are an idiot for thinking such a thing to begin with. Rather than understand that the beauty of her soul shines through when she is being herself, the woman changes the subject and effectively snatches nourishment away from the soul-self, which thrives on being acknowledged.”

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype

Troupe Zarifa – and our teacher Joan “Hyam” Hopkinson

Pictures taken right after diagnosis, In the middle of treatment, and at our Tribute Hafla after her passing.

“The Dangerous Old Woman”

“It is the nature of the saplings to quake in the winds; hesitant, learning

to hold their own places. But, the older trees, with their years of

testing and being tested, they are the ones who, whether in the long

stern winds or misty gales, sway the most. Less a bouquet of tentative

trembling first-time buds, now much more the leaf-perfumed hips of a

hundred wide women dancing—these old ones, regardless of form,

sway,

by heart,

to the music that thunders through them.”

—Clarissa Pinkola Estés, PhD

http://www.clarissapinkolaestes.com/index.htm