Category Archives: Dancemeditation

Blood, Guts, & a Bottle of Bordeaux

Posted on September 6, 2012 | 4 Comments

Last night, over a warming meal and a shared bottle of Bordeaux plus two extra glasses…  ahem… I told one of my dearest friends my renewed and slightly terrifying plan.

For one year I am going to budget hard (so not a whole lotta Bordeaux) and write full time.  I’m not going to focus on building a little herbal empire.  I’m not going to finely craft a business plan for anything except becoming a paid writer, which means that I will also need to submit my writing places on a regular basis.

I’ve been writing every day for many years now, but I often write from my nice, relatively safe, mile-a-minute mind.

My mind isn’t the best writer.  My heart’s much better, but she’s fickle.  She likes poems, and plays, and sometimes stories, personal essays, and longer works of fiction.

“7 Ways to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Bomb… in bullet points!” is not writing from my heart.  Thus far, anyway.

Because I can right now, and because I don’t know when the opportunity will come again, my primary job for the next 365 days will be to write from my heart, spirit, and soul.

Things could change. Things always do.  I might have a child.  I might have to take care of someone in my family.  I might not have the financial ability to live thriftily and spend the vast percentage of my time making art.

Maybe it isn’t wise to take this risk, I tell myself.  Maybe I should continue to build my herbal business and spend my extra energy writing instead of the other way around… but I can’t stop myself anymore from taking this risk.  I can’t and I won’t.  I’ve learned the hard way that once my spirit and soul truly decide something my ego has to go along for the ride.  Just ask my ex or the restaurant managers of my last ‘real’ job.

My wise friend had two suggestions for me:  1.  Stick to the budget.  (I could get lucky, but it isn’t smart to assume that I will be… although I am going to plan to be lucky)

2.  Find a supportive community.  For me this means, among other things, finally going to poetry open mikes again after a hiatus of…. 17 years.

I’ve also added a third piece of my own advice.

3. Move and breathe everyday, preferably in a community of others interested in embodiment.

After returning from an incredible retreat with my teacher Dunya and our Dancemeditation community, I’m excited to start this new adventure by participating in the ’90 Day Self-Directed Intergalactic Dance Party’ hosted and conceived by delectable dancer, Dancemeditator and writer Alia Thabit.  I’ll be improv dancing for at least 20 minutes every day, focusing on my breath and the beat, and I’ve added my own additional prompt of writing whatever wants to come out in poetic form for at least 20 min. a day. (Notice I didn’t say poem-a-day… but writing in poetic form for a minimum of 20 minutes a day… and maybe, as time goes on, I’ll give myself a maximum number of minutes also).

I think that this, along with regular doses of magic, synchronicity, travel, nature connection, art inspirations and mentoring/ learning from kids in my community garden should keep ‘the channel open’ as Martha Graham might say.

 

This thing I’ve told myself I’ve wanted for so long is now possible, and that possibility is a little terrifying.

I’m deeply grateful to my precious handful of supporters, all creative geniuses, who read this blog… I know that I’m going to need this space in the year to come to feel connected to the outside world as I keep climbing and falling down that rabbit hole, into the sea of tears and out beyond with nary a glass of wine  and just a little cup of oatstraw tea…

Diving in. Photo by Nathalie Molina

 

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Posted in creativity, dance, Dancemeditation, Healing, writing process

Finding Gratitude

Posted on August 30, 2012 | 1 Comment

I feel grateful to be alive.    This gratitude lives in an underground stream that runs through the center of my blood.  It must always be there, but I haven’t always been able to feel it.

This feeling of gratitude is gentle.  There’s no sweeping symphony accompanying it.  My inner music is just birdsong and wind, and here on New York’s Lower East Side that’s punctuated by the sounds of rattling bike chains, car horns, brakes, engines, and the incessant river of the human voice.

I’ve recently returned from 13 days of Sufi Dancemeditation with my teacher Dunya and our community outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico on a ranch full of jack rabbits and singing coyotes, silent snakes and air infused with the scent of juniper after rain.

After that I had 2 ½ days with Lilly Allen’s Be Present community in here in Manhattan.

During these 15 ½ days I had the opportunity to immerse myself in the world of my body, spirit, and soul, and to feel nurtured in the company of many wise women in both communities who’ve been doing inner spirit work for over thirty years.

