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Dances of Universal Peace is Coming to Asia!

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Only if we are united, do we stand a chance to overcome the global problems we face as humanity. It’s time to heal the fragmentations of society and use our differences as an enrichment rather than an impediment to our harmonic presence on Earth.

The Dances of Universal Peace (DUP) is a very simple practice, suitable for all people and at the same time very special, because in circles we relate and harmonize intimately: we shake hands, we share looks, we listen and we sing. The dances set scriptures and sacred phrases from various spiritual traditions to music and movement of the world.

It can be a powerful and transformative practice, dissolving our illusion of separation, and invoking an embodied sense of unity, presence, and compassion. Offered in an atmosphere of safety, authenticity, and mindfulness, the Dances help us to open ourselves to qualities that emerge and remember the interconnectedness and harmony of life.

Our Communications Coordinator, Luvian, has recently joined one of the International DUP Camps in Turkey. He shared his experience joining the camp which you can read in this article.

You can also earn more about DUP here: Dances of Universal Peace.

The Dances in Asia

Having mostly been practiced in the West, we are excited to announce that the Dances of Universal Peace is coming to Asia. We will be collaborating with DUP International to hold several workshops and camps to share this beautiful and transformative tool in different countries listed below.

Arjun Calero, Senior Dance Mentor from Colombia

This series of dances in Asia will be led by a very experienced facilitator, Arjun Calero from Colombia, who has more than 20 years of experience holding dance circles in different countries of the world. Arjun lives in Atlantida Ecovillage, in the Andes of Colombia, a place he co-founded in 2003 with friends and family in order to fully embody the search for an alternative and restorative way of life on the planet.

He has worked for years with local native communities, youth groups, movements, and networks to build a better future. He is a senior mentor in the Dances of Universal Peace (DUP) International Network and Sufi Guide in the S.R.I., and is very much involved in the native ceremonies and ancient wisdom of the Americas, serving as a medicine man and ceremonies conductor since 2003.

Details of the events

Register for DUP Camp Thailand 2022

If you’re interested to join the events in Indonesia and Maldives, please mark your calendar and fill in the interest form below, we will inform you of updates and the registration link to your email as soon as it’s ready.

See you at the in-person workshops!🌺❤️

Joining the Dances of Universal Peace International Camp in Yalova, Turkey

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A few weeks ago, I had the wonderful chance to participate in the Dances of Universal Peace International Camp that was held in Yalova, Turkey. It was a 5-day camp where we did a lot of rounds of sacred dances, meditation, and workshops with participants coming from all over the world. And I’m thrilled to share that the dance is coming to Asia in the coming months.

All of the dance leaders, musicians and participants of the camp

The Dances of Universal Peace is a practice developed by Sufi teacher and Zen master Samuel L. Lewis. It is a transformational practice that invokes an embodied sense of unity, presence and compassion and touches the spiritual essence within ourselves through reciting sacred phrases, music and dance from various wisdom traditions of the world. This practice can be done by a group of people anywhere from five to hundreds, even thousands of people creating powerful resonance and harmonic vibration. You can learn more about the dances at dancesofuniversalpeace.org. 

The whole experience of participating in the dances has been really heart-opening for me. In the beginning, we didn’t really know each other, we simply shared our presence without much connection. In a session, we did a number of dances one after another. And by the end of the first session, it felt to me that all of these people (there were a little more than a hundred of us) that I don’t know before are my brothers and sisters. We all come from different cultures and backgrounds (there were 27 countries represented from South America, North America, Europe, Central Asia, Middle East, and Asia), yet it was so easy for us to feel connected, and develop care and love with each other. As a result, talking and getting to know each other at a deep level during meals and between sessions became a very effortless process.

We were lucky to have very experienced dance leaders that have been doing this for decades – some even for 50 years! They guided us on how to utter sacred words (mantras or dzikrs), sing the melodies, and also the dance movements. After five to ten minutes of instructions, suddenly one hundred people are all dancing and chanting together in beautiful harmony. It is magical to see how I can move in rhythm and sing very firmly despite not having much experience dancing and singing. I think everyone regardless of their dancing or singing skills can easily in these dances.

Listening to the instructions from the dance leader

The focal point of the dances is participation rather than performance. It is totally okay to make mistakes and forget the sequence from time to time as the most important aspect of it is how much involvement and devotion we give when chanting and dancing. I tried to give my utmost involvement during the dances and invoke as much devotion as I can within myself. As the sessions go by, I felt that my heart opened up like the petals of a flower in the morning. Opening up to receive as much light from the sun and fully express the beauty within, not being worried about anything that’s coming – the breeze of the wind or the rain. Living in contemporary modern society, I feel the need to shut myself and numb myself from the pain that arises from witnessing all the things that don’t feel right like people taking advantage of others, wasting resources, violence, slaughtering of animals, deforestation, pollution, etc. I’m grateful that through practice that is done collectively in a safe atmosphere, I learned how to open up my heart and put aside the protection when I feel it’s safe to do so. It is an inner skill that I think will be vital for my growth as a person.

The Dances are coming to Asia!

Having experienced the effect of the dances myself, I am really thrilled that GENOA is collaborating with DUP International to hold several workshops in Asia and have more connections with the dances. It is a beautiful and powerful collective tool to build connection, community, and awareness. Something that perhaps the ecovillage movement in Asia could really find fitting. I also think that this can be something easy to overlook as from the outside it looks like we’re just a group of people dancing, not doing anything tangible for the world. But I believe the transformation that is happening within each person through the dances will find diverse and beautiful ways to tangibly manifest in the future. I can already feel this possibility within myself. 

