SURVIVAL DANCE, DELIVERY SYSTEM AND THE BESHT PART 1 DEFINITIONS

First, two definitions.

Survival dance means what you do to provide food, clothing and shelter for yourself and your dependents.  The term comes from Native American elder Harley Swift Deer through Bill Plotkin.  It’s not why your unique purpose on this earth at this place and this time, it’s not who you are on the deepest level, it’s what you do for a living.  In our world this mostly means how you earn cash to buy things, but for our ancestors, hunting, gathering, building, spinning cloth and weaving—these were integral parts of their survival dances. It helps if you are truly talented at what you do for your survival dance, but the number of mediocre to good farmers or hunters vastly outweighs the truly talented ones, just as the number of mediocre to good employees vastly outweighs the great ones. I don’t think that’s changed at all.

Delivery system or sacred dance means how you share your true purpose or deepest identity with an identified community. It’s something that comes from deep within you and feels really right.  But it isn’t just about you—some kind of community has to get it.  If a delivery system is delivered in the woods and no one receives it, it isn’t a delivery system at all.  I do think that the community that receives it doesn’t necessarily have to be human.  I’m inclined to think that it is possible for a farmer, for instance, to have as a delivery system a way of nurturing the land they steward and their target community is the land, rather than some humans.

Here's the difference between survival dance and delivery system in this example.  Our hypothetical farmer sells his/her produce or value added products at a farmers market or through a website.  That’s their survival dance. If they do this just to make a living, that’s a survival dance.  If they do that because their purpose is to share the healing properties of good food or medicinal herbs and their target community is the folks who are healed through their food or herbs, then the selling of their herbs or food is their delivery system. (as well as their survival dance).

As I’ve said before, there’s a tendency to push for the unification of survival dance and delivery system. I’m not so sure that’s necessarily a good idea.  If it works, that’s wonderful, but often enough there’s work to be done to make it a survival dance, for instance, marketing, that doesn’t suit someone at all and they struggle because of that.

One last note, it can take some experimenting until someone finds a delivery system that works.  I don’t think it is necessarily obvious in all cases how we should share who we are and with whom we should share.