With Dancemeditation I was given the enormous gift of time immersed in spirit and the body.  With Be Present I was given the gift of the container to listen with immense presence to other people’s most tender realities, as well as the time to share my own from a very open state.

I feel full.

I want to write.

I lie in a claw-foot bathtub and stare for hours at the changing light. My thoughts are fast.  Dreams and visions.  Forgiveness.  Heartaches.  Ancestral memories.  There are psychic openings followed by blessed blank white space.  My heart contracts and expands.

Space has been created inside me.

I can see and feel so far below the surface, and that’s where my gratitude lives.

photo by Ann Paquin

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Posted in creativity, Dancemeditation, Healing, nature, writing process

The Alchemical Power of Bitterness

Posted on May 21, 2012 | 6 Comments

Loss catches me rushing.  It puts metal clamps on my legs and forces me to sit with my sadness.  As I write this I’m sipping rooibos tea and watching the long fingers of the sun stretch across a busy intersection just before sunset in an outdoor cafe.  My heart is heavy thinking about the recent passing of a beautiful woman I knew through our shared spiritual work, our Dancemeditation and Sufi practice.

When we were on a retreat together two summers ago, she asked me to show her a pool of shimmering water that some of us had found underneath a high waterfall in the middle of a forest near where we were staying in upstate New York.  We slowly hiked into the forest together on our afternoon break between day and evening meditation.  We were barefoot, not speaking much, noticing the plumes of mist rising between the trees in shafts of sunlight after a night of rain.

The waterfall was writhing with life after the storm, frothing down the cliff-face and churning into a wide pool in front of us.

We stripped off our clothes and dove in, emerging to float on our backs, comfortably silent, just being with the water flowing over us and buoying us as the sound of the falls laughed and sang in our ears.

As we dried off in the sun, my friend talked about wanting to bring her children there, how her radiation was going, how much she enjoyed being in her body.

The passing of her vibrant, loving spirit gives me my sense of gratitude  back, places it gently in my heart, a gift.

I remember to appreciate all of life.  The gorgeous spring sky is easy.  But the appreciation needs to extend beyond that, to the transformative potential of my sadness, my anger, my fear, the times when I feel frantic and anxious.

Bitter is one of the tastes that the Western palate doesn’t often utilize in our food.  In the West we prefer sweet.  We adore sweet.   And yet we need bitter.  Bitters help to nourish our livers.  They help our systems of elimination.  They help us to live.  Bitter roots such as dandelion help to ground us.  The bitterness in chocolate gives it character.

Without the gifts of sadness, of anger, of fear, I can’t empathize.  I can’t fully differentiate the thrill of joy when it comes.  I can’t revel in the experience of overcoming obstacles.

Bitter is a taste that can be acquired, like anything else.  I cultivate my appreciation of the bitter aspects of life through writing, through reaching out to others in need, through the healing miracles of great art.

Today I’m remembering to enjoy the bitter as well as the sweet.  I’m remembering how to see beauty in what feels like struggle, to savor it as though I were always plunged into the pool of a waterfall, shimmering and pulsing with precious life in all of it’s complexity.

 

What I do to honor bitterness in my life:

A little ritual/ an excellent spring herbal tonic:

Boil a pot of water.

Toss in a large handful of some bitter roots.

Dandelion, burdock, and yellowdock would be perfect.

Celery seed and sage would be good choices too.

Inhale the bitter flavors.

Think about your most challenging emotions or situations.

Imagine the bitter herbs grounding you, giving you strength and clarity.

Allow yourself to be present to any fear, anger, or frustration that you feel.

Cover the pot.  Let the herbs and your thoughts simmer.  Write them down if you like.

After ten minutes or so strain the tea and drink it, imagining the herbs helping you to feel grounded, calm, clear, grateful, and present to whatever comes.

I often do little rituals like this one.  Would you like me to share them here on the blog from time to time?

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Posted in Dancemeditation, Healing, herbs, nature

The prayer we all know

Posted on June 9, 2011 | 2 Comments

Yesterday I practiced that basic prayer, the one we all know: ‘Help!’ said to thin air.  A neighbor has been calling the fire department every time she sees anything on our building’s fire escape.  Someone threw a rag out the window last week and it landed on the iron grille.  She called.  They came.  She has a vendetta against my mild-mannered superintendent, and when she passed me in the lobby last week she told me in hushed tones that she can get to him this way.

