We dance for a million different reasons, but one of the biggest ones is to feel our relationship to the earth. It’s the one relationship that is with us every day of our life. I hate it when I hear someone say “ I don’t dance”. Everybody dances.
Today’s dance:
Imagine a spot exactly in the middle of the crown of your head. (imagining this spot is a form of thinking/knowing that requires no tension. It’s your kinesthetic sense, simply knowing where something is in space.)
Imagine a spot at the tip of your tail bone.
Notice the distance of these spots from one another, and from the earth.
Notice the dance they are doing already. If they are fixed in relationship to one another, you are probably not breathing 🙂 and might feel stiff.
To dance with the earth, all you have to do is perceive it. Recognize where you are, what’s really important, where your primary support comes from. It’s so basic as to be completely invisible to most people, yet one of the most important things in your life, ever.
Check out this video about one of America’s greatest dance companies, Halau O Kekuhi, and what this connection means to them:
Want to learn more of my “mind-dances?” Go here for the next workshop, here for private lessons, and here for a free (you must bring a flower!) 30 minute consultation.
Do you get overwhelmed trying to keep up with current news and events? That’s probably a good thing.
Why? Because it means you are actually really sensitive underneath it all. You are responding naturally to something that’s crazy and upsetting.
I’ve been in the woods for a week, no TV and no news. When I finally got bars on my phone and read the front page of the NY Times, I just cried. Don’t worry – I had a lovely vacation even so!
I’d been so maxed out on the news that I stopped feeling it. The only thing that helped me to recover my natural state of giving a damn was taking a break – and it’s very hard to do that if you live in a city because the news is everywhere, even if you don’t deliberately read it.
I no longer expect myself to be immune to news overload, to be able to stop obsessively checking social media, to be able to stop the resulting emotional shutdown. My body is trying to help me out, and responding in the only way it can. There is no quick fix for this state. It’s human and normal to be affected by the news. What’s not normal is to expect myself to be able to conquer my own sensitivity.
One step, one nerve at a time, it’s possible to get back in touch with your self. It just takes time, and it helps to have a simple process to follow. That’s what I’ve devised over 17 years of teaching sensitive artists how to take care of themselves.
Try starting at the beginning. The first cranial nerve, the foremost one in your brain, is for smell. Try this experiment right now:
Imagine the distance between your eyes, see out of your eyes into the distance.
Your organ of smell is high up in this space. Feel the air going in, cooler, and out, warmer. Stay with this motion for a few minutes. Notice any smells.
Feel any easier – less focused, less tight, more balanced? I hopes so. Maybe you will be able to step away from the news now 🙂
P.S. The more sensitive you are, the more you need a good self care practice. I hope you will sign up for my newsletter if you want to get more self care tips.
“POLES ARE FOR SAFETY, NOT FOR YOUR LATEST ROUTINE”
– my favorite broken subway rule
Real life circumstances sometimes call for a little rule-breaking. Dancers understand this instinctively. Where most people are afraid of falling – like on a moving subway train – dancers see opportunity: for self-challenge, for making money, and putting on a good show! They have a certain crazy faith in balance, space, and their own physical intelligence. If I can imagine it, they think, I can make it happen!
I’ve seen alot of scared passengers on the subway during these crazy routines, but I’ve never seen anyone get hurt. The risk is carefully calculated. After all, if you hurt your audience, they won’t give you their hard earned cash. If you are a dancer, though, you know: dancers do get hurt. If you are a dance educator, or a touch professional who helps dancers sustain long careers, you know what I mean. Dancers take alot of risks, and sometimes pay a price – willingly or not. The challenges of my dance life, and a desire to take better care of myself inspired by my first experiences with the Alexander Technique, led me to several key questions by the time I was 25:
– Could it really be this easy to let go of ideas about movement that no longer serve me – so I can keep dancing?
– Is it really possible to stop holding myself back physically, mentally, and emotionally?
– Am I willing to trust my intelligence and imagination and stop hurting myself?
– Am I willing to stop trying to control outcomes (including the audience’s perception of me) that I have no control over anyway?
If you are a movement educator or a dancer in pain, there is a good chance that you’ve got ideas about how your body is supposed to move that are not in harmony with the actual design of that body. No, it’s not just that dance is hard. Those ideas (and many of us have multiple and conflicting ones) are deployed in our bodies in full force especially when under the stress of performance. The good news is, there is a way you can discover what they are really doing for you, good or bad!
In my Beginners Mind, Beginners Body Workshop the most important tool you will receive is a reliable method of finding out for yourself if your ideas about movement are true (not harmful) or not. It’s not just another “technique” to learn. It’s a method for finding the truth of the body for yourself, making your already considerable body of knowledge even more valuable and accurate, so you can keep doing what you love and share it with the world.
Here is my most recent video on the nerve supply for your arms. It might give you an idea of how you could do one of these crazy pole routines without hurting your delicate shoulder joints!
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