I’ve been thinking about the Dancemeditation principal ‘Ingest, Digest’ in relation to our mind/body split. I, and we, over-appreciate mind, under-appreciate body, and believe that it is fine, even noble to criticize, repress, correct, and demean the body. (This goes on consciously or unconsciously. Mind’s hegemony is always humanity’s issue.) In Dancemeditation, this all comes to light quickly and we are changed fundamentally, irrevocably by this awareness. A new interior script allows us to heal imbalance. How?

We go to Dancemeditation session and follow a teacher or a fellow participant. Body follows body without words. Follow. Follow. Following someone else’s movement is my body ingesting the ways of another body; it takes the place of my mind telling my body being told what to do. Mind gets into the swing of this.

We toodle along. Mind relaxes a bit. Body expands a bit. As following another body continues, Mind relaxes its leadership grip. Then the instruction comes, words for the body: “Close your eyes and move how you feel.” Move how you feel, Body. Body is allowed to move as she feels, and the mind, lulled by 20 minutes of following, sinks back, goes along for the ride. Mind keeps track without trying to take over. It is hypnotized by Body’s doings. As Body wakes, moving her own way, Mind is fascinated. Mind was considering abandonment—going out the window for a bit, going down to the Thought Bar for a drink of the same old same old, but Body is so luscious now, doing something Mind hadn’t thought of. Mind stays in the room. Watches. Mind comes beside, alongside, with. I am with you.

Mind gets a new feeling here, beginning to see that every day Body does a great deal, handles a great deal. Heat, cold, food, gravity, dirt, light, darkness. A miracle. A lot of energy there. True “I”-ness begins to take shape. Mind sees something about itself. Just this: Take away those whips. No Whip. No roar. Whips make an enemy. Listening makes a friend.

Mind now sees the situation. Mind sees that we are mostly body. Mind see that we are our bodies. Every breath is the body in motion. Every blink and wink and nod and trot is the body. Every laugh and cry is the diaphragm and the throat, body. Every bend and twist is the body. Every kiss and hug is the body. Every tongue and lip, keyboard finger tick and ear prick is the body. Every heart beat is the body.

Mind learning to observe Body is our world changing completely.

Letter to Mind:
Dear Mind, become reverent. Take your whispery place in the Appreciation Choir. How lucky you are, Dear Mind, to have such a home. Now, Dear mind, let Body move as she loves. That is all you need to suggest. Watch as she finds her way, her pleasure and play and anguish, uncoiling the many packets of concern that she has carried these past days and weeks.

Mind, be soft. Become Body. Because, Mind, you are Body.

Let Body know that all the things you think about are not so important. Let her know that you aren’t as big as you’ve been making out. Okay, let her know you are just a piece of it all. Let her know that you know this. Now let her swallow you, absorb you…

Mind replies:
Dear Body, I have always known that you are Thought. You are Intelligence.

Mind becoming Body is our world changing completely.

How about your mind? Your body? Their relationship? Let your body write a letter to your mind…

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Under Shiva’s Gaze

Shiva graces our Dancing
As we enter the Great Temple of the Body.

Little do we know what will Unfold.
We just know we will be the Unfolding.

Flowing into Spontaneous Combustion,
I become Whole HOLY from the Dance.

And I taste the Freedom of Pure Bliss
Which is Love Incarnate.

My beautiful Earth Body becomes
Heaven on Earth.

My psychic aches and pains melt away
And there is only the Spaciousness of Becoming.

The Emptiness I have feared all my Life
Is now the Opening.

May I continue the Practice of Drinking
From the Sacred Chalice of my Longing for the Divine.

(c) 2011 Loretta Armer
November 15, 2011, Dancemeditation™ Spiritual Bellydance
at Kripalu Center for Yoga

Why is personal practice so important? A naf would whisper in our heads that it isn’t, that we are fine without our practice. Go ahead, eat that donut, crap out in front of internet TV, FB the evening away…But practice is solace to our pain. In practice, we recall and re-experience crucial learnings from retreat training periods together. We bring the group, the teachings and the teacher into our daily flow.

At Dancemeditation retreat, we learn many teachings. One core teaching is to approach ourself without tyranny. We practice steady, centered, calm self-witnesses. We move and breathe and chant and explore with a generous dose of compassion for our selves and our small human predicaments. We learn to know we are safe, that we can trust. Our training time is the act of taking our young terrified selves by the metaphorical hand and being the good parent, the good guide, the nurturer, healer, loving deity, the Lover. We  work to become not only the person riddled with darkness but also the person who knows that these darknesses will pass and that we will be okay, that we are fine, that we are lovable and Beloved. When we return home and do daily practice, we integrate the depth of experience we’ve initiated during retreat. In daily practice, we continue to knead the compassionate space we have learned into our flesh.