Yesterday morning, as I excitedly sat down to a day of uninterrupted writing with another volunteer manning the Children’s Magical Garden, (the community garden I run) no daytime appointments, and all my chores completed… the buzzer rang.

A very kind fire fighter explained that while it was ridiculous, the neighbor keeps calling and though they deemed it to be fine last week, I had to take my window-box inside, even though only about 2 inches of it touched the fire escape.

For years this tiny, 6 inch by 3 foot wide space has been my only private garden,  a scrap of growing life that’s just for me.  Recently I planted snap dragons, zinnias, and bush basil.  They most likely won’t survive on my sill without those extra hours of sun, but we’ll see.

It was  a brutally hot day and I’m fiery so this situation produced, to put it delicately, thoughts of the ‘Kill Bill’ variety, the Akira Kurasowa ‘Throne of Blood’ variety…  (Come to think of it, I could have eaten a snapdragon flower.  The essence is specific for this state.)

Snapdragon flower essence is great for fiery types who can go off at the mouth and tend to have jaw tension. I'd love to see snapdragon triage stations all over NYC in the summertime!

How to prevent the rage from taking over?  My Dancemeditiation practice transforms emotions, but I was too angry to try it.  I was too angry to pray.  I sat at my computer and said aloud, ‘help!’  Then I walked away and started straightening the house.  If I can’t be happy, at least I can have clean dishes and a made bed.

Something pulled me back to the computer about ten minutes later.  I had been sent a video poem by poet/herbalist Ekere Tallie.  And it was, as my poet/ herbalist grandmother would say, a hushing miracle.  My heart opened without any forcing, like a zinnia in the sun.  I wish the same for my neighbor too.

You can watch/ listen to Ekere’s poem here: Roots by Ekere Tallie

How do you recenter yourself after something has enraged you? Do you ask for help?

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Posted in Dancemeditation, gardening, Healing, herbs, poetry, writing process

What works for you? 13 things to get your creativity flowing

Posted on March 5, 2011 | 3 Comments

Someday I want to write a self-help book called What Works for Me. After we are adequately clothed, sheltered, fed, and protected from violence what helps us to flourish is slightly to very different for each person, with obvious commonalities.

Recently I’ve been experiencing some stuff that feels hard.  I’m aware (thankfully) that if you’re measuring my hard up against the whole of human experience I’m actually lying on-top of a light and fluffy lemon souffle.  But knowing this doesn’t stop me from occasionally feeling like I’m buried under a mountain of sucked-dry olive pits.  And its the butt end of winter and the garden’s a mess and… there are so many things I don’t want to think about.

When there are things I don’t want to think about it blocks up my creative life.  It certainly blocks up my writing.  There are ways of unblocking.  I know what mine are, even when I don’t do them.  Writing them in list form helps me to remember them.

Here they are:

  1. Journaling for a set period of time each day on those things I don’t want to think about.  Writing without stopping is the best way to go about it. Just getting down all of those first thoughts a la Natalie Goldberg’s brilliant Writing Down the Bones.
  2. Collaging or any form of visual art that I find fun without caring about the outcome
  3. Anything combining movement, rhythm and music– the more engaging, the better.  For me this is usually Dancemeditation practice, Flamenco, or Funk.
  4. Water– showers or even better herbal baths or if I’m very lucky swimming in the ocean.
  5. Sleep– lots of it
  6. Good sex
  7. Laughing with friends and loved ones (even if it feels forced/difficult)
  8. Time spent in nature
  9. Adventures
  10. Reading poetry or spiritual texts
  11. prayer/chanting/recitation
  12. Experiments– any and all kinds
  13. Inspiring conversations

Traps:  i.e. what I wish would help me because its generally what I think I want to do when I’m stuck, but never actually helps and sometimes-to-often makes it worse.  Jennifer Louden calls these ‘shadow pleasures’.  Writing them down in a list helps me to avoid them.  I’m not judging these activities in and of themselves, mind you– not confessing my sins.  Its just that when I do them in an avoidance pattern they are unhelpful.

