A life-changing experience

(By Alice Wilson - adapted from her letter inviting women to the GIFT in Austin)

The GIFT has been the most incredible life-changing, reality-enhancing experience that I have ever encountered - and that's saying a lot! The GIFT has nothing to do with 'fixing' you or trying to make you 'better', yet it has deepened my love of the dance form I do, strengthened my health and intensified my joy in living. I've been present ten times now and miraculously, each 3-day circle is composed of exactly the right women drawn together for each other.

This is one of the few certainties of The GIFT. It is a journey into the unknowable and un-sayable and yet those of us entrusted with organizing it have to try to communicate. The closest I can come is to say that The GIFT is a potent journey into the archetypal Feminine; not the sanitized, sometimes tortured view of the feminine reflected back to us from the media, but the expansive, sensual, sacred energy that permeates the Universe operating through and beyond the limitations of time and space. Each weekend is a state of the many faces of grace where compassion breathes your body and miracles emerge.

In my experience, although The GIFT has nothing to do with an particular religion and instead honors them all, it has everything to do with spirit. With the tiny spark of spirit's awakening, it's protection from the wind in cupped hands and of course its Kali-like incarnation as a raging inferno. That conflagration that can burn down the house and leave you dancing in the flames, is part of this sisterhood and so this Rumi poem seems to me to speak to the heart of the matter.
The prophets have wondered to themselves, "How long should we keep pounding this cold iron? How long do we have to whisper to an empty cage?"

So don't be timid. Load the ship and set out.
No one knows for certain whether the vessel will sink or reach the harbor.
This is much more important than losing or making money!
This is your connection to God.
Think of the fear and hope that you have about your livelihood. They make you work diligently everyday.
Now consider what the prophets have done. Abraham wore fire for an anklet. Moses spoke to the sea. David moulded iron. Solomon rode the wind.
Work in the invisible world at least as hard as you do in the visible.
Be a companion with the prophets, invisibly so that no-one knows.
You can't imagine what profit will come! When one of those generous ones invites you into his fire, go quickly Don't say, "But will it burn me? Will is hurt?"
Rise! Move!
Being still is how one clay clod sticks to another in sleep while movement wakes us up and unlocks new blessings.
So, in the immortal words of my long-suffering parachute Jump-master who was Georgia-born and bred and who drawled loudly and laconically at me, as I clung so desperately to the wing of the plane, "JUUUUUUUUUMMMMMMMMPPP!"