How This Whole Movement Thing Began
Moving easily across the floor, forty-five years later, I could still feel the essence of that glow. What a gift that day was.
A brief break from poetry, to talk about another creative stream in my life—sacred movement.
Out on the dance studio floor last Sunday, letting the music open me up in that familiar way, I found myself pulled back to the moment dance became a gateway to something much bigger for me. Our movement facilitator, Lynne Herbert, holds space for all who venture onto the floor on Sundays, inviting us to allow whatever needs to show up to arrive in full splendor. I guess that morning, that studio was the right place to revisit my experience.
As I started to look within, I saw the brightness of that day in my teens. It was in its otherworldly state, the way things looked after I’d accidentally altered my consciousness through movement. There had been pain that day too, of course. But by then, the pain was all gone.
I don’t like to admit it, but my body usually hurts, if only just a little, since I was young. Truth be told, if I gave up sugar and food from the nightshade family, as I did for several years in my twenties, I would feel perfectly fine. Still working on that one. The effects of a case of serum sickness (an immune reaction to some bad medicine) impacted me and a cohort of kids back in the ’70s. I didn’t really realize everyone’s body didn’t feel like mine, so I learned to push through it—which usually worked. Except on really cold days like that one.
I was, of course, underdressed for tromping through snow and skating across ice to get to high school. Many parents will recognize my teenage propensity to pretend I wasn’t frozen to the bone as I headed off wearing something that looked cool but was completely oblivious to the weather. I think I had a trench coat over a T-shirt, over torn jeans, topped off with Chuck Taylors. Too cool for the cold.
My joints were starting to feel like molasses as I worked my way across the ice. Instinctively, I leaned into my ballet training. If I could flow from the street up onto the sidewalk, it hurt less. Anticipating small heaps of crusty snow, I landed toe-ball-heel, extending a pointed toe to the next drift coming my way. I was really starting to enjoy myself. Not a choreographed masterpiece—more like dance turning me into a river of body that could flow over everything. I squeezed every bit of momentum out of each step, every gesture, paying it forward to pull me like satin over the rough terrain.
Before I knew it I was totally high. Not only did my joints not hurt, I actually felt pleasure moving through me like warm soothing honey. The brightness of the day took on an etheric quality. Scraggly trees and snow topped bushes glowed from within. The world itself had changed, I was walking in a totally new terrain. Somehow the intensity of my focus along with releasing held energy in my joints had brought me into a completely different state of mind.
The world had revealed its true, radiant self. Moving easily across the floor, forty-five years later, I could still feel the essence of that glow. What a gift that day was.
Yes it was pain that led me there, but once I became aware that movement could open up bigger, deeper places, I never forgot. Every style of dance, every martial art I trained in after that day was a way of cultivating a sense of presence in my movement. Everything was a doorway to something bigger.
When I move with Lynne and the others who show up, I feel totally connected to that place of endless possibility, knowing that each step forward I take might lead me to a new movement that transports me away from pain and more deeply into the present moment. I never know what will come up next, but because of my younger self, I’m more than willing to trust.
This morning, I woke up at five a.m. and (after feeding many animals) found my way to the circular canvas mat at the foot of my bed. Its creation was inspired by years of training in Aikido in a dojo with a large circular mat. In graduate school for my arts degree, I made a mini dojo mat. It became the place I used to cultivate combining shamanic journeying with movement, drawing again on that space I discovered so many years ago. The circle I have now is the third incarnation I’ve made over the decades, as I’ve dragged it through the many phases of my life.
This morning, as with so many others, I put on a blindfold and grabbed my rattles. I now know many ways of altering my consciousness through music, percussion, and movement. After only a few moments, my body becomes a gateway as I dance into other worlds. Recently, my helping spirits encouraged me to deepen my experience of the Ocean, dissolving into her currents. It is an experience so sensuous, transcendent, and relieving I really can’t convey it. You have to dance it to know it.
Maybe if my joints hadn’t ached and ballet hadn’t given way to those knee problems, I would have become the dancer I dreamed of becoming as a young man. It took me years to let go of the grief of that loss. But I have known the world in a way that few Westerners are given the chance to know it. I have felt the soul of the Sun pulsing through the conscious, living bodies of a forest. I have flown as many beings into places few humans have ever gone.
This morning, I learned how the Snowy Owl prays.
It’s amazing how those cracks that open up suddenly, unexpectedly, in our lives can lead us straight into the hands of divinity.
Hope to see you on the dance floor soon…