  1. Trolling around on the computer
  2. Reading escapist fiction
  3. Cleaning beyond the basics of daily maintenance  (This seems like it would help, but in my experience it sadly does not.)
  4. Shopping
  5. Eating mindlessly
  6. Worrying (as Clarissa Pinkola Estes says, worrying is like praying for what you don’t want to happen.)

So now I have my lists along with my newest experiment– seeing if they get me out of my latest stuck– and maybe someone else too… Want to play?  I know there are hundreds of different lists out there that are all inspiring…

What are some of the things that work for you when you’re stuck?  What are your traps?

 


 

 

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Posted in creativity, dance, Dancemeditation, music, nature, theater, writing process

flight paths of healing

Posted on August 5, 2010 | 3 Comments

I’m eleven.  I’m waiting for my mom outside of a nail salon in one of those cell block strip malls.  It’s a hot day, but I can’t stand the salon’s muzak or its chemical smell, so I’m sitting on the curb starring into the parking lot, sweat dripping down my back.

I hear a frantic squawking noise and notice a little brown finch caught in a viscus tar-like substance poured in a black line between two cement slabs. The finch’s feathers are becoming covered in black gunk as she frenetically flaps her stuck wings while the tar hardens.  I kneel down, and as slowly and gently as I can, lift her up and out.

The finch is completely still in my hands.  Then she trembles for a few minutes before suddenly flying away.  In the car on the way home I tell my mom, who nods.

For years I couldn’t understand why this memory is so important to me.

Recently I was re-reading Peter Levine’s book Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma.  The book compares the way that humans handle trauma with other animals, using research from the field of neuroscience and psychological case studies to explain how trauma stays in our bodies, not just our brains, and so we need to move in order to heal.

The first phase of trauma, where we feel frozen, is an involuntary physical response that takes its time, and is then overcome by movement.  Human cultures often view the immobility phase as a sign of weakness, and so are unsupportive to people experiencing it, who internalize this feeling.

There is an immense amount of energy that needs to move through the body afterward, which also often has no good outlet.  We can get stuck in the frozen feeling, reliving the trauma again and again.   If we are allowed to let the energy move through our systems, we begin to heal.

I came across this passage in the book:

“A bird that crashes into a window, mistaking it for open sky, will appear stunned or even dead.  A child who sees the bird’s collision may pick up the bird out of curiosity… or a desire to help.  The warmth of the child’s hands can facilitate the bird’s return to normal functioning.  As the bird begins to tremble, it will show signs that it is reorienting to its surroundings… If the bird is not injured and is allowed to go through the trembling-reorienting process without interruption it can move through its immobilization and fly away.”

The bird was me.  In all those years of feeling stuck and thrashing in the tar, some part of me knew that if I could just feel the warmth of someone’s hands (being witnessed) and tremble it out (dance and move), I could fly.

We know the flight paths of our own healing.  The maps are always inside, and there are always clues to find them. 


This is an excellent interview on the related topic of PTSD, creativity, and healing.  Thanks gorgeous healer Shamsi for the link!



photo by Dean Borcherds. You can buy a print here.

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Posted in Dancemeditation, Healing

The more I dance the more I write

Posted on July 31, 2010 | 9 Comments
If I could shimmy like my sister Kate

Shake it like jelly on a plate

My mama wanted to know last night

How sister Kate could do it oh so nice

Now, all the boys in the neighborhood

Knew Kate could shimmy, and it’s mighty good

I may be late but I’ll be up to date

When I can shimmy like my sister Kate.

I mean, shake it like my sister Kate.

Those were the lyrics to my first ecstatic dance.  My dad played blues guitar and sang, and I’d shake and shimmy just as fast and furiously as my little three-year-old booty could across the ice blue carpet of our Florida living room. By the end of a jam session I’d usually ripped off most of my clothes and whirled around and around, my eyes streaming, to collapse in a heap.  This dance had a name.  I called it the widdy-waddy dance.

Since I was clearly not such a ballet type, my mother took me to tap class.  I loved the tah-TAH sounds my shiny Mary Janes made the first time I put them on, and hated the thick white tights that slid down my hips to create an unpleasant basket effect around my crotch during class as the instructor’s grating voice shouted, “shuffle ball change, shuffle ball change”.  I crumpled.  We didn’t go back.

