On dancing & leaving the body
Hi friends, it is Spring and time for weather changes and rebirth. Except that change can be hard, and welcoming change with an open heart is a motherfucker.
My life is going through a big change: I am moving in with a partner. Truth is, as much as I feel excited to no longer live alone, I also feel the resistance to change deep in my bones.
I thought I had a good grip on the emotional ride of this transition. Until Sunday, when I woke up discombobulated, as I was about to head out to a four-hour contact improvisation dance.
To the innocent eye, contact improv looks like a bunch of awkward people trying to get an orgy going with their clothes on. Still, thanks to the scientifically-proven benefits of orgies, contact improv helps me release, ground, and attune.
I dance passionately. Like a curvy spindle in an on-again-off-again relationship with gravity, I love to watch my body move through energies and emotions, soldering my life force with other dancers on the way.
On Sunday though, instead of an agile and curious body, all I could feel was a lumpy bag of heavy gravel rejecting motion.
I tried getting off the floor, with no luck. My emotions had their own agenda. Laying in child pose, choked up, I pretended to need extra warm up time.
Finally, I managed to stand up. I threw myself on the dance floor and bumped into a few folks. Before long, disembodiment forced me to resign. I was there, but I wasn’t there. I had to sit out.
Presence is so elusive in a state of dissociation.
After an eternity of watching others playing and having fun, I was bored and frustrated. I looked over and locked eyes with a friend who’s been battling cancer for the last six months, realizing that he had rarely missed an opportunity to dance.
With twenty minutes left, I suddenly had a thought. What if this was my last twenty minutes of life? What if my body was going to drop dead and this was my last chance to experience existence in this flesh?
A burst of presence pierced through. I got up running to the middle of the dance floor.
Aware of the pressure of death, I was ravenous for connection, almost wanting to yell, “this is it, this is all we got.” But the more I felt the rebirth of presence in my body, the more I knew that I could not get attached to anything or anyone.
Released from the burden of bonding, I held up my arms for a clumsy twirl. Celebrating every spark of touch, I basked in the beauty of each glance, wowed by the power of welcoming the end.
Change is weird. Change is death. Yet, nothing exists without death. I still have a lot of grieving to do before welcoming change with an open heart, but at least in the meantime, I can always dance.
PS: This was supposed to be another ask for donations but I have a hard time asking for money. As we approach our 10-year anniversary, there is a part of me that wonders if we’ll make it. And also, we’ve made it this far, and whether this is the end or not, I know that we will be reborn.
If you want to join us in this cycle of death, birth, change, and grief, please consider donating. We are raising 40K this Spring. We’d love to add 10 new monthly donors to our wonderful donor community, and also are looking for a couple of major gifts.
PPS: With all this talk of touching and changing, I can’t help but plug this beautiful Octavia Butler quote:
“All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.”
Going back to asking for donations, money changes things. Perhaps you can make this change happen. Perhaps you can feel this change too.