Here is something completely different and quite unexpected. (Unless you have met Eline Kieft in person!) Curiously compelling with its ineluctable invitation to attend to a new way of practising, honouring, and celebrating embodied existence in the world. More so even than this, Eline offers a profound recognition of the ways in which life itself performs its ceaseless dance, drawing together each of its myriad expressions into an ever-newly improvised articulation of its holy life-giving sacredness.

Using her own experience of life’s twists and turns, Eline explores the connections and spaces between movement/dance; spirituality/embodied wisdom; landscape/wholeness; soul/soil; ritual/journey. The overarching and wonderfully transgressive and transformative idea of the ‘muddy temple’ both guards and proffers, enfolds and reveals, an ancient wisdom that finds sacredness right before us – shimmering at the heart of aliveness itself.

I have read this book three times now and, on each occasion, I have found something new, different, challenging, and stimulating. At the end of the third reading, I was struck by the thought that this is exactly the kind of book the celebrated Rhineland mystic Hildegard of Bingen would have written had she lived in the 21st century. It’s a masterpiece, a gem, of embodied, integrative, and healing thought and action for the people and creatures of today’s world that this human will return to again and again for inspiration.

Terry Biddington, University of Winchester

Eline Kieft’s Dancing in the Muddy Temple is a joy to read. She skilfully weaves a compelling narrative of the relationship between embodiment, dance, and nature—rooted in academic study, informed by real-world experience, and spiced with a rare passion for her topic. This is a book about cultivating new ways of knowing ourselves and how we fit into the world—through the silent wisdom of movement and dance. It is also a book about an urgently needed transformation in consciousness grounded in embodied experience. Kieft writes with clarity and conviction, inviting us all to participate in this new paradigm of embodiment.

Christian de Quincey, John F. Kennedy University

Dancing in the Muddy Temple draws us into a meeting-place of dance and the body, spirit and place, ritual practice and shamanic experience. Eline Kieft’s dancing feet trace out the temple of the spirit, but they are also always aware of the everyday ground on which they (and we) stand and move. There is a lot of depth to this enticing book, which interweaves the scholarly with the personal and experiential, and readers from many different backgrounds will find their understanding gently expanded and extended as they follow Kieft’s journey through the various modes of embodied awareness. Those who choose to follow her footsteps will find her a secure and informed guide to the new disciplines through which we can learn to reinhabit, and contact the wisdom within, our outer and inner worlds.

Geoffrey Samuel, Cardiff University

Dancing in the Muddy Temple is an illuminating book providing a portal to the reader to explore how dance, creation, spirituality and healing companion one another. Here is scholarship that is not only knowledge, but contributes to the wisdom of the body and exemplifies a philosophy with flesh. Kieft’s book reconnects what too long has been separated and invites one into a fertile space of dance as a pathway to insight, transformation and connection to the earth. In a time when the planet is hurting, we are given a book as medicine— a medicine for dreamers and dancers, scholars and seekers, philosophers and artists, but most of all, an embodied spirituality and an embodied scholarship that dances. This is nothing less than an exquisite offering to the world.

Celeste Snowber, Simon Fraser University

Eline Kieft’s wonderful book of dancing scholarship emerges from nature immersions, somatic spirituality, field research, and shamanic practices. Its easy reading style opens upon a channel of wisdom and a metaphysics of courage. Rather than being a book about nature, dance, shamanism, or anthropology, it explores a cross-disciplinary gateway towards a somatic spirituality that is culturally inclusive.

Sondra Fraleigh, State University of New York, College at Brockport

Kieft deftly threads lyrical reflections on dance, nature, and spirituality through intriguing stories about her own movement-enabled discoveries, to reveal how improvisational dance can heal cultural and personal wounds. Drawing on her experience as shamanic practitioner, she makes the case that dancing can help people cultivate connection with their multi-layered selves, with other humans, with the natural world, and with what she calls “spirits” and “source.” Kieft's gentle encouragement and clear examples guide readers to release their own capacity to dance as an enabling condition of their health and well-being.

Kimerer L. LaMothe, author of Why We Dance: A Philosophy of Bodily Becoming and What a Body Knows: Finding Wisdom in Desire