The energy that first coursed through me on the island in Palawan eventually asked to be labeled and contained. A pilgrim from Manila helped to land the moniker, innerdance, a somewhat romanticized yet figuratively accurate coinage to describe the mysterious movement of energy that brings people to blissful states of insight and surrender.
An example of the countless words spoken and written about in the last years relating to the process are these words published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer by one participant named Jaime Licauco whose many articles on innerdance sought to define the energy through science and spirit : “At this time, something happened to me that I had not experienced before. I went into a trance and fell from my chair to the floor. Then I went into a journey back in time from my present adult life to childhood and then birth. I saw myself inside the womb of my mother. I crouched and assumed a fetal position for a few minutes, then I went forward in time again until I reached my present age. I went back in time and returned. It was an inner dance—an inner rebirth. It was a very powerful experience for me and I found myself teary-eyed. It was a cathartic experience I could not forget.”
Experiences such as these are common in the innerdance experience, where sickness, pain, depression or anxiety is transmuted - and with this energy conversion arises a deeper inter-connective story that understands life through uninhibited consciousness of the world beyond the confines of the filtered mind.
In its first years, a lot of energy was spent on justifying that such profound experiences do lay readily dormant and existent in all beings, a latent force that is effectively repressed in modern times. A bridging energy flow that brings into awareness of the complex energy systems that so many of our older cultures have systematically tracked in so many forms and manifestations in humans and in all other living and non-living forms in the perceivable universe.
Where the innerdance needed no justification, it was a simple matter to bring remembrance about. A random sharing such as Ronabeth’s from Manila in the first year of innerdance’s inception would describe the raw and almost speechless clarity the process brings with it: “I remember thinking right after the experience, 'that was not just energy.' Energy would be too small a word for it. What I felt there was sheer power. For that brief period in time, I felt positively and utterly powerful. My experience was a reminder of what is important in my life. It was an awakening of my real self, which I have kept hidden away from the world for so long. It was a celebration of the life force that lay dormant inside me, a rebirth of sorts and the awareness that I have what it takes to change my life and perhaps touch those around me within my grasp all along. I have it within my power to be change and affect change. I have the capability to be a medium of light and love in this world. I have within me the tools I need to achieve my personal utopia.”