Please check out this wonderful piece by Ruth Vincent in Chelsea Now, The Villager, NYC

Healing the spirit through dance
‘Skin of Glass’ is a memoir of divine and human love

By RUTH VINCENT

In her recently published memoir, “Skin of Glass: Finding Spirit in the Flesh,” ballerina-turned-Sufi Dunya Dianne McPherson, explores dance as a spiritual practice. McPherson, 55, a longtime resident of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, was compared to a modern-day Isadora Duncan, but ditched dance fame to become a bellydancer, a Sufi mystic, and the creator of Dancemeditation, a spiritual practice of awareness movement in which the body is viewed as a teacher. This is her first book.

I met McPherson several years ago in one of her Dancemeditation workshops. I was mesmerized by McPherson’s dancing, her almost inhumanly liquid spine, but more than that I was impressed by her teaching abilities to help someone like myself, with no dance background whatsoever, learn to be more comfortable in my body. When her memoir was published I wondered if McPherson would be able to convey as a writer what I knew she could convey as a performer and teacher.

McPherson succeeds admirably in the almost impossible task she sets for herself: putting into words what is wholly nonverbal—dance, and describing what is utterly indescribable—mystical experience. Boldly experimenting with writing style and form, taking risks most writers wouldn’t dare, she writes her memoir from the body, not just about it. Chapters entitled “Eyes,” “Spine, “Legs and Crotch,” and “Skin” explore the differing consciousness of each body part, each becoming a launch for memory which further unravels her life story.

The memoir begins with McPherson as a young dancer, pirouetting under her father’s critical gaze and secretly starving herself to meet the demands of her ballet teachers. McPherson has all the outward signs of success in her field, but injury and a growing spiritual restlessness lead her within to study Sufism with a charismatic Iraqi Sufi master. He gives her the Sufi name ‘el Dunya,’ which means ‘world’ as in the physical universe. Initially McPherson balks at the name, asking him if she could have a moniker that’s more obviously ‘spiritual’?

“Where do you think the spirit is?” he replies.

The name becomes synonymous with McPherson’s earthy spirituality, one that doesn’t reject the body.

When I asked McPherson about her intent in writing her memoir, she told me that she had initially penned it with a very small audience in mind—namely her own community of professional dancers and Sufis. However, since the book’s publication, McPherson says she has been surprised and gratified by the “wide range of readers who have responded to its message…the mother who read it with her teenage daughter and how it became a way for them talk together about respecting her body and her sexuality in a way that reached beyond morality into who each truly was…the elderly woman at the library who told me she had never thought much about her body until she read my book…the woman scientist who didn’t think of her self as spiritual, through the embodied nature of my journey she opened to that aspect of herself …or the memoir-loving librarian who really loves “Skin of Glass” as memoir.”

Like a good dancer, McPherson begins her book with a slow warm-up. The first few chapters on her early youth resemble a scientist’s observations—painfully detailed, heady, tedious—but the writing sharply accelerates once she undertakes Sufi study. Her stream of consciousness prose creates the bodily sensations of movement meditation. In the spiritual tradition of Sufism, where the Divine is often referred to as the “Beloved,” “Skin of Glass” is also a love story. Endearingly frank about her insecurities, McPherson reveals her increasing trust in letting another human being love her, and this trust parallels her growing belief in the Divine. It’s a tale of both the awkwardness and the ecstasy of learning about Divine love in the arms of a very human partner. McPherson is at her best when writing about mysticism and sex, and ultimately the two are inseparable. Her prose style echoes Rumi’s poetry in the sensuality of spiritual experience:

"When we kiss where does the kiss begin? Is it when my lover leans toward me and I smell a change in the air, then his scent? Or is it when the conversation shifts temperature, ceases to bound forward, where it halts slightly… his body seeming to grow dense and planted before torquing in my direction?...Is it when our mouths, having meshed like greased gears, find a sucking rhythm, or is it when the tongues meet, scissoring like the thighs of tango dancers? Or is the kiss only truly a kiss when our touching skins melt... amoebic and formless, our minds slide inside the sensation? Is it when we no longer count who is leading and who is following, when we are mixed into simultaneity?... Where did I say “yes” or he say “yes”?....Was there ever a place where the tentative “maybe” was discarded and my answer to him was all “yes” and the “yes” was abandonment to timelessness, a complete surrender? Is there ever a complete surrender?"