The funny thing about the shadow, all those parts of ourselves we aren’t comfortable acknowledging, is that we leave our love and passion in the dark as often as we leave our fear and anger.  As Rilke says, “the darkness pulls in everything.”

After that one tap class I decided that I had a secret.  My way of dancing wasn’t o.k. with the rest of the world, so I needed to hide it.  The surest way to hide something is to bury it someplace where you can’t even find it yourself, like a squirrel with an acorn.  That’s what I did.  I told myself I wasn’t interested in dance.  I didn’t even like watching it very much.  I would still dance around alone in my room, but that didn’t count.  That was silliness.  It wasn’t dance.  When I danced in the theater, that was acting.  It wasn’t dance.

The acorn stayed buried until I started developing my intuition during a terrible period of writer’s block.

The conversation with myself went something like this:

          “I HAVE to get out of this block.  What can I do?  WHAT?”
           “You are a dancer.  Dance.”
           “What?  I’m not.”
           “Yes you are.“
           “Sure you don’t mean that dance will shake me loose– that’s all?”
           “No.  You are a dancer.  It is a part of who you are.  Find it.“
           “Really?  If I’m a dancer I’ll be able to be a writer?”
           “Yes.”

I didn’t have anything to lose. I listened to that voice.

Within six weeks of my first epiphany I’d found my teacher, Dunya McPherson, and Dancemeditation.  I watched her dance and thought, ‘That’s it. I can come out now.  Its safe for me.  She’s such an amazing dancer, and… she’s doing the widdy-waddy dance!  She’s moving just how her body wants to move.’  I went on her website and fell in love with her writing too.  Clearly perfect.

The writer’s block took time to fully melt away; maybe a year of furious dancing within the healing context of Dancemeditation with its focus on awareness and respect for the body’s innate intelligence.

When the block finally melted I thought, ‘Well, maybe I got what I needed and now I can stop.’  But of course its not like that.  The more I deepen into dance, the more my writing deepens, the more I deepen.  The body is a doorway to reality beyond the personality, the ego, which can hold us all hostage.  It was my ego telling me I couldn’t, shouldn’t write.  My ego was telling me to stay small, safe, and to avoid criticism at all cost.

I’m often scared.   Dance is an art form that takes many years and hours to begin to master.  It isn’t about steps, its about learning how to move the body with more and more articulation and awareness.  Five years and eighty days to earn my Dancemeditation teacher training certificate and I’m still near the beginning of that journey.  The exciting part is that like studying nature, studying the body from the inside out is also a life’s work.

At its core my dance feels strong. The widdy-waddy dance is intact.  Its unfolding with greater variation every time I have an opportunity to learn technique, to discover more ways to move, different ways of seeing, feeling, of being in the world.

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Posted in dance, Dancemeditation, writing process

Learning to Give from the Overflow, not from the Well

Posted on April 26, 2010 | 9 Comments

There is a wise Sufi saying, ‘Give from your overflow, not from your well.’  I interpret this as meaning give from a place of love, joy, and abundance, not suffering and self-deprivation.

Today in New York City its a rainy Moonday, which feels good.  Its like a snow day for gardeners.  I’m taking some time for myself after spending a large portion of the last two weeks working on a massive volunteer project.  I’m the director of a kid’s community garden on the Lower East Side called the Children’s Magical Garden.**

 Kids love worms. They get super excited whenever they find one.

Kids, teachers from the School for Global Leaders across the street from the garden, parents, other garden members and I have been putting in a rain garden, a small native wetlands that soaks up the water in the garden’s lowest point.  When the plants have grown up some, it will not only look like a wild, beautiful place, but will also create habitat for more song birds, humming birds, bees, dragonflies, and butterflies… increasing the wildness in the city by just a little bit, and providing an amazing outdoor classroom for kids and adults alike. 

All of this warms the cockles of my heart and so I haven’t minded all the hard work, even though it has involved digging three feet down into ground consisting of broken brick, brick dust, rusted metal and the like.

My hands look, to quote a literary friend, “very Pearl S. Buck” with the ground-in dirt (even after scrubbing) giving them a mottled appearance.  On the upside, I can feel my hands getting stronger and think I would do alright in an arm wrestling contest.

This community garden is one of my greatest spiritual teachers.  Sometimes its lessons have been frikkin hard. 

