Dancing in the Dharma
by Sandy Boucher
Summary
In the great movement of Buddhism to the West, Ruth Denison has been a pioneer. The first Buddhist teacher to lead an all-women’s retreat and the first teacher to use movement and dance to train her students in mindfulness, Denison created a quintessentially female, body-centered way of teaching the Dharma.
Sandy Boucher tells the gripping story of Ruth’s youth in Nazi-dominated Germany and her struggle to survive the near-fatal abuses and privations that befell her after the War. Later, Ruth and Henry Denison explored the counterculture, and traveled to Asia and Europe to study with the major spiritual teachers of the twentieth century.
Excerpt
On this April morning of 2003, in the high desert, I expected the beginning of summer’s crushing heat. Instead, as I trudge the quarter-mile from Dukkha House, the women’s dormitory, to Las Vegas House, where Ruth now lives, my hair whips around my head from the cold wind, and above me loom great piles of darkening cloud. I look out across the open stretch of Copper Mountain Mesa, a terrain sparse with creosote and desert sage, dotted with modest houses, part of the Mojave Desert of California. Ruth Denison’s meditation center, Dhamma Dena, spreads out in one-story buildings and house trailers, their wood, stucco, stone, and painted metal blending into the vast monotonous landscape.
I am here once again to sit and talk with Ruth, to learn her history, travel with her the road that led through sites both physical and mental to this destination.
Outside the gate to Las Vegas House, I find cacti planted in gleaming white toilet bowls, sprouting magnificent cherry-red blossoms, and I stop to admire the gorgeous petals of these briefly blooming flowers. I open the gate of the chain-link fence, walk up the sandy driveway, and go in the back door of the green-shingled, one-story house. The previous owner installed the fence and wire security door. Ruth has so little fear that, fr most of the period this center has existed, doors were never locked, and most of them still aren’t.
The fence was useful, however, during the five-and-a-half years of her husband Henry’s dying, when he lived here and was guarded by fierce dachshunds, eager to take a chunk out of your ankle when you came to visit him. Many times I trembled at the gate, menaced by scrabbling, growling little wiener dogs, as I called for someone to come out and hold them back so that I could go in and sit with Henry.
This morning no such guardians attack me. Ruth’s latest dachsies are too old and tired to leap into watchdog mode.
Through the closed porch I go, and into the dark, narrow kitchen, calling, “Hello, I’m here!”
Ruth stands in the living room talking to Dhammapala, the woman re3turned from Burma, who will stay here for a time. Dhammapala gives me her brilliant smile while Ruth goes on instructing her. “Yah, while I am gone for the night, dahling, you stay here in my house. That will be nice for you, hmm? Later I show you how to feed the coyotes, and the rabbits, and the roadrunners.”
“I can sleep in my van,” Dhammapala offers.
Ruth objects. “No, dahling, you sleep in here, so you can take care of the doggies.”
She turns to point them out, curled on a large round pillow between the dining room and the living room. Tara, shaggy and gray-whiskered, sleeps. Nelli Belli Delli, a beautiful caramel-colored shorthair with a delicate pointed snout, looks up at us anxiously. She is a purebred who had been used for breeding…and would have been sold for vivisection, had she not had the extraordinary good fortune of being rescued by Ruth Denison.
Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press. http://www.beacon.org
Reviews
“Boucher’s life repeatedly intersects with Denison’s, making this a dual tale of development and discovery and, therefore, doubly compelling”--Booklist
"[A] stirring yet unsentimental spiritual biography” —Bernadette McGrath, Dragonfly Review
"This book is a tonic to lift the spirits and energize the heart”—Joanne Macy, Author of Widening Circles
Author's Biography
Sandy Boucher, a leading spokesperson on women and Buddhism, is the author of eight books, including Turning the Wheel: American Women Creating the New Buddhism and Opening the Lotus: A Woman’s Guide to Buddhism. She lives in Oakland, California, with her partner.