Photo by Ahmad Odeh on Unsplash
unpolished thoughts 3/16/2019
Last night, I took my worries out dancing.
I didn’t forget so much as I exorcised them.
What is a worry after all, but a feeling of bodily discomfort, an internal itch that can’t be scratched?
But how can you worry when you’re only concern is what your body is doing in this exact moment? If you give your full attention to your movement, you’ll be able to scratch that itch after all.
The dance floor was crowded and the energy was already high before I arrived. But I felt no hurry to dive into the boiling cauldron. I skidded around the edges, letting the heat slowly warm my skin, moving more slowly than the pounding rhythms, just soaking it in.
I was particular curious about the skin on the bottom of my feet and how my heel could move inside that envelope, gripping the floor in different ways. As I sank into the sensations, I discovered the way that my heels don’t just live on the floor, but also inside my hip joints.
I leaned with my head, swinging my pelvis for balance and gripping the floor with the skin of the soles of my feet which stretched away from my rolling heels. My legs had no weight.
In this moment, there was only this moment.
The to do list wasn’t forgotten, it was obliterated. There was nothing to do except move my body, soaking in the rhythms and the faces of sweat-soaked dancers all around me.
In a moment like this you can feel your power because it isn’t sliced up into twenty different agendas and it isn’t interested in pleasing anyone else. It rises up inside you and reminds you that you don’t have to spend so much time doubting what’s possible.
When you drop everything that gets in the way of feeling completely alive, everything is possible.
So, what will you do then?
As I drained out the excess thinking from my body and more fully joined my pulses to the room, I began to surrender more and more control. Aliveness does not permit performance for others that brings no pleasure to the self. It is not concerned with external pressures and opinions.
The heels, the hips, and then the head and the heart.
I found the ground in my breastbone and it began to shake. I discovered that my arms were not lead weights, they were the extensions of the wings of my shoulder blades.
My neck knew the rest of my spine and tilted and turned on the column of its support.
Pulsing and pulsing and pulsing and pulsing. Until my jaw became unhinged and my tongue didn’t care who could see. My voice rose up to touch the ceiling.
The back and the front were connected. They were the same thing. Every impulse to move had a quality of reaching simultaneously backwards into support. It was possible to float, fly, or shake in any direction.
Where was the thinking?
It was mostly absent, allowing my brain to breathe, making room for a different intelligence.
Thinking is not what makes us alive. It’s movement that does that.
Movement is an intelligence that can opens us simultaneously to the insides and outsides of ourselves. It feeds and feeds off of environmental energies, and into the interconnected circuitries of the community. It does not thrive on separation.
When we move beyond thinking together, we discover what we are truly capable of. We escape the limitations of the fears that we were historically taught and the loneliness of our minds.
Our worries reveals themselves for what they truly are – injunctions against movement. We learned in grade school, or maybe earlier to carry them around with us:
Think! Don’t move so much! Sit still! Know your place!
What the hell does that mean – ‘know your place?!’
Our place is right here in this world and the only way to know it is to move through it.
I hope we never forget that.
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Does your thinking get in the way of feeling alive?
Do you move to feel what pleases you or in the attempt to please others?
What if you could free your body from your social conditioning in order to feel deeper human connection?
This is what my 2019 online program ¡Reimagine Yourself! is all about:
How to make your movement practice into a vehicle for rewriting the story of how you move through the world.
To learn more about ¡Reimagine Yourself!, click here
To participate in a free Awareness Through Movement class on Thursday March 21 at 2pm EST, click here
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