Its a large unpaid undertaking and has the potential to suck up all available time– very dangerous for an entrepreneur and writer with a penchant for procrastination.  There have also been so many seemingly hostile elements to overcome such as–

  • Toxic soil. (Most NYC soil is poisoned with lead from paint and must be painstakingly amended or replaced with new, healthy compost.) 
  • Endless rubble.  (The garden was build on the foundation of a burned down building and has been sinking into that crushed foundation over the years.)
  • Ignorance.  (Very few people have any gardening experience, and therefore greatly underestimate the challenges the space provides.  They think it is simply a matter of planting flowers and watching them grow.) 
  • Personal conflict/ toxic relationships.  Toxic environments produce toxic relationships.  It has been challenging to say the least to work through personal difficulties with other gardeners.  In the end, however, it has also been deeply rewarding and transformational to all involved.  These transformed relationships have made this next, more productive phase of work/play possible after years of two steps forward, one step back.

What I have strongly come to believe is that service, to be truly effective, must involve the concept of what my Dancemeditation teacher Dunya calls dynamic reciprocity.   This means that the work actually feeds you.  The work leaves you feeling joyful, inspired, re-energized, more creative, more full of juice for your own projects.

Forget selflessness.  For most of us, its a trap.

Dynamic reciprocity goes beyond feeling good because you are “making a difference”.  That attitude of self-righteousness has the potential to slide into its own flip-side, an attitude I’ve felt many a time… martyrdom.  “I’m spending all this time and not getting paid.  My work isn’t appreciated, and yet its now somehow just ‘expected’ of me by the community.  The garden doesn’t look beautiful yet and so people don’t see all the hard work I’ve put in…” blah blah blah.

Then there is “Oh my gosh!  Look at me with my big ego wanting credit!  I’m not selfless enough!  This is about the earth, the children…” blah blah blah martyrdom.

I decided that this year I was going to pull self-righeousness and martyrdom out by the roots and compost them.  I’ve been planting joy and contentment in their place.

I’ve made it a point to focus on activites I adore such as mentoring a small group of local kids I’ve known for years who are committed to the garden and to listening/working with the earth.  I’m learning to better delegate the tasks that I dislike, such as contacting the parks department. (I actually much prefer removing rubble by hand than organizing on the phone.)

I have also reminded myself that it is because of this project that I was sponsored by the community to go to school to become a permaculture designer, something that has dramatically increased my happienss.

The past two weeks I haven’t had as much time to write, but all of the additional physical activity has magically worked out all kinds of kinks in the third draft of my play and first draft of my novel.  My third eye feels very open, and I feel tremendously grounded and focused in my herbal consultations after working so intensely with the earth.  Dynamic reciprocity is happening, and its truly awesome.

For this Moonday, I would as always love it if you have art/poetry etc. to share in the comments, and am also interested in where you have found dynamic reciprocity or rooted out self-righteousness/martyrdom in your own life…

**Children’s Magical Garden website still under construction.  Find lots of pictures of the garden on the facebook group, Children’s Magical Garden Community and Supporters
Thanks to friend, fellow Dancemeditator, and novelist Karleen Koen who first introduced me to the phrase ‘give from your overflow, not from your well’. I’ve been pondering it ever since.

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Posted in Dancemeditation, gardening, nature, permaculture

Moonday Salon– Post your Creative Thoughts

Posted on February 22, 2010 | 5 Comments

This is week 8 of the Moonday Experiment.  A close friend of mine who actually reads my blog was confused by Moonday.  She thought that there was only one Moonday post.  So that means I haven’t been clear enough.  Moonday is my weekly response to Monday.  It is me zapping the “do! do! do! go! go! go! hurry hurry hurry!” chant in my head with a different energy, Moon energy. Its a way for me to honor the intuitive and creative on a day that is known for being all about business.  As I’m an artist who does my level best to do something creative every day, I use Moondays to do something– at least a tiny little something– uninhibited and for sheer love of the thing, without a thought to whether or not its good.

I’ve been encouraging people to participate in the experiment by sharing their creative ideas and outpourings in this supportive space in the comments.  There haven’t been many takers yet, but the ones who have shared something have been incredible and so much fun.

