The Tragedy of First Position

 

Here is a video entitled “The Tragedy of First Position.”  It is of a little girl in her ballet class trying so hard to get her feet into first position.  She just can’t seem to do it:  click here to see the video

I feel like this a lot – both figuratively and literally.  The little girl is trying really hard. And the teacher is so kind.  She says, “It’s okay if your shoes aren’t doing it” and “Ohhhh, it’s tricky!”

Sometimes our shoes just don’t seem to take us where we want to go.  We have to learn how to navigate our lives.  We have to somehow accept where we are now and work from there.

In life, I think all of us take the role of both the teacher and the little girl.  There are times we need someone to make us feel better and there are times we need to make others feel better.  Maybe our comforting words are not strictly the truth, but it’s worth a little white lie if it helps someone retain her dignity.  When we see someone struggling, we understand that anyone can be confused, anyone can make a mistake, anyone can just not understand.  

I feel like the little girl when I am trying to execute a dance step I am not familiar with.  I just can’t get my body to go where I want it to.  I watch other people who can do it and will see if I can’t imitate that person’s body in space.  I try to forget about myself and think I am doing exactly what the teacher is doing.  Then when I look in the mirror – not even close.  For those few moments, anyway, I was soaring.  I try to not be disappointed, but just tell myself I’ll practice and I’ll get there.  Plus, the journey is more than half the fun.

Sometimes when I feel lost about how to handle a situation, I look around like that little girl to pick up some clues and see how others are executing any metaphorical first position.  In the video she keeps trying so earnestly to get it right, but she doesn’t seem discouraged or upset. She just wants to get it.  I love that.  Even though the girl is struggling, she has a sense of self-acceptance.

I also hope that I can be as nice as the little girl's teacher -- whether I'm with friends, clients, family, or strangers -- giving words of encouragement and understanding.  It's so important to do that for myself, too, remembering that even as I try to figure things out -- even when I feel utterly at sea -- I can stay afloat by accepting myself just as I am.

It's so important to remind ourselves and others that it’s okay if "getting it" takes some time.

As the teacher, be kind.  As the child, be kind to yourself.  And enjoy the journey.

Photo by MaryEllen Hendricks

The Near Enemy

In my previous blog, I was talking about letting go. It seems to be a major theme in my life.

When I recently started a new business, I was upset that what was appearing before me was not what I had expected. But then I had a realization -- I was doing what I loved with people I felt connected to. Letting go of my fear enabled me to focus on the happiness that had already manifested in my life.

Before I had this epiphany, I was experiencing “the near enemy.”

I learned about this concept while reading a novel, a “cozy mystery” by Louise Penny. In it, one of the characters talks about the near enemy, which is something undesirable that appears as something good. For example, attachment masquerades as love, callousness masquerades as equanimity, and pity impersonates compassion.

My experience of this was the near enemy of love, since attachment can look like love, but it is not.

Attachment is born of fear – whereas its opposite, connection, springs from love.

In dance, attachment is worrying about what it looks like rather than allowing the connection to freely express what arises organically from the music.

I can be afraid sometimes that my work is not good and that people won’t like it. That causes me to be attached to what I think people might like, which in turn restricts my movement options in choreography. If I listen to music in the spirit of love, I am connected to the music and the movement. I am experiencing love rather than fear. When I move from connection, I am offering something from within myself rather than giving something that doesn’t belong to me – something that resides outside of my connection.

Attachment feels like taking directions from outside yourself (along with a big load of anxiety). Connection is a feeling of being solid, grounded, and happy because it comes from within.

The trick is slowing down enough to identify what’s really motivating our actions.

When in doubt, I (try to) remember to ask myself, “How does this feel?” If it feels fraught with anxiety, I know I am on the wrong track and I have to back up and take a breath. I have to take a moment, breathe, find my connection and begin again.

Are we responding to attachment or connection? Love or fear? Are we expressing the near enemy?

We don’t have to fight the darkness; we merely have to turn on the light.

Acknowledging love and feeling connected unmasks the near enemy, causing it to fall away and allowing us to freely express our truth from within.

Photo by MaryEllen Hendricks

Liberation

We were in class and one of my clients was saying that once she decided to stop looking in the mirror while dancing, she enjoyed the experience much more.  She let go of the self-imposed rules dictating how it should look and let herself just dance from the heart. 

There is nothing wrong with aspiring to achieve certain “lines” when you dance, but it restricts your expression if you can’t allow yourself to dance outside the box of your own making.  There really are no mistakes.  There is only you, expressing yourself in an authentic way and making adjustments according to what feels good to you.  

Once you let go of how something (anything) should look, you open the door to other, maybe even more wonderful ways of being.

In my life, I believe the most powerful therapeutic tool I have used (and continue to use) over and over again is the act of simply deciding to let go. 

