I’ll be honest…. I am used to sharing stories with people whose eyes I can see and whose breath I can hear. Normally I can see someone shift in their seat if they are uncomfortable, or tense their body if they are excited to hear what happens next. I can see them smile, shake with delight, or curl their brow in contemplation. These are intimate moments. Perhaps mostly so because I witness their story (their body’s response to my telling) unfolding before my eyes, drink it in, and allow myself to be touched by it somehow. It opens my heart or delights my senses or stimulates my creativity and helps my story come more alive. It draws me deeper into some sort of altered state, like a trance dance that seems to expand my sense of time and connection to everyone and everything around me. It’s an amazing feeling of being exquisitely present, of feeling more alive. But I can’t see you and that feels weird. Here’s a request: if you are so inclined, would you let me know what you think, or better yet, what images or sensations or feelings moved through you as you read these words? I am hoping I can still find that dance, with you.
Tanta Masha was a huge woman with a rotund body and breasts that could smother you even before you had time to put down your bags and take off your coat. The sheer weight of her found relief in an old, torn red arm chair – the kind that swivels all the way around and remembers every crumb of burnt toast and spill of hot coffee. It was the safest thing around, that arm chair: a reliable old lover embracing her mountainous buttocks, rocking her in delight as her legs loosely covered in nylon stockings spilled from her belly and poured themselves into a pair of neatly tied black orthotic shoes.
Each time I visited, I knew I’d find her in that red arm chair. Waiting. Not once did I see her stand upon those sturdy legs of hers, although I like to imagine that she enjoyed their confidence in clamboring up and down the stairs to her apartment or appreciated their loyalty during the trek from her bed to the bathroom in the middle of the night. No matter how they managed in my absence, I only saw those legs in repose, peeking out from beneath her black dress. Eventually I could count on them to churn out a shuffle in some kind of seated two-step. And that’s when it would begin — the official summoning of the earth’s dreamings surging upward through the shag carpet, into that old red chair, and out through her matriarchal lungs – bellowing for me to rise up and firmly tether myself to my soul’s journey: “Dance, Stacelah, dance!”
The red chair would disappear and the musty smell of the apartment would evaporate as I danced for Tanta Masha. I moved my body to the rhythm of her laughing and her hands clapping to the ends of time, or at least to the far reaches of her abdomen which protruded a foot in front of her nose. Pure joy coursed through my young body and my heart leapt into her breasts for that breath-defying moment – pleasure and delight, hers and mine – rolling in and out of the dance.
It was a beautiful and innocent beginning to my twenty-year career of dancing to appease others. The love and connection, the pleasure and the pleasing from those intimate apartment showings somehow got twisted up only to unravel a long trail through the worlds of classical and modern dance training and performance. For two decades I would sweat, grow stronger and slip farther and farther away from my body. Awareness and sensation, mind and spirit, would remain fractured and buried under technique, correct alignment, precise execution and a drive for accolades and applause. I had danced my way out of the womb and into the world of the objectified body, where consciousness, sensation and feeling were left in the dark to watch from their red chairs.
As my original instructions would have it — that job description for my soul — I would continue on past traditional dance training and deeper into my life dance. Slowly, rigid forms for internal tuning and external presentation were replaced by conscious movement practices: “release technique” (technical translation: a way of harnessing gravity through the skeletal body, enabling the muscles to find eccentric contractions in motion); “improvisation training” (read: spontaneous, present-moment dance creation); and “contact improvisation” (Google Steve Paxton, creator of this groundbreaking dance form born in the 1970’s). I was learning to let go of all the armor and soften into meaningful connection with my body, the present moment and the embrace of the earth beneath my feet.
With time and trust – or more truthfully, a cold turkey leap of faith -, I eventually traded performing for audiences for the most provocative role of my career thusfar: cultivating a powerful inner witness to the unfolding of my own natural movement. With my eyes closed, I began to feel sensations more acutely, notice patterns of thought, and open to the memories and imaginings of my bodymind. This was the beginning of exploring movement as a healing art, as a process rather than a product, as a language of my body-mind-spirit.
I stopped calling myself a dancer and began to refer to myself as a “mover.” Dance had left a bitter taste in my mouth and I needed a salve for my abandoned body-mind.
Through the practice of Authentic Movement – the name given by Janet Alder, although the form was created originally under a different name by a woman named Mary Starks Whitehouse – I was able to create a conscious, non-judgemental relationship with myself – and of course began to offer the same to my relationships with others. I was able to move into sensation, be with it, express it. And as a witness to someone else’s process, was able to deepen my connection to my own internal process. (This practice asks that while witnessing an other, you pay attention, or track, your own sensations, thoughts, feelings.)
My life changed dramatically when years later I followed my intuition to the School for Body-Mind Centering and began to study with somatics pioneer Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen. It was then that I came home to a place of inner knowing and for the next twenty years, journeyed deeper and deeper into the realms of my body’s wisdom within and back out again. As both the map and the territory, my body became the perfect hologram of sensation, feeling, imagining, integrating, and healing.
My life thusfar began transforming – my brain and body repatterning in profound ways, my mind and spirit finally landing – as I opened to sensation in every tissue layer right down to my very cells. I became a naturalist, passionately researching and exploring inner ecology. Doing befriended being, memory emerged through fleshy substance, and the integrity of my life took root as thoughts, feelings and actions aligned throughout the cells of my fluids, organs, bones, muscles, nerves, glands, and skin. I was finally dancing again – in the vastness of subtle inner movement and in the exquisite interplay between body, mind and spirit.
And then I found my way to sacred ground. I moved 3,000 miles west and began to follow the tracks and trails of my inner cosmos out into the forests and fields of my new homeland. I discovered the rhythms and cycles of the natural world and began my tutalage in the ancient arts of human survival – first through learning to grow my own food, then to track animals, understand bird language, wander without any maps, harvest edible and medicinal plants and use trees to make fire and shelter. I began to mentor others in the ways of the body and to connect through their senses to the magic and mystery that is nature – the Earth’s and their own.
And while my naturalist studies are young, my treads are deeply worn as I continue to dance my way from inner to outer realms and back again. The cells of my body have found their reflection in the living systems of the natural world. Trees are my bones. Rivers and oceans flow within me. Birds lift my spirits and enliven my dreams. All of life’s mysterious, interconnected bounty dances within me. And as I open my senses, I am filled with joy and pleasure and the delight of a child once more. Awakenings rise up from within my own inner cosmos, and I sink into the full rapture of being truly alive, embodied and connected with the wonderous world of all living beings. This is my soul’s dance.
movement for life 