There’s an unflinching honesty in the midst of all this poetry. McPherson resists the memoir genre’s temptation: to simplify the ambiguity of her life. She makes no final judgment on the Sufi community that shaped her. “We were westerners seeing what we hoped or feared in a culture we would never fathom.” She acknowledges both the spiritual gift of her Sufi training, and that she was raped by her Sufi master, the same Sufi master who gave her her name. Unlike other memoirs, McPherson tells painful stories from the voice of her body, rather than psychoanalytically. Her writing heals like a tribal trance dance. McPherson’s memoir has the unfinished quality of a life still being examined, an author still very much alive and kicking. This is mysticism for New Yorkers: a non-fluffy, erotic, and startlingly honest memoir.

“Skin of Glass: Finding Spirit in the Flesh” can be purchased online at dancemeditationbooks.com, amazon.com, or at the Integral Yoga Institute (227 W. 13th Street; 212-929-0586). McPherson teaches regular classes and workshops in Dancemeditation, including a 5-day intensive in NYC November 6-10. For a schedule of upcoming workshops, visit dancemeditation.org

Please join me October 9th at the wonderful Gateways Bookstore if you are  in the area. I'll be reading and showing Visual Poem film accompaniments.

Also, for those  of you in the NYC area,  check out the terrific review for Skin of Glass in Attitude: The Dancer's Magazine. (Here's where you can pick up a copy. Attitude is a great publication. Support them!)

Carol Skolnick , author of Soul Surgery Blog, is a wonderful writer and deep seeker.
Here is her review of Skin of Glass.

June 10, 2008

See-Through You: A Book Review of Dunya Dianne McPherson's Skin of Glass

Unlike the lyrics to the Blondie song "Heart of Glass," which speak to fragility and betrayal, to have a skin of glass is to be transparent to oneself. In her new book, Dunya Dianne McPherson lets us see her, and see through her, as well...literally to the bone.

Skin of Glass: Finding Spirit in the Flesh, is a literary spiritual memoir by my once and future dance teacher. (She's coming to Santa Cruz in October!) I attended Dunya's Dancemeditation classes in New York for years, initially dragged there by a friend who insisted I didn't have be a good dancer or physically coordinated in order to do this spiritual/somatic practice: a combination of bellydance, Sufi work, and fluid yoga. (In doing so, I discovered that I was a pretty good dancer, and not as clumsy as I thought.)

Dunya was a "bunhead" kid (as we New Yorkers called the young chignon and leotard-sporting girls scarfing ice cream outside the Joffrey ballet school each summer) whose passion for classical dance took her from Wood's Hole to Juilliard. In the early 1980s, severe injuries ended her performance career while it opened her to a new way of experiencing dance as embodied prayer. She went through the usual stuff of spiritual biography—big experiences, parental disapproval, disillusionment with the teacher—until the path and practice became uniquely her own.

What distinguishes this spiritual autobiography from others is the emphasis on the body. It is after all through the body that we come to spiritual maturity. Dunya's memoir is a remembrance not simply of events, but of the evolution of bone, skin, sinew, muscle, organs, blood, sweat, lymph, and hormones along with the soul. The language is poetic and erotic, whether Dunya is describing a transcendent act of lovemaking or the inward journey sparked by an awareness of skeletal structure.

The reason this book is special to me goes beyond Dunya's exquisitely written story and seeps into my own. My discovery of Byron Katie's inquiry collided with my Dancemeditation practice; each enhanced the other. As fluid movement had its way with my body, I was no longer the limited, egoic story; I noticed that as soon as I attached to a thought that interrupted the flow, I would take a tumble. When I was connected with my essence, unselfconscious and unafraid, the dance danced itself. Who would I be without my story? A woman dancing beautifully for herself, even while performing for others.

Dunya and I approached the path to self-realization from different sides; she was a dancer who met spirit through dance, I was a seeker who met dance through spirit. Through our respective practices, we touch what cannot be grasped by the thinking mind...and we meet in the middle, where there is no distinction, where all is transparent, where we see and are seen.

"Inside any deep asking is the answering." ––Rumi

Really nice to see Skin of Glass turn up on Ellen's Dancing on Cape Cod blog.

"I just finished Dunya's book, subtitled, FINDING SPIRIT IN THE FLESH. It will be shelved in the spiritual memoir section, if the bookstore has such a thing, women's literature. I read slowly because it was very poetic. An incident here or there would provide an anchor for the imagination..."
––Ellen Brodsky, ballroom dance teacher, Falmouth, MA

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