We invite you to experience this wonderful tool of unity with us. Please feel free to extend this invitation to your friends and family that might be interested to come along. You can see the dates below. More info will be announced soon, so please stay tuned to our social media channels.

See the Event Page and Fill out the Interest Form

Remember, anyone regardless of age, gender, race, religion, belief, dance, and singing skills can participate in this practice. Let’s build connections and recharge each other with energies of compassion, unity, and harmony. See you all there!

We came together beaconing unity, love, peace, and harmony

About the Author

Luvian Iskandar, Communications Coordinator at GENOA

Luvian has just completed his studies when he joined GENOA as communications coordinator. As he became aware of the social and environmental degradation in the world, he resonated with the holistic approach within the ecovillage movement in regenerating social and environmental systems. He chose to study the early development stage of ecovillages for his master’s program, thinking that he might be involved in such a project in his home country, Indonesia, in the future. He feels that building bridges across divides is one of the most relevant works today as we need an understanding of unity to overcome the global issues we are facing as humanity. He hopes to contribute to such a cause through his role in GENOA.

Foodscape Pages: Soulful Conversations on the Ecology and Culture of Food

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If you care about food and how it is grown, about the soil and people who help to restore it – the path leads you to Foodscape Pages! 

Foodscape Pages is a community-driven platform for publications and gatherings that inspire meaningful conversations and new perspectives around the ecology and culture of food. Through the lens and medium of food, we hold space for personal stories of lived experiences and for direct connections with practitioners on the ground.

As more and more people in Singapore and neighbouring countries are getting interested in gardening, growing their own edibles, and learning more about our food systems, they look for knowledge and a community of experience. However, a lot of information available online is not always applicable to our context; sometimes it’s the climate condition (a lot of information is from places with temperate climate), and sometimes it’s the socio-cultural and political circumstance in which one can begin to grow some of our own edibles. Foodscape Pages came about to bring up the voices of practitioners who have the experience and skills on the ground, but may not always be active in sharing their stories online. The intention is the sharing of local and bioregional knowledge, and to connect people interested to dive deeper into the conversations around food and our food systems.

What seeds we are planting

Foodscape Pages dreams to connect people who are interested in the ecology and culture of food in our bioregion, as well as to nurture more eco-literacy of regular folks, especially urbanites who are not connected with our food sources, to become more aware of our relationships with food, and how that affects the well-being of the individual, the community, the society and the planet. It is our hope to cultivate and nurture a space for increasing both external awareness of what’s going on out there, and relating it back to how we live our individual lives and make our choices through deepening inner awareness.

Foodscape Pages works towards this dream through bringing together different pieces of knowledge and publishing the theme-based journazine “The Sauce – on food, community and inspirations”. The first issue focused on Soil, highlighting initiatives like the Soil Regeneration Project and Community Composting, and inviting perspectives from practitioners to share their personal stories in Singapore and the region. This publication got distributed with over a hundred hard copies, with selected articles available online for the wider public.The second issue of The Sauce was dedicated to Seeds. As Foodscape Pages intends to be a community-driven platform  we held an open call for contributions, invited practitioners to share their views, and organised a 3-part community creative writing workshop to co-create content for this issue. Part of this Sauce included interviews with practitioners from Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia and The Philippines, creating a space for all to begin thinking about interconnections in our bioregion.

We want to build the capacity of our community and share skills and knowledge freely, so that people can continue to be inspired to learn and grow together, and bring that to more people. 

As we work together, we intentionally hold a space of care through regular check-ins and actively practicing kindness, empathy, trust and gratitude through active listening and authentic sharing. One of our priorities is a relationship with members of Foodscape Pages wider community. We are exploring how to use language with care and cultivate supporting ways of being.

How it grows

The initiative was conceived by Vivian, Sixian and Huiying with the Foodscape Collective as a key partner to form an ecosystem around the vision of a fair and circular food system for all. Now it is growing through partnership and relations! Each of the Sauce editions brought us close with other change-makers in the region –  with Kontinentalist to create a seed map and share our research around the importance of seeds; with independent developers and designers from ThoughtWorks for creating a new website with better features; with a developper and illustrator receiving partial funding from CreativesAtWork and Blue3Asia for making our work even better; and with many more.We have received contributions from close to 30 contributors, either through writing, sharing their stories, illustrating or contributing their design and developer skills. You can read more about the community of Foodscape Pages on this page.

To date, without any funding except through community crowdsourcing, we have published our first journazine in print, in the process of publishing the second issue on our new online platform, organise in-person gatherings that bring people together to be creative and deepen our knowledge and literacy around our relationships with food. Throughout this time we learnt how to be adaptive and agile during these volatile times of a global pandemic, to find different and creative ways to connect on a human scale and trust that by deepening the influence and impact we can have in even a small number of people, it can create a ripple of impact through these engagements.

One of the good practices we discovered is to have regular check-ins for anchoring the connections on a human level, one that is based on trust, respect, understanding, interdependence and interconnection. This provides resilience especially during challenging times.

It has been amazing to see how people come together to co-create and find ways to be together in challenging times. Community support is one of the key enabling factors that has been keeping this vision of creating and maintaining the continuing growth and work of Foodscape Pages. 

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Go to www.foodscapepages.org to discover our materials, meet the community and connect with Foodscape Pages! You can also follow us on Facebook and tell your friends who are curious about growing and eating healthy food and living in connection with nature.