Walking the Walk and Dancing the Dance

I will not diminish myself that now is the time for me to be ready. Late bloomer, perhaps.....But, I was ready before the others and now the ones who also are ready come along before and after me and influence me to move forward, onward, let it be known. I can’t do it alone.

If you want to discover more about the incredible capacity of your body’s wisdom, then drop deep into the cellular presence of aliveness, always running like the undercurrents of a strong and deep river. We can feel this but rarely for so many of us, is it ever pointed out.

Once it’s pointed it, either we want to turn away or we are intensely intrigued. Either way, there it is.

Clients find me, the ones whom I have the privilege to go through the Rolfing Ten series with.....and I give them movement experiences along the way to help reveal to them “ the information of space”, as Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen talks about it; that there is so much to play with, discover and nourish when we learn how to tap into the Somatic body; the living, experiencing, indigenous body.

Remembering and finding pre-colonial and pre capitalist human aliveness......

We can craft our state of being. Don’t you ever have that itch to craft yourself into something somehow different? Like an aerial dancer or a great athlete or a rock climber? That is a long and mindful journey of attention.

When I lived in Vermont, every Thursday evening, I would most likely join the Dance Together Community from 7-9PM in a great big open hall. There, typically 80-100 people move around in the space to music put together by the DJ of the night. We collectively connected through musical lyrics and rhythms and the pulsations of our own movement making. I watched, over the years, how people changed from being kind of stiff and uninventive and perhaps a bit shy to awakened, bold, expressive and full of life and connection. By the end of each Thursday evening, coming out of Chaos and into Lyrical, it felt to me like we were one giant wave of water breaking past the ceiling’s height, like a flock of birds that curve and shape together, swooping up and down in enormous space. It had a collective hummmm. It was a good scene.

Today, I am studying. I’m preparing to teach at a Contact Improv intensive at Dreaming Stone in North Carolina with other teachers and I’m pouring over the profound and beautiful anatomy lessons of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen. Her classes have been profoundly orienting me to the somatic body for over thirty years, more deeply over the past 6 years. And this week, I am reviewing the dynamic movement of the bones of the feet, hips, legs, knees and spine to transmit some nourishing experience for my fellow colleagues....I am opening the retreat, and it makes me want to find stillness and breath and a microscope of grounding into the information of the space within ourselves before we expand into space and dance together, leaning body into body, listening outside and in.

This anatomy of the bones feels to me like a bone broth, a deep rich nourishing moment dearly holding our own bodies as beloved.

I want to describe for you now one small moment that I had from Bonnie’s teachings today. She was talking about the layers of the bone of the femur, which in its core has red and yellow blood cells that can turn into making blood when needed. She suggested that we explore moving form he marrow of the femur into the marrow of the pelvis and the shines and the spine and the skull. My whole body was moving and I elicited a fluid strength that feels truly generative, activating blood making marrow and rising to my call.

I badly hurt my knee two weeks ago. I suspected that I had asked too much of myself as I trotted around all weekend for the Athens Film Festival, walking from my close to downtown home to the downtown scene. All that asphalt plus some afternoon dancing with the Venn Dance Company. By Sunday night, my knee was very badly bruised. First I couldn’t bend it, I limped and angled into one, my spine, my pelvis and my femur. I felt so stiff and incapable. I spoke with lots of professionals, but I never had any x rays nor went to see a PT, because I don’t have the money to cover what insurance won’t. So I trusted and patiently lived with it and worked with it through my own hands, acupuncture and therapeutic movement.

Small signs of progress began to emerge and today, with Bonnie on my laptop talking about red bone marrow making blood generating incredible fluid strength, I evoked that aliveness through the tissues. I bounced and bounced and twisted and pressed and leveraged wherever my body wanted to go and I imagined the same kind of large group dancing springing alive in Athens Ga.

Here I am, ready to behold what is to come. I am ready to walk the walk and dance the dance in this hot land, finding the good scene.