From Where You Are

When you take a dance or strength class (or any class), you have to move from where you are now.  If you try to do something you are not ready to do -- like use a 10lb. weight when you should be starting with 3lbs. -- you compensate in all kinds of ways and don’t really get the benefit of the exercise.  At best, you’ll expend energy without making progress.  You’ll be spinning your wheels.  At worst, you could actually end up hurting yourself.  

On the other hand, if you can accept where you are now, then your progression will be easy and you can enjoy the journey rather than “shoulding” all over yourself. (“I should be able to lift a heavier weight,” I should be able to leap higher,” etc.).

It’s the same in any aspect of life.  Sometimes I think my feelings are just “wrong,” especially if I’m angry or insecure.  These feelings are uncomfortable for me and I usually just deny or bury them altogether.  

Invariably, though, I find that denial, pushing against something rather than allowing it, only causes the feelings to push back or rear up and bite me when I am not looking.

Denial causes me to compensate in all kinds of ways that are not healthy.  Underneath my denial is guilt for having these feelings in the first place.  Then it’s just a big old mess.  I am spinning my wheels and my path gets harder. 

If I can forgo this mental dance, I understand that anything I am feeling is “legitimate” because it is authentic.  The particular emotions at issue may not be pretty, but they are real and should be treated as such.  There are many places in me that need to grow, but I have to go from where I am now.  I can pretend to make a moral, enlightened leap but if I am not truly there yet, I’m going to fall hard.

Accepting my feelings is an act of self-love.  It’s like giving a home to a mangy old dog found unexpectedly on your doorstep.  When I love and accept that dog just as he is, he can transform.  And so can I.  But we still had to start at mangy.  

When our young children are feeling envy or fear, we accept it and let them know that these emotions are a normal part of life.  We love them and let them know their feelings are natural and okay.  Truly, it is how we choose to act in the face of these feelings that matters.  Will we make the decision to be kind to others and ourselves or will we deny our truth and sweep it under the rug – where it only remains to be found later, bigger and uglier than before?

Treat yourself just as you would your beloved child or your dearest friend.  Love yourself enough to accept your uncomfortable feelings and allow yourself to grow from where you are.  

And enjoy the journey.

Photo by MaryEllen Hendricks

What's In Your File?

When I am teaching or learning complex choreography, it helps me to break it up into pieces.  So an eight count can be seen as two groups of four or I can accentuate in my mind the similarities of a combination and use that to organize it in my brain.

When I am successful in shifting my perception of the parts, rather than being overwhelmed by the whole, difficult choreography becomes easier and even friendlier.  It’s friendlier because I have become familiar with it.  I have made a code for myself that I can use to refine my movement.

While I would not describe myself as “organized” -- I am quite comfortable with cheerful disarray -- I find that if I can file and categorize anything in my mind, it’s as though a path has opened itself up to me.  It clears things up and jettisons extraneous information.

The problem is that “filing” something under a certain category and reaching a level of understanding about it does not mean you have any control over it.

In the past, I was “stuck” in an unhealthy relationship.  My friends and loved ones told me all the very good reasons to get out, NOW! And I agreed.  I nodded my head and acknowledged that was the only sane thing to do.  But I couldn’t follow through and leave the relationship until I was ready to believe that I deserved better. And that was something I had to do myself. The problem belonged in a working file because I am the only one who can effect a change in myself.  Some people who loved me imagined that if they just talked to me hard enough and long enough, I would see myself as someone who deserved love.

That change had to come from within me, and yes, I could receive moral support, but that file belonged to me alone.  I had to organize my thoughts and develop a code that I could live by to create a happy life.  When I figured out who I was, and I could understand the bad patterns I had manifested, a new path opened up for me.

Knowing what is in your file and what isn’t (what you can control and what you can’t) is a huge lesson, not only for dealing with self-development but also for interaction with others.  When we can look at troubled loved ones and see that they must own their life as they have created it, we allow those we love to find their own way – and their way is not necessarily ours.

I am not speaking of abandoning a person who is still working on a particular file, but we can mistakenly feel attached to someone else’s decisions, as if we have power to make everything all right.  Instead, we can love, be connected, but drop the attachment.

This is especially true when my friends and I fret about our children. We have to constantly remind each other that they are grown and capable of making their own decisions.  Of course, if we had the power to effect change in others, the world would be perfect – at least from our point of view!

I had to find my own way, and so does everyone I love.

I had to work on my own file – grateful for love, understanding, and support from others, but ultimately still on my own.

What file are you working on?

Photo by MaryEllen Hendricks

Resonance

This word has many shades of meaning.  In dance, I have to resonate with a song before I feel I can choreograph it.  The word is ephemeral because I can only describe my sensation of resonance as a feeling of being moved in some way.  Maybe the song makes me feel happy, maybe it makes me emotional, or maybe it brings up memories that have meaning for me. 

One can resonate with anything:  music, movement, a person, a book... I believe resonance has something to do with vibration.  Music also has vibration and when a class is moving in unison to a song.  There is a resonance that occurs – people vocalize at the same time, for instance, because breathing naturally synchronizes with movement.  

