As I sit here wondering what to talk about my mind keeps thinking about dancing and how I haven’t been doing much at all lately. My body has this odd disconnected yearning when I tune into it and there is nothing that my mind is doing at this moment that makes any difference at all to this physical sensation. In fact the mind can help the body to relax by using it’s capacity for understanding but there are times when talk is cheap and the only thing to do is to dance! My Beloved and I are no longer running a monthly dance and our local musical co-op closed down at the start of the year so the possibilities for going out and dancing have been less in our town.
That of course is no excuse and barely makes it in as a valid reason even, dancing can happen anywhere including when we are at home all alone. A FB friend just had a dancing challenge where she danced for half an hour every morning with her kids, what a good idea I thought to myself as I clicked on ‘going’. You can guess where I am going with this, I did not do one formal dance session in the two week period. And I LOVE to dance, when I manage to have a really good movement session I feel AMAZING! This is starting to sound a lot like a recent post on meditation and how I wasn’t managing to get myself on the cushion in spite of how beneficial it is to my health. Well I have made it to at least a couple of meditation classes since then but as for a regular practice, forget it.
So what to do? The first thing that comes to mind is that it would be useful to talk to my Beloved about this issue and see if we can come up with a buddy system that supports regular movement for us both. I’m thinking dancing here, it’s usually sensible to do one thing at a time and as a deep lover of the transformational energies of dance I know that if I create the space my body will adore moving the energy in this way. The other idea I’ve had is to run a weekly dance class that goes for an hour and call it “Dance For Joy!” I can’t be the only person who has this problem and I love the vision of a room full of people laughing and dancing to an eclectic mix of tunes old and new. If you have a look there are often plenty of meditation classes for people to attend but dance classes where you get to do your own thing are not so common. So this will be my next focus for a class but in the meantime I will see what I can do about moving this gorgeous body of mine a little more often.
The spirit in motion heals, expands, circles in and out of the body, moving through the layers of consciousness from inertia to ecstasy. Open to the spirit, and you will be transformed.
Gabrielle Roth
And I will continue with my gratitude practice because that helps with pretty much anything and everything! I’m noticing as I feel gratitude and visualise my body in motion that my mood is lifting even as the body’s yearning becomes more pronounced. So what kind of incredible transformation might be possible when I actually dance in real time with an open heart and mind. I’m smiling and feeling very excited at the prospect!
My gratitude practice was severely strained last week as I struggled to find something to be grateful for in the face of bureaucratic nit picking taken to extraordinary lengths. As I do my best to raise funds to get myself and my Beloved to Thailand for my brother’s wedding I can’t even manage to get myself a passport which has to be step number one for any overseas venture. Because my name was spelt Kerri on my birth certificate I have to go through an application to change my name to Kerry, the spelling I have used for the entire length of my 52 years on the planet. And to avoid waiting 67 business days for this absurdity to be processed it is costing me $211 to change something that has come about because of a clerical error. This is a world gone mad where restrictions that are supposed to keep us safe from the bogey man are interfering with ordinary folk trying to go about their everyday business.
The world is a very noisy place these days and silence something that many people actively avoid. I consider myself a reasonably conscious human being and yet I find myself doing the very same thing even though I know perfectly well that being silent is a great way of tuning in to deeper feelings and sensations. So what is so hard about simply sitting in silence? On my lunch break when I work a full day I usually go out to the balcony where I can breathe fresh air and see the sky and feel the wind on my face. And I know that once I’ve finished eating that the best way of spending the rest of my break time is to sit in meditation. Then the next thing I know I’m looking at Facebook on my phone and getting caught up in all of that stuff and I only manage a few minutes of actually sitting in stillness.
It’s worth a shot anyway, maybe even a gratitude diary where I write down all the things in my life that I am grateful for. As a lover of improvisation I will probably make it up as I go along ! And who knows what will happen as I spend more and more time in meditative spaces, many of the thorny issues I’m currently facing may turn into beautiful roses smelling sweet!
“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
Through the Vortex 