A practitioner of a Path is one who practices the practices of the Path, but it isn’t just practicing that makes the practitioner. It is also knowing, and remembering why practices are being done. A Path is an awakening. A transformation. Blind adherence is not enough. We need also to turn willingly into the awakening.

When you resist practice, you stand on that threshold. Your foot is lifting to step. Will you crossover? Will you wake? Pat the naf on the head and step in.

I am working with a new chanting. New to me. Otherwise, old as time. Its not important that anyone know what the word is. It’s a Sufi chant. Sufi chanting is called zhikr — remembrance.

My new chant surprises me because the part that is meaning — its literal translation — doesn’t touch the fullness of the experience. This chant must be right for me since, as I do it, I cross a threshold into the place I never want to forget, a place where I feel completely human yet safe and real. Most ordinary days, human-ness is a long string of vigilance and fear. I’m familiar with all that, inured to it.  I seek the place where, like my time as an infant, I was held by my mother or father and they were vigilant for me. I was safe in their arms. They watched out for the wolf and bear, the snake and illness. Those killers. ‘Being held’ is a sweet flavor of giving up into the Moment. Yet the Moment requires surrender, letting yourself be held.

On the surface, the Moment could be any sort of temperature or condition; it could be painful, or it could be luscious. That, however, is just its surface. There is the inside of the Moment. The inside of the Moment is far more than being held and carried. It has a secret wisdom. (Not so secret if you get there but untouchable to most who stand on the outside of the glass window in life.) The importance of spiritual seeking is to find and touch, every day and in as many moments as possible, the inside of the Moment — not forgetting what should never be forgotten.

The inside of the Moment is a lamp in the dark, a vista that is boundless, is newness, is inspired existence, is non-separateness, is freedom, is spaciousness. It is soft like rabbit fur, and a perfect embrace. It is communion, knowing, contentment, and the end of bottomless want. It is the end of fear.

Back in NYC I focus on business. I sit in front of my computer and type away. I’m on the phone. I email. I organize Dancemeditation sessions and ‘run the store’. But as I do, I feel what I am doing. Inside my apartment, I inhale EMFs. As I walk along the street, I inhale heavy metals. With every breath comes poison.

NYC is a stimulant — caffeine or speed. It’s a great jolt, useful in creative tasks and for un-spooling complex ideas. The mesa is nourishment. Direct inspiration. I make the two sound very black and white. Who wouldn’t prefer the mesa? But the mesa has its rigors. Its austerity is a large part of its ability to heal, and that must be gotten used to. New York is materially cushy. Lots of water. Lots of electricity. Anything you could possibly want — for a price.
The power of NYC for me has always been its raw energy. If I can transform it with my practice I have a dynamic resource, but I have to transform it, not get lost in it, or follow its whims and tides which easily chew up a soul.

I feel almost as if I need to get all my business work done quickly before I lose my juice. But then I realize that the healing that took place on the mesa is changing how I am working. I breathe as I type. I tend toward balance. I don’t teeter on an edge. I am all here, and being all here is far less crazy, less volatile, less self- destructive than past ways I’ve lived in NYC.

I stopped in at Grace Church on 10th and Broadway to listen to the noon organ concert. That was a nice break. The cool colored light. The smell of wooden pews and leather prayer books. Timelessness, to breathe and be bathed in music.

I have lifted the requirement of daily practice from those in Intensive Training, but I still recommend daily practice—daily ‘remembrance’, as the Sufis call it. Remembrance of our Truth.  I don’t want to police it, not because I’m lazy; I just think it isn’t serving the people who train with me. It puts the struggle for one’s Path outside the self, keeping the self from ‘growing up’, spiritually-speaking. Each of us has to recognize our resistance, our choices. We need to reflect on them and weigh them. No one can put you on your own center. If you want it—inner peace, authenticity, perception, solidity—you have to strive for it. Struggle for it. A child’s little legs must work. It’s best if I step aside there. Go head—have your own intimate self-dialogue about that.

Our questions: What is important to me? Where does real happiness come from? When do I feel most whole? If spiritual path is where we live in Truth, then a regular return to the Doorway is one of the most crucial stages of growth. Retreat training and personal practice open that Doorway. Over the years, I’ve personally come to rely on a brief but focused daily practice, thus my recommendation. I hope for us all that the heart will cry for it and land us in a quiet room, with closed eyes, breathing, moving, feeling the world beyond thought. I hope the practice calls us to it. Wouldn’t that be wonderful…But if not, well, what are you going to do about it?