We gravitate to certain people because we sense their vibration is like our own.  People we don’t resonate with are not at a “lower” or “higher” vibration – just a different one.  At our core, we are all the same. 

And even though we feel resonance with others, we all have our own way of “vibrating,” whether it’s to music or to life.  I like the expression written by Tosha Silver in her book Outrageous Openness: “Go through life with an open hand.  Let what wants to come, come and what wants to go, go.”  We can use that open hand to navigate our lives or to “smack” ourselves or others.  It’s our choice.  

But when we give up the struggle of holding onto something or someone that no longer resonates with us, life becomes happier and freer.  We are in the flow and receptive to new adventures.  We have opened the space for whatever new vibration resonates with us to come to us.  

What does an open hand mean to you?  Letting go or a good smack upside the head?  That smack could make you remember to just let go.  

You get to decide. 

Photo by MaryEllen Hendricks

Small things, Big Picture

When working on choreography, I look at the basic elements of the song (like the number of beats per phrase), but I also have to step back and look at the song as a whole (such as, how many times the chorus repeats before the bridge comes in).  There are an infinite number of movement choices in every musical phrase.  I choose which ones to make “real” when I create choreography.  In life, every moment presents an infinite number of response (or behavior) choices.  What we choose to do and say is what becomes “real.”  Additionally, what we choose to look at dictates our state of mind and affects how we experience our lives.

In life, we can often get stuck, focused on small things that just do not matter in the context of the bigger picture.  I’ve found that when a person is mad about a particular situation, getting stuck on something small is a symptom of anxiety rather than a rational response to a problem.  This hyper-focus is born of anger and narrows the array of possible choices.  What is being made “real” is the person’s fear.  It never ends well. 

When I was much younger and getting a divorce, I left my wedding dress at the house I was living in with my then-husband.  I had a crazy grandmother who was living with my mother at the time.  She was enraged because instead of coming home to them, I chose to live at a friend’s house.  Every day, my grandmother would call and badger me about retrieving my wedding dress.  Apparently, she felt it was imperative and had to be done NOW.  Of course, that was the least of my worries as I was very sad over the break-up of my marriage and didn’t care if I ever saw that dress again.  But my grandmother would just not let go.  She ended up getting the dress from my soon-to-be-ex-husband and took it to a dry cleaner to be “preserved.” 

Can I take a break here and just stand to the side, look at the larger picture, and ask you, “Crazy?! Right?!?”

Anyway, she ended up getting into a HUGE fight with the dry cleaner over the dress.  It didn’t help anyone and it certainly didn’t make me feel better.  To this day, I don’t know what happened to that dress. My grandmother was certain that either the dry cleaner stole it or my ex-husband was wearing it all over town – I don’t know what story she told herself.  The point is, in the larger picture it wasn’t about the dress.  It was about her rage at not being in control and how (once again) I’d proven my inadequacy as a granddaughter and human being.

On the other hand, focusing on the small things can get you through a tough time by consciously putting one foot in front of the other.  This is a very different kind of focus.  It’s one of openness to new ways of seeing situations and experiences.  It has to do with staying in the now.  The options one has in this case widen because the focus is on asking, “What’s the next right thing to do?”  This hopefully springs from love of oneself and trust that we will know “the next right thing.”  When you put a lot of “right things” together, you get one really big, good thing.  

In the context of dance, small movements sometimes set up the momentum for the bigger dramatic sequences.  It’s like a build-up before the leap.  In life, every step we make is creating the big picture of our lives and a build-up for the next leap.

We have no idea what the big picture is going to look like. We just have to go phrase by phrase, beat by beat, and trust that if every step is an expression of our heart’s truth, it will bring us to a beautiful song – or a big picture we are thrilled to see.

Photo by MaryEllen Hendricks

Cheerful Disarray

After a good, sweaty dance class, endorphins are always running rampant.  In this state, it’s like being a little high or cheerfully disarrayed.  You can just blurt stuff that maybe you might think twice about saying at another time.  

We have to get messy sometimes and remember to give up what we believe something should look like.   A little disorder, I think, is often good.  I like to refer to the state of my home as “cheerful disarray.”  No, I am not a hoarder, but I am not averse to a little randomness in the placement of objects.  I am not a firm believer that “everything has its place.”

After class one day as I was kissing a friend goodbye, she said, “Ugh, watch it!  I am so sweaty!”  I blurted, “Good! If you’re not sweaty and a little messy, it probably wasn’t a good class – just like sex!”  And it occurred to me that after a dance class or at the end of a sexual encounter, if every hair is in place and you have not broken a sweat, if your heart isn’t beating a little faster, if the world doesn’t look a little brighter, it probably was not such a great experience. 

If you don’t approach dance (or sex) with abandon, being truly yourself, at the end of it all there may be something lacking.  It may be fun, but not completely and wholly satisfying.

A good dance class is like good sex – it makes you a little messy.  In a positive sense, you can get lost in it, expressing yourself without words.  Your body is saying it all, in your own unique way.  And that is a beautiful thing.

When we move from within, even though the result can be messy, it is authentic and life-affirming.  

Let’s embrace our cheerful disarray and remember that when we are expressing our authenticity, we are at our most powerful. 

Photo by MaryEllen Hendricks