Welcome to Dancing Shiva
Dancing Shiva is small retreat center in mountains of North Carolina near Asheville. It is the home base for a community of students and practitioners of tantra that grew out of the teachings of Swami Rama of the Himalayas, as received by Rudolph Ballentine, MD, and Rudiji’s experience of learning and later teaching at the Body Electric School based in California.
For the last 20 years, those who have studied and trained with Rudiji have passed on this unique path to many others, and DS serves as a place for all those who tread this path to come, reconnect with the tradition and with the earth, and to find rest, serenity, and inspiration.
Though DS serves all people, its focus is authentic, classic tantra, emphasizing the inner marriage between each person’s inner Shiva (“masculine”) and Shakti (“feminine”), and is particularly dedicated to those of LGBT orientation, who have life experience with their “two spiritedness” and are thus likely to be especially well suited to living and teaching this tradition of tantra. It’s staffed by men committed to this work and functions as a mini-monastery.
Mission
Dancing Shiva’s mission is to bring a version of tantra to the West that is both accessible to the Westerner and relevant to the present — yet still true to the authentic tradition of tantra taught and lived in India for millennia. It aims to do this by offering workshops, trainings, and other programs both at its home in the mountains and away. Even more importantly, however, is that DS is a place where the teachings are lived, and where one can absorb their essence by simply being present. It is a place for healing, transformation, and celebration.
Purpose
Dancing Shiva is a wilderness oasis where students, teachers and seekers come to integrate and recharge spiritually and sexually by experiencing, learning and practicing Tantra.
What is Dancing Shiva Tantra?
Tantra is an ancient body of practices and philosophy that chart a path of personal transformation and spiritual attainment. It is sex and body positive, honoring the physical along with the spiritual. Emerging from the mists of prehistoric South Asia, it has, over the millenia, woven together threads of the highest and most abstract of Vedic wisdom with the magic and earth based intuitions of tribal shamans.