Dance Your Yoga
with Erotic Dance Yoga
By Felicia Tomasko
On a Saturday evening, a group of eight women transformed the Blue Star Rising Yoga Studio near Santa Barbara, California, into a sacred space to explore the sensuality and inner energies of the erotic feminine. Within the studio, which was filled with flowers and candles and featured an alter dedicated to the divine feminine, yoga teacher Niav Connor presented a synergy of yoga, dance, tantric breath, and meditation techniques. Some friends came in pairs; one woman received the workshop as a surprise gift; I came alone. In Erotic Dance Yoga, Connor encourages women to fall in love with themselves, and find the inner erotic, which is not about sex as much as it is about being sensuous.
Connor’s mission, along with co-teacher Sarah Scharf, is to return the sacred feminine to our everyday lives in a world that she describes as having an overabundance of aggressive masculine energy. Connor has been practicing yoga and meditation for more than seventeen years and teaching for four. She is also a PhD student in psychology at the Santa Barbara Graduate Institute.
In the flow of the fully clothed workshop, we alternated tantric breathing exercises to awaken and stimulate our inner spiritual energy with dance and yoga sequences. We were freed, with a bit of a boogie down sensibility, from the sometimes linear and static postures of yoga. As we moved, Connor encouraged us to run our hands over our legs, or down our arms, just as we might caress a lover’s skin in a sensual moment. This movement was intended to spark the feeling of falling in love with ourselves. We also practiced some of the grooviest sun salutations I’ve ever flown through.
Seven minutes of the workshop were spent eating chocolate. I have never before taken seven minutes to eat one piece of chocolate, but the experience was blissful and I have never felt so satisfied. The chocolate was an interlude of sensuality, of taking time, of experiencing the erotic, the feminine, and the sacred in a workshop expressing all of these.
We also indulged ourselves in the joy of dance, with free-form movement set to songs celebrating womanhood. We danced to shake off our day-to-day selves. All too often when we dance, we are performing, showing off, comparing ourselves, or dancing with a goal in mind. I am shy. But in the safety of the ritual circle, the kindness of the candlelight, I could just let go. In Erotic Dance Yoga, we had the freedom and safe space to let our inner dancer bubble up from within.
I practice yoga regularly—often daily. But my experience of yoga doesn’t usually involve as much groove. Erotic Dance Yoga inspired me to put a new shake and sensuality into my mat.
For more information visit www.eroticdanceyoga.com.
