Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Grandmother's Secrets: The Ancient Rituals and Healing Power of Belly Dancing
    Unavailable
    Grandmother's Secrets: The Ancient Rituals and Healing Power of Belly Dancing
    Unavailable
    Grandmother's Secrets: The Ancient Rituals and Healing Power of Belly Dancing
    Ebook279 pages3 hours

    Grandmother's Secrets: The Ancient Rituals and Healing Power of Belly Dancing

    By Rosina-Fawzia al-Rawi

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook


    "Come, sit by me," says Grandmother. "Take this chalk in your hand. Now draw a dot and concentrate all your energy into this one dot. It is the beginning and the end, the navel of the world."

    So Fawzia Al-Rawi describes her grandmother's first lesson about the ancient craft of Oriental dance. Grandmother's Secrets always circles back to this grandmother and this young girl, echoing the circular movements of the dance itself. Al-Rawi has written a strikingly graceful and original book that blends personal memoir with the history and theory of the dance known in the West as "belly dancing."

    It is the story of a young Arab girl as she is initiated into womanhood. It is a history of the dance from the earliest times through the days of the Pharaohs, the Roman Empire, to the Arab world of the last three centuries. It is a personal investigation into the effects of the dance's movements on individual parts of the body and the whole psyche. It is a guide to the actual techniques of the dance for those who are inspired to put down the book and move.

    Al-Rawi conveys in this book not only the history and technique of grieving and mourning dances, pregnancy and birth dances, but the spirit of these age-old rituals, and their possibilities for healing and empowering women today.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherInterlink Books
    Release dateNov 15, 2012
    ISBN9781623710118
    Unavailable
    Grandmother's Secrets: The Ancient Rituals and Healing Power of Belly Dancing
    Author

    Rosina-Fawzia al-Rawi

    Dr. Rosina-Fawzia Al-Rawi was born in Baghdad and spent her childhood in Iraq and Lebanon. She is the author of Grandmother’s Secrets: The Ancient Rituals and Healing Power of Belly Dancing, Divine Names: The 99 Healing Names of the One God, and Midnight Tales: A Woman’s Journey through the Middle East. She holds a PhD in Islamic studies. She completed her Arabic, Islamic, and ethnological studies at the Universities of Vienna and Cairo and has been teaching Sufism for over 20 years. She holds workshops in various countries and her books were translated into Arabic, German, English and French. Al-Rawi’s workshops, classes, and training courses are based on knowledge drawn from psychology, spirituality, cultural anthropology, and medicine. They are underpinned in particular by a body of knowledge known as Sufism, which has been collected and passed down over centuries, especially in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Dancing, meditation, breathing techniques, traditional Sufi-practices such as zikr, whirling or working with the Divine Names all focus on opening the heart and embedding oneself into the great universal laws, beyond egocentric and social norms, connecting body, soul and spirit. In Vienna she set up a center for female spirituality, where seminars, workshops, and personal support on the path to self-discovery are offered.

    Related to Grandmother's Secrets

    Related ebooks

    Performing Arts For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Dance Around The World

      Mar 1, 2020

      Dance Around The World
      1 min read

    • Article

      Dancing Home

      Oct 31, 2018

      As a young, anxious, civil engineer, I would never have imagined dance to be my doorway to living a rich life. At 24, I was on my way to first-class honours and had a position lined up with a global firm. I was set. But beneath the surface, I was cri

      2 min read

    • Article

      La Artista Total

      Aug 7, 2019

      La Artista Total
      11 min read

    • Article

      For Love Of The Beat!

      Jul 7, 2021

      For Love Of The Beat!
      3 min read

    • Article

      Hips Don’t Lie

      Mar 30, 2023

      Hips Don’t Lie
      4 min read

    • Article

      Shimmy And Shake

      Oct 5, 2023

      Shimmy And Shake
      3 min read

    • Article

      Raise Your Voice

      Aug 23, 2023

      For someone who is, by my own admission, a great big show-off, I strongly believe singing is a private matter – something reserved for the shower or car. Of course, I’ll croon a little something to my kids, but they’re yet to develop a critical ear,

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Melodies that Make Us

      Jul 7, 2021

      The Melodies that Make Us
      3 min read

    • Article

      Meet Aseel Tayah

      Dec 2, 2021

      Meet Aseel Tayah
      8 min read

    • Article

      Raveena.

      Mar 27, 2020

      Raveena.
      5 min read

    • Article

      Drama Queen

      Jun 1, 2019

      Drama Queen
      7 min read

    • Article

      Queer Chi

      Oct 6, 2020

      Queer Chi
      7 min read

    • Article

      This Mortal House

      Oct 7, 2021

      This Mortal House
      4 min read

    • Article

      Moving To Your Own Beat

      Feb 14, 2018

      Moving To Your Own Beat
      9 min read

    • Article

      Lewis Major

      Jan 29, 2021

      Lewis Major
      3 min read

    • Article

      Exploring a Collective Unease

      Dec 31, 2022

      Exploring a Collective Unease
      7 min read

    • Article

      BOLT FROM The Blue

      May 12, 2020

      BOLT FROM The Blue
      5 min read

    • Article

      Grandmother Mind

      Jun 7, 2022

      Grandmother Mind
      9 min read

    Reviews for Grandmother's Secrets

    3.5/5

    24 ratings4 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      I am so grateful that I happened across this gem. Delightful and Inspiring. Masterfully written memoirs: short and sweet yet alluringly warm, vivid and moving. Much like perfectly picked pieces of fruit, somehow each just as juicy and fragrant as the last. I was originally drawn to this book by my general interest in dance but was very pleasantly surprised by how the authors personal tales woven into a thorough overview of cross cultural sacred ritual, and creative expression, not only provided a new perspective and context for the power of dance, but elevated my understanding of dance as an integral part of the human experience.
    • 1/5
      I really, amazingly wanted to like this book. The first section is a little unbelievable, but a pleasant read, and who I am to say these weren't the author's experiences? I slogged through the so-called history section out of pure determination. Her 'history' was a self-serving collection of meaningless generalizations and unsubstantiated "facts".

      I figured the section of exercises had to be worthwhile. Even if your history stinks, if you dance, how far wrong can you go in creating exercises for dancers? Right?

      Wrong! This kind of pseudo-scientific semi-mystical crap is just not worth my time. Silly I could live with. Goofy I could live with. Blatantly false information (your spine is not actually ramrod straight unless you've been hideously injured) wrapped in pathetic attempts to ascribe all that is good and right in the world to an unbroken tradition of female dancing? I'm out. I'm done.

      I'm sure this books speaks to someone. That someone is amazingly not me.
    • 4/5
      i would give it a 9 if not for the biological-gender-essentialism. this is understandable within the frame of her materialist account of patriarchy, which i was persuaded by. but it would have been nice to have a caveat abt the divergence of the objective intention of patriarchy over time, attendant w the process of the global-comparative notion of "feminine/female".
    • 2/5
      There were some really great (verbal) images here and personal history but as a whole it did not hold my interest.