The trick is recognizing when I need to do it.  Sometimes that isn’t so clear.

I just started a new business and I had a preconceived notion of what I thought it should look like.  When it didn’t happen the way I thought it would, I became attached to what I thought was the only road to success.  One day while I was teaching and having a quiet internal meltdown, the thought suddenly came to me: “I am doing what I love to do in a place I love to be.  I am grateful for every person who came to dance with me today.  That’s really all I need to know.  I trust that I am doing what I’m meant to do and that if it’s wrong, I will be led to the next right thing.”  

It was as though an anvil was lifted from my back. I felt euphoric. I was freed from attachment.  Instead I was now feeling my connection to dance and the people who dance with me.  

Once I truly let go, everything changed for the better.  Was it a change in me?  Was it a change in circumstances? Or are they the same thing?

Letting go of knowing the outcome and going step-by-step (enjoying the journey) is like releasing yourself from bondage.  Worry and anxiety narrow our field of vision so that only a few options appear to be available.  When you let go, the world expands and shows you where to go next.  

So I think of my life as a dance – I don’t know what choreography is coming next, but I am dancing this way now.  And I like it.  

Sat Nav

When I feel that I must do new choreography now, I know that kind of inclination (or inner direction) is based in fear because I am attached to what I think I should do rather than being connected to what really is. And under those circumstances when I try to do something new, I end up throwing it out.  It never sees the light of day (and it shouldn’t). 

Lately when I am faced with a choice, I try to stay in the moment and say to myself, “All right, what’s the next thing to do?  What feels right and makes sense now?”  It has taken me years (really -- decades) to be able to use this process.  Every time I have to make a new choice, I stumble along in the old way until I can pull myself together to use that “new way.” (At least it’s new to me.)

I was talking to a friend on the phone and she said, “There’s a lot of static on the line, is it on your end?”  I said, “Yes, I must be too far away from the source.” 

That really struck me.

When I am filled with anxiety and worry, I notice that my navigation system doesn’t communicate with me very well.  There is a disturbance that does not allow my clear thinking. 

When you are far away from your source—that part of you that is always there, behind the words in the space between your thoughts—you can’t understand what is being communicated.  There is static on the line.

We are always connected to our truth, but sometimes we let ourselves wander away from our foundation, from what we know to be true. 

Worry and fear are static that keep us from making lucid decisions.  Although it is difficult, I have learned that when I don’t know what to do, it’s best for me to do nothing.  I understand that when I allow myself to get quiet and release the external noise, I can “hear” clearly.  My sat nav starts working and sending me directions.  

I don’t know where the sat/nav will lead me, but I have to trust that a clear, calm inclination points me to the road I should follow.

And just like choreography that comes from a joyful, rather than an anxious place, I can let it see the light of day and keep dancing.

Visit our website at Dansue Dance Fitness

Degrees of Freedom or N minus 1

When choreographing a song, there are an infinite number of possibilities of what movement to use.  As I go through a song, the possibilities are narrowed because (for my purposes) I really only want to have 3 or 4 combinations, as this makes the dance easier to learn.

In statistics, there is a term, “degrees of freedom.”  This means that if, for example, you are working with 10 subjects in an experiment, when you choose the first subject to study, there are 10 choices (or degrees of freedom).  When you choose the second subject, you now have 9 degrees of freedom, and so on.  When you get to the 10^th subject, you have no other choice, so “degrees of freedom” is defined mathematically as n (the number, in this case 10) minus 1.

I found this concept fascinating, especially because I was considering it from an adult perspective rather than the teenage/young adult point of view I had when I first learned about it.

When I am going down a certain path, whether it is a personal or professional issue, I try to make the best “right” decision, moment-to-moment.  It’s like, “OK, what’s the next right step NOW?”  I used to (and it’s a hard habit to break) try to look ahead and make decisions based on what I imagined was going to happen.  It didn’t work well.

I find that we do have degrees of freedom in our lives.  We make one decision, and then take the next step and the next until finally there is a point at which there is only one decision, one door, to choose.  When enabling a person we love, we choose every step to “help” – but sometimes those steps are not helpful.  Yet we try them again and again because we can’t bear to choose that last degree of freedom.  It’s too scary.  So instead of going forward, we go backward or in circles. In the end, though, we are faced with that last degree.  There’s one choice left.  So we close our eyes, take a deep breath, and choose that last degree of freedom because nothing else has worked.  

There is a strange comfort when we are finally faced with that one choice, the extreme, the one we swore we’d never do.  But when it’s the only one left, we just have to take the leap.

What I’ve found is that, even though that final degree is the scary one, every step I took that I felt was right led to this final one.  And this final choice, no matter how hard, has produced results that I thought I would never see.  It was worth it.  It put me and those I love on another, better path.

I am forever grateful to this process.

What is your final degree of freedom?  When you get to your n-1, it can set you free.