The cabin’s thin wooden walls and open windows are connected to what is beyond—I am half outside all the time. My psyche is finally beginning to trust this but neither quickly nor easily. My cramped shape of self, molded by the confines and habits of my NYC apartment, have had me living cut and bound, my body’s long silvery threads severed, coiled, knotted. Limbs, skin, and tight skull now learn to unkink, expand, and rest in the vast space beyond the rim. I am often in a feverish body, my core threatening to burn through the skin and bones, to sear the bed and ignite the sheets. I am recovering. I am recovering from a long serious illness—my life caught in amber, my lifer so patterned it was immovable, breathless, still. A fever burns off an illness.

In the space and air and time, the amber cracks. It takes huge energy to live through this. I feel guilt for my lassitude, guilt for my pleasure; I fear my pointlessness. And I am fortunate to be some kind of moth.

Talking. It’s wind. Air moves in shapes and temperatures. I am mostly involved in expressing meaning and oblivious to the shaping by my tongue teeth, lips, and throat of little gusts of air into rounded, clipped, or coiled forms. Talking all comes down to breath. Gale, zephyr, breeze, wail. As I talked with a friend, I had a perception of my words as being buffoon-like, the wheeze of antique bicycle horn, or a guttering candle end. Part of me was present in my words while another part witnessed my conversation in abstraction, as sounds devoid of discernible content, and right there, in middle of throat motions and noises, I felt relaxation. Has the pressure to express meaning co-opted my breath?

Thought, perception, and reflection are beautiful. Talking is beautiful. Like everything, it is most beautiful when it is relaxed, not driven, compressed, or glued together in Frankenstein shapes. I love when a true perception forms itself in within me, rolls along my tongue, catches a flow of exhale, and, if it needs to, eddies gently out. I also love when my thoughts aren’t driven to emerge but instead, roam free and breathless through the my neurotransmitter corridors, becoming this and that, popping up, dying away, cobbling into new contraptions.

Could breath come and go, the throat open, sounds come out, and not mean anything? Is meaning so essential? Must every bodily squirt come to something?

As I woke, I lay in bed, cool, smoke-tinged air, round as a cotton ball, pushed in the window. I savored being under the covers. The sheets softness matched the silky air. The trees seemed to clean the air that has been carrying smoke from the uncontained Carson Forrest, AZ fires west as far as Ohio. I curled under the covers and waited for the impulse of rising to fill my legs and spine and arms. The time of waiting, which isn’t really waiting but my body’s gathering together into a gesture or act of rising, was delicious.

I wasn’t aware of going toward rising. I was aware of floating away from sleep, from the night. My ears and eyes drifted over their domains, sipping sounds, sipping snippets of view, bird shadow, gilded pine needles. My nose weighed the ratio of smoke to pine scent. A little inner engine assessed and organized these fragments, feeding them to my flesh until I curled into a ball or spilled onto my belly to modulate my core temperature or to nudge my skin to lap the sheet, an awareness coming after-the-fact, ‘Ahhhhhh, that feels good.” The accumulation of these bits, like the building of sensorial friction, revved my little engine into action, and I sat up. No effort. No thought tractor-ed down my nerve branches, pushing sluggish muscles through a brain fog.

There I sat, empty, not standing or lying down or changing in any way. Time ticked by. My fine-pointed awareness faded as the wave of morning routine washed in—make the bed, get the tea going. The day of thoughts, plans, actions began.

And then I arrived with my tea tray in the Bower. It is all comfort. I feel inertial.

I often wonder, then, what a viewer adds to seeing three dimensional movement, and this brings me to the doorstep of Witness Dances — being watched and watching. I witness someone move and much of my effort goes to seeing what she is  doing. But in recent times this has felt entirely forced, not so much a practice of visual focus and undivided attention but rather a blinder to ‘what is’. In my new phase I turn toward finding my breath as I watch others and let my attennae go to work gathering impressions. My mind spreads open, clears, the way a rumpled patch of water settles, and finally I see what I am looking at. But how can I know if it is reality? It is at the very least my reality. My view. I realize, for me, being seen in Witness Dancing is no issue. I am entirely comfortable in the role. All my growth has been during the aspect of witnessing. I had no idea when I began this practice, that this aspect would require such a long unfolding and challenge so much of what I understand in myself.

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