"What was it about Ruth that drew me back, year after year, for almost three decades?" Sandy Boucher asks herself early in Dancing in the Dharma. Delving into Denison"s dramatic and sometimes tragic past, Boucher examines the life of this beloved and controversial teacher to try to understand what shaped her and informed her teaching.
In the great movement of Buddhism to the West, Ruth Denison pioneered and innovated with her own quintessentially female and unique way of teaching the Dharma. She was the first Buddhist teacher to lead an all-women"s retreat and the first teacher to use movement and dance to train her students in mindfulness. As Sharon Salzberg, cofounder of the Insight Meditation Society, remembers, "The wisdom, and the emptiness side of things, were very clear in her. She expressed all that very, very well."
Catching the unique charm of Ruth"s voice in vivid scenes and anecdotes, Boucher tells the gripping story of Ruth"s youth in Nazi-dominated Germany, her years in Hollywood in the sixties and seventies as a participant in the counterculture, her world travels to study with the major spiritual teachers of the twentieth century in Asia and Europe, and her flowering as a Buddhist teacher. Along the way, Boucher also addresses the hard question of how to continue to learn from a spiritual teacher while responding to that teacher"s complex personality.