Maya Taahira

When I first started belly dancing, I was drawn into a powerful sense of community, radiant self-confidence, and subtle feminine grace. Then I moved to the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area and my perspectives on Middle Eastern Dance shifted somewhat. The new image of belly dance, it seemed, was one of fortune, fame, glory and rock-hard abdominal muscles. Everywhere I went, women wanted to experience the “new” belly dance workout. Optimistically, I quit my day job and launched myself head first into a new career, visions of belly dance superstardom shimmying in my head.

Then I became a mother and everything changed.

Motherhood brought with it a whole new set of challenges to my preconceived notions of belly dancing. After a somewhat difficult pregnancy and birth, I was physically and emotionally shaken to the core of my being. My body became foreign to me: leaking breasts, sagging belly crisscrossed with stretch marks, a newly expanded backside. Sleep deprivation, piles of unattended laundry, and haphazard meals became the new norm. I barely had time for a shower, let alone hours of practice for new routines and dance combinations. As Erma Bombeck once put it, I felt like I lost everything in the postpartum Depression. Where was the old me? Where was her body? Her grace? Her dancing? Her life?

After nearly four months of maternity leave, I approached my return to dancing with mixed feelings of joy and trepidation. I had been out of the loop for months and was afraid no one would want to take classes from me anymore, or see me perform. Could I still produce a shimmy without rearranging my internal organs? Would I ever dare to undertake a Turkish drop again?

Happily, my dance students returned in droves, assuaging my fears and increasing my class sizes. Slowly, it dawned on me that motherhood had created an outward, rather than an upward expansion of myself as a dancer (and a woman). I was used to learning a new dance technique, performing the movements, teaching it to my students and moving on to the next new thing. Now, I began to feel the power and beauty of Middle Eastern Dance centered in my heart, not in my head. Music moved through me, not around me. Dance became a vital part of my existence, not just a performance or a lesson.

Like the spiraling henna designs that grace this website, belly dance became one of many metaphors of my newly expanding consciousness. I went from being a strand of the web to being the whole web, and the spider that created it. Belly dancing continues to bring me newer and deeper levels of understanding of the universal Divine Feminine in all beings. Just when I thought I knew it all (or most of it, anyway) I realize how much I still have to learn.

Somewhere in the whirlwind of my pregnancy, birth, and mothering experiences, Triple Goddess Tribal Belly dance was also conceived and born by a group of visionary women who believe in the life-altering healing powers of this dance as well. Whatever level of enrichment this dance brings to your life, I hope you benefit from it enormously.