I recently found myself as a guest at a party surrounded by belly dancers. It was a costume party, so I was dressed as one myself, in all black with gold coins tied around my waist. I come from a line of belly dancers on my father’s side, a family who lived in Iran. As a young person, belly dancing was woven into my daily life, not as something exotic or extraordinary, but just what we did. We called it Persian dancing and there were always piles of saffron rice and kebobs and garlicky pickles and my father on the violin.
As a child, I was embarrassed by the Iranian side of the family because it was something other kids made fun of. I purposely didn’t learn the language, and once I was a teenager, I did not belly dance again. I wanted to assimilate more than I wanted to learn the lessons of the culture from which I was born. The long lines of legacy went underground.
The night of the costume party, I returned to the belly dance. As the night deepened and the DJ raised the beats to a nearly full moon, I felt my hips loosen.
There is a moment, if you allow yourself to be danced instead of being the one dancing, where the movements themselves have a life of their own.
I felt my body remembering, as if my hips were recovering a long-lost code, and I began to move with a free shake that did not stop for hours.
Why did this dance matter? And why share this story here?
My passion is to find the ways that feminine wisdom matters in the world of money.
That night, even though there is nothing written or any historical data to support such an idea, I felt in my body that belly dancers were some of the first female bankers. That’s right. Bankers. The dance itself originates from rites of fertility, from a time when matriarchy was intact. As cultures shifted to patriarchal systems, belly dancing shifted too, until it became something within the control and for the entertainment of men. As I returned to my own lineage of belly dancing, I felt the power of a woman’s dance and the power of fertility itself.
The original abundance. The coins around the waist are the perfect symbol.
I felt a possibility that maybe those women, dancing behind closed doors of the patriarchy, held an independence and sovereignty that other women didn’t. With their bodies, they remembered the deeper meaning the dance held, and how wealth, power, and fertility are deeply intertwined.
I felt the way a body can be our compass and guide back to meaning. The more we tune our inner compass, the more we access and honor the cues, the better it works for us.
Listening to our physical responses can help us make the financial decisions in our life. I am not suggesting that we throw away rational metrics when making a financial decision, not at all. I am simply suggesting that we bring the body along for the ride.
Your body is speaking to you in hundreds of small ways.
The breath is held, jaw is tight, shoulders are hunched. The brow is smooth, eyes are soft, breath is long. Feet are crossed and bouncing, pelvic floor is clenched. Legs are wide, knees are bent, there is a sway through the hips. These are all physical whispers of wisdom, a dialogue between the mind, the gut, the heart, and your very bones. The body records these sensations, holding an element of a complex consideration.
The next time you are facing a financial decision, put the rational metrics aside at some point and tune into the body. Give everything a little shake. Shift your weight from side to side and feel the inner compass recalibrate.
Reach back through the eons to where all traditions merge and imagine the original coins of abundance and prosperity flashing in the candlelight of a sacred, fully embodied, rhythmic space. Learn to be danced by the music. Tune into the feminine wisdom waiting to be transformed into something new.
