Body Language

Dance is like life in so many ways.  In every moment there are an infinite number of movements that you choose while dancing.  In life, every moment holds an infinite number of choices about what to see, think or say. 

Dancing is a way of expressing what cannot be said in words.  The body has a language all its own.  Many studies say that 93% of communication is non-verbal.  As Martha Graham said, “The body says what words cannot.”  In fact, words can be limiting.  Once you name something, you’ve taken away a part of its dimension.  You’ve brought it down to Earth rather than letting it be in the realm of no words. 

I was watching an interview with the actor Peter O’Toole.  Talking about his many roles, he said, “The parts chose me.”  He knew instinctively when a part was his and when one wasn’t.  He also said, “Acting makes the words flesh.”   In the Harry Potter books it’s a widely known fact that the wand chooses the wizard.  The wizard then uses the wand to channel and create magic.

This makes me think about the difference between surrendering and allowing.  They are both about letting go and that is powerful, but somehow allowing feels stronger.  Allowing implies the trust that comes with knowing rather than just believing.  Surrender is doing. Allowing is being.    

In class, we use choreography, but even within that framework there are still an infinite number of choices.  Instead of choosing a movement, can we let a movement choose us?  Can we let the feeling and the music take over our bodies and just ride that wave?  Can we then be the movement?

It’s a little scary to give up what seems like control.  But control is an illusion.  Our power lies with our being, not our doing. 

His parts chose Peter O’Toole.  The wand chooses the wizard.  And dance chooses us -- all in order to create magic.    

The question is: can we allow it?

(Thanks to Beth Prins Leas for the Martha Graham quote!) 

Your Center, Part II or Letting Go (Again)

Dance, physically, originates from your core. The emotional experience of dance comes from your truth.  You move from what’s true at your center rather than what “looks good” or what’s extraneous – a process of letting go of what it looks like and dancing what’s true for you. 

You can’t make anyone else dance the way you want them to.  You can only affirm that they dance from their own truth.  Not yours.  You can validate their path, their truth, their way.  You have your own, as everyone does. 

I was thinking about how much letting go is, at least for me, the crux of the process that leads to joy and (dare I say it?) good things happening.  There was a time when I didn’t (couldn’t) answer my phone.  It rang and I was filled with unmanageable anxiety.  Even now the phone rings and I have to remind myself that it’s okay -- I can answer it and not implode.  I’m safe.

 

In reality, I was always safe, I just didn’t know it.  I didn’t realize that I didn’t have to hold my breath to ensure that everyone else could breathe.  I didn’t know that my being a time bomb waiting to be activated wasn’t really helping anyone, especially not me. 

When I realized that worrying and managing and taking Lunesta night after night so I could, please God, get some  $&&^^^*%$%#  sleep was only making me more of a pitiful wreck, I finally let go.  Kicking and screaming, yes, but I did it. 

And everything changed. 

I could breathe.  I could sleep (mostly).  But I had to trust that there was something bigger than me – call it the All That Is, the Higher Self, whatever -- that knew what it was doing and I had to let it be.   I had to get out of the way.  The funny thing is that I never had responsibility for the choices made by the people I love, even though I thought I did. 

All I can do is love them and see them as who they truly are at their core, regardless of how they might be showing up.  They are Light. Love. Joy.  As we all are.

These people I love each found their own path, in their own way.  And it really was (and is) miraculous. 

All the surface stuff is just that: surface.  I had to learn to trust what was true, what was at the core. 

And the truth, as always, is love. 

Your Center, Part I

When you are dancing, you are moving from your center.  In order for the dance to be fully experienced, the movement flows from within you to outside of you.  Sometimes I can get confused and think that this one space on the floor is where the center is, but it isn’t. It might be the center (or the place I begin from), but it’s not my center.   My center is within me, not on the floor.  If I think it’s a space on the floor, I can’t take it with me and I move much differently when I’m focused on a center that is outside myself.  I’m then afraid to let go of that spot and that constricts and narrows my expression.  The boundaries are then too rigid.  And no fun.

When I basically forced marriage counseling on a man I am no longer married to, he was very angry with me as we went to our first appointment.  I felt frightened.  As we sat silently in the waiting room, I picked up a book, The Language of Letting Go, by Melody Beattie. I flipped to a page and read something like, “You know what the truth is.  Do not allow somebody else tell you you’re wrong or crazy.”  This was a good thing for me to read because my whole life, well-meaning people had been telling me that my feelings weren’t valid.  I learned to not trust my gut.  I accepted it because the repercussions of not toeing the line were so scary.  Weirdly, but predictably, I recreated that in this relationship.

In the therapist’s office, when my then-husband was speaking, I was very happy I’d read that passage of the book.  The life he thought we were living together was in a different universe than mine.  But instead of pretending that his perception was mine (which I might have done, so as not to embarrass him or rock an already sinking boat), I was able to say, “I understand that’s how you see it, but this is how I experience our life.”  I now know that he wasn’t lying.  He just saw things differently. (Reason number 323 that we are no longer married or even live in the same country.) Here I had a choice to make another person my center or to realize my center is within me. 

We all have to go to our core to find our truth, no matter who does or does not share that truth. 

Coming from your truth expands your boundaries and your field of expression.

And the best thing is it is always with you.  You don’t have to go anywhere.  Your truth lives in your center.

Dance from there.

Clown's Credo

In this blog I often write about serious situations.  But I was thinking the other night, as I watched an old sitcom, that allowing ourselves to be dorky and silly is important too.  To be able to feel the joy of dance without regard to what it looks like, to be able to let go and allow ourselves to expose what’s underneath—serious or silly—is a healing experience.  To be irreverent, yet loving, to be joyful yet aware of the realities of life, to be in the moment and unafraid of what we might be revealing to others -- that’s what dance is, that’s what life is.  