This Moonday I will be dancing at the Metropolitan Building at 7 PM (its free if anyone happens to be reading this and lives in NYC) with Dunya Dianne McPherson’s Dunyati Alembic.  The Alembic is meditative dance, Sufi practices translated for performance.  Our director’s instructions are simple but challenging: relax and breathe.  Our job is to stay inside of our bodies, and not to think ‘is it good, is it bad, do they get it?’  just stay with ourselves and let the dance unfold.  It feels profoundly healing to dance in this way with witnesses, and our hope is that its also deeply relaxing to watch. We’ve gotten some great responses that indicate that it is.

So that fulfills the Moonday quota!  And this completely unedited post does, too.

I’d absolutely adore it if you’d join in.  Post a link to your site with your artwork/videos/poetry/etc.  Share some writing– a thought, a poem– in the comments– it can be a quote that inspires you, too.  Or a link to some art of any kind that inspires your own creative freedom.

That seems to be the theme bubbling up in me today.  Freedom.  Inner Revolution.  So if you like, answer this question:  When do you feel free?  Where are you?  What are you doing?

Happy Moonday!

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Posted in creativity, dance, Dancemeditation

Part of the Human Heart: Celebrating Haiti’s Strength

Posted on January 30, 2010 | 3 Comments

Last night I went to a memorial service/ benefit for Haiti.  It was held at the Integral Yoga Center in Manhattan in a tightly packed meditation room where people sat on pillows on the floor.  It was organized by my dear friend, yoga and Dancemeditation teacher Anita Teresa. 

Anita led the group through a heart opening, expanding meditation and visualization.  It felt like a way to honor the depth of loss, to wrap my mind around a tragedy so huge.

What came up for me is that fully experiencing grief takes some safety, some space.  People in Haiti don’t have that right now. What they do have is strength, and its incredible. 

Another friend, dancer and Dancemeditation practitioner Nisaa Christie, has had questions come up in meditation around what the earth has been going through with the earthquake and aftershocks.

Anita invited her to dance.  She let her body lead her through an experience of the earth, prompting me to ask ‘Who will pay attention to what the earth needs, too?’

Her dance gave us a way to feel into the earth, to honor the process of shifting and change, beyond all human concerns, without denying the great tragedy to people and animals.

Later we were led in Kirtan by a group of beautiful singers and musicians.  I felt we were not singing only to/with the Divine, but also directly to/with the people of Haiti, lending them our voices, our strength alongside their own.

I thought of children I’d read about in the New York Times the night before showing both resilience and extreme vulnerability after experiencing enormous loss, and I remembered being little, sitting on the floor in my preschool singing ‘this little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine’. When we were led in a version of that very song I imagined those kids finding their way to safety, finding the strength and comfort they need, inside and out.

There was some discussion about our collective experiences with the tragedy.  People asked, ‘why does it take this sort of crisis to come together? To give? To feel as one?’

A Viet Nam vet said that he had once seen a child shot, and witnessed the mother’s grief, and in that moment he felt that he became that mother.  His grief was that strong.  He said that crisis has the power to shift us into a place of total empathy.

People talked about how issues of racism play into the U.S.A.’s relationship with Haiti.  There were expressions of hope that this tragedy might raise consciousness about the cultural, religious, and historical gifts that Haiti has to share with the world, despite news coverage which seems to be focusing almost entirely on the negative aspects of Haiti’s situation and history, without context or any sense of the U.S.’s historical role in Haiti’s troubles.

For those of us outside of the Haitian community, there are lots of ways to feel more connected, not just to the tragedy, but to the people.   Read Edwidge Danticat’s Crick? Crack! and experience the Haitian people’s perseverance through difficulty.  See a production of Once on the Island (or produce it) and learn how Haitians are world leaders by being the first nation to be founded by people who were once enslaved and overthrew their oppressors. Read The Magic Orange Tree out loud to kids and be transported by Haitian folktales while being enveloped in their rich storytelling tradition.  Ignore or actively refute news stories suggesting that Haiti can never overcome its difficulties.  Watch some dance.  Read some history.

I hope to learn some of Haiti’s sacred dances.  Dance is the way that I feel closest to people.  I want to celebrate the people of Haiti.  I’m awed by them for letting their light shine, even in the face of terrible tragedy.  I want to hold space for that light.

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