Certainly I have learned, and my life has been enriched by what I take from dance and from what dance gives me;  by what the people I dance with, and the people that I love, give me;  and by what I give, too. 

Sometimes, though, all that’s needed is a little laughter. 

So here’s a quote I was reminded of, in that old sitcom that I used to watch as a teenager and that still makes me laugh 39 years later -- the Clown’s Credo:

“A little song,

A little dance,

A little seltzer down your pants.”

~ Chuckles the Clown.

Dance happy.

In Sync

In a dance class, once the class starts moving, people are not only moving in sync -- they start to breathe and vocalize in synchrony.  It’s like the phenomenon when you place two metronomes in a room clicking at different speeds.  In a while, they will sync up and click in the same rhythm.  That happens with people, too.  Women who live in close proximity start to have their monthly cycles in the same rhythm.  Sometimes I look around the class and many people are wearing the same color.  If I had art-directed the class, I wouldn’t have been able to do it better.  That could be a coincidence.  Maybe not.

We all become more “one” when we are dancing together.  It’s just a fact of vibration on planet Earth.

Sometimes it happens that a dance class is crowded.  Some people are okay with this and others are not.   People tend to have their own spots where they like to dance.  When the class gets crowded, clients can sometimes start to get fearful that there won’t be enough room for them to enjoy the experience.

Well, it’s understandable!  Dance is precious to us and we don’t want to miss a moment!

However, if everyone would let go of the fear and embrace the love (the dance) and realize that everyone is there for (more or less) similar reasons, everyone would feel they have enough room.   Because of the synchrony, if you let go of being afraid of someone encroaching on your space, you will have more room to move.  That seems paradoxical, but if everyone relaxes, synchrony will happen with personal space on the dance floor, too.

This reminds me of times when I really felt I was RIGHT, in some dispute or other.  And I was going to hold onto that because it felt so good to be RIGHT. And even better for the other person to be WRONG -- (not something I’m used to). 

But holding on to my RIGHTNESS like grim death, really was that—grim death.  It didn’t get me anywhere I wanted to be.  It’s like that old saying, “Would you rather be right or would you rather be happy?” 

It’s the same with holding on too tight to your dance space, your opinion, or your RIGHTNESS; rigidity gets you nowhere you really want to be.  It is based on fear.

When we soften and allow flexibility, when we can make room for someone else, it is based on love.

 In that place, we can breathe better and -- more importantly -- dance happier.

Cracking the Code

I’ve had a lot of music that I love “in the queue” for years that I just can’t use as the basis of a dance routine.  There are some codes I just can’t crack.  Even if I keep trying and come up with something, I usually don’t like it.  I’m trying to make something out of nothing.  For me, anyway, some songs remain unusable, no matter how much I love them.

Recently, a dear friend of mine who is trying to take care of an elderly parent went through a process that I recognized because it was so similar to my own.

My friend’s dad was always, and remains (duh) very difficult.  Somehow we always feel that if we try one more thing — a new doctor, a new medication, a new place to live – the people we love might finally “get it” and change.  My friend acquiesced to every request.  He really knocked himself out.  We were trying to say to him, “Stop!  Your dad is not going to be any different, no matter what you do!”  But he just kept thinking, “Okay, this will be the last thing.”  “No.  Okay, this will be the last thing.”  Then he hit the wall.

This is so similar to when people kept pointing out to me that I was an enabler.  I had to do what I had to do until I realized that there was no filling an empty bucket with a hole in it.  I couldn’t fix my “bucket” and neither could my friend.

He and I had to finally let go.  We both had to understand that there are some codes that just can’t be cracked.  There are people who can’t change, no matter how much we think we can love them into it. 

In this case, letting go doesn’t mean not loving.  It means accepting and loving anyway.

You can love the song and not be able to dance to it the way you want to.

But you still love the song.

You Know

Any time you are moving to music, to a beat, to a rhythm in your own head, you are dancing. Don’t ever let anyone tell you what dance is.  You know.  You can try and try to BE a dancer, and find that it somehow eludes you, so you are never “there.”  In fact, chasing something, by definition, means that it is running away from you.  But if you decide that you are a dancer right now, every time you dance, you are a dancer getting better and more proficient. 

You already are what you seek to be.  You just didn’t know it.

One of my favorite movies is Galaxy Quest. It’s about washed up television actors who were in a cult series (like Star Trek).  Alien beings had seen transmissions of the show and thought it was real.  As the plot unfolds, the aliens ask the actors for help in another galaxy, and the actors, because they “act as if” they are heroes, become heroes.  They already were the parts that they were acting, they just didn’t know it.  They didn’t have to pursue heroism; it was there inside them waiting to be uncovered.  

In the book, Dying to Be Me, Anita Moorjani, talks a lot about “allowing.”  This is the idea that we already are everything we want to be, because the tapestry of life has already been woven.  (We move through time; time doesn’t move through us -- just as quantum physics has shown.)  Since everything is already, we don’t have to search or seek, we only have to allow.  And allowing is about just being.  Being the truth of who you are and trusting that.  No one else can tell you what course you’re supposed to be on, who you’re supposed to be, or what you’re supposed to do. 

I spent a large part of my life being what others thought I should be.  I didn’t trust myself.  I figured these others must know something I didn’t.  They seemed so sure.  So I thought I’d better listen.  Well, although they had the best intentions, they were still wrong. 

Trust that you know, in the deepest part of yourself, who you are. 

You already are who you seek to be; you (maybe) just don’t know it yet. 

So instead of doing, we can decide to be.  Instead of believing, we can know.    Instead of seeking, we can allow.

The path begins and ends right where you are.