Our studio was gargantuan, with a lofty sky view over the lyric Columbia County surroundings. Birds stopped to sing or chant in rhythm with us and the old wood floor was bouncy and soft as suede underfoot.

The Dancemeditation work was deep and steady. So many beautiful, precious dances floated around the room. Dancers with fans, veils, silky pants and skirts, lycra tights, loose hair, shaved heads, castanets, zils. Breathing, looking quietly out and in.

A few things that happened:
~ We started up a zil choir!
~ Kate Temple-West took us on a brilliant weed-walk introducing delicious, healing wild greens growing everywhere.
~ Kate Russel opened up the gorgeous vista of veil-painting with her quiet mystic energy and deft suggestions.
~ Karleen Koen read spiritual poetry for us in her smoky tones.
~ Laurienne Singer, faculty at LACC, brought us a new quiet, way to listen to our partner’s body.
~ The Store in the Mansion’s front parlor was a continuous hot-spot.
~ Nathalie Molina helped produce an evening presentation about Dancemeditation’s past & future.
~ Nisaa Christie  & Liz Abbene made an amazing final feast the followed a dyamic performance evening that included  Kryss Statho, Carol Henning, Alia Thabit and Core Alembic (Dunya, Nisaa & Kate Russel.)
~ We closed with a Ceremony of completions for several Teacher Certifications, and  initiation of  those entering the TT Cert program as well as those entering into Advanced levels of our work and into our practicing community.

Thank you to everyone for making it such a remarkable journey.

I look forward now to our next 2011 Movement Monastery in New Mexico, as well as the exciting purchase of a property to be a dedicated home for Dancemeditation.

This is an exciting and happy time.

Sufis melt fragments into the sky sea,
rain them on a desert garden,
bloom them in the shape of every Other flower, forgetting the birthright fragrance.
Foreheads rest on a warm iron planetary hub
and toes wander near the nearing moon.

Upside down, you think.
Inside out. She said this time and time again.
The wet smoke and dry blood,
sprouts dancing backward into the seed.

When the Earth is oiled with her own feathers
and the sky tumbles here and there,
we can still write still poems
and watch them drift off in our bottle minds.

To the monastery!
To where cleaner lies think themselves,
& where, thinking gone walking,
we get at least one trustworthy breath.
And another.

– D. D. McPherson

The Movement Monasteries are hard core. Like a blast of convent life. It was good to remember how much more goes into our relationships at Movement Monastery retreat. We cook, wash pots & pans, sweep the floors as well as share intensive Dancemeditation practice. This is a good place to develop clear boundaries, express oneself with kindness, mind one’s own business while receiving high quality connection with others and with oneself. And we are all in very rich communion with Self and the Now.

This year I so needed Kripalu’s nurture; I’m a little worried about SMM. But I also look forward to doing the work for two weeks. Two weeks! Yay!

Can’t stay. Gotta go. Got to eat, to sleep, get away, get more, get noticed, be alone. It’s a speed world, and I often feel that my identity has shaken down into shorthand, a self-understanding so hastily scrawled it’s hard to decipher what my self originally meant. I’m a dotted line rather than any one long tone.

Meditation practice (mine, of course, is Dancemeditation) is impulse management. It’s what I do. Can I stay in the meditation room, in my meditation, inside my experience, tolerating discomfort? Can I stop running on impulse? If yes, I get a lot. I wake up. I un-break and bitty fragments flow into one long tone. Staying in the room––my metaphor for not giving in to impulse, getting up and running away––has given me a billion views of my delusional self. I’m over the idea that I can control my world or others; that I can escape from illness, old age, and irrelevance; that I can avoid suffering. (Being immortal and immune are such casual yet universally cherished fallacies.)

As a teacher of extended retreats, I observe how the effort of staying in the room accumulates. Day after day, we all lift the weight of the self up and down, pumping through what isn’t true. This dredges up anxiety, and we stay there, feeling it, letting it sort itself out, letting it pass away. It is as strenuous for me as teacher as it ever was as student. My job of keeping everybody at work means I have to be there too. Sometimes I want to run away early, or act out against my students; I feel my stamina ebbing, internal struggle getting the better of me.

But there is one strong difference between my struggle and what I see in some others. I observe when a person’s heart is fisted. Waking hasn’t yet planted its blossom under the breastbone, and their meditation work remains a loose collection of serenities and mini-epiphanies, soothing but temporary and a bit feckless. Sometimes they smile through the session, other times they bolt up and huff off.

I’m in a different place. It happened like this: like everyone else, I stayed in the room, often unwillingly, but curious and obedient, and grew more tolerant of my self. This led to being better at tolerating others. Over time, the world grew roomier. (For all you Sufis, Rumi-er.) Life became more comfortable, then more wonderful. It was magic, really. Then one day something distinct happened. An entirely calm decision to wake arrived in my heart. My heart turned unquestioningly toward the entire process, choosing to stay in the meditation room, in the meditation, inside true experience. There was nowhere else my heart wanted to be.

I was like that for a long time before I ever began to teach, though teaching has further forced my hand, making me arrive before everyone, tolerate more than I thought I ever could, then stay beyond the end, folding up the mats, shutting off the lights. Adnan Sarhan, Sufi Master, said remarked, “If I could find something better to do than teaching, I’d do it.” It was such an unsentimental statement. He took the role of Sufi Master as a preference. He actually liked it. And I have certainly weighed those words against my own choices since. I’m glad I stayed in the room through the time it took for my heart to un-fist.

In the past I’ve liked setting aside time to practice in a sanctuary environment. It’s more solitary than at retreat, but I can replicate most of the circumstances (music, privacy, resting.) Recently I’m enjoying practice ‘in the marketplace’. Simple and unobtrusive practices–-breathing with awareness of different aspects of posture or motion is a good one––integrate well into workplace mechanics. The computer becomes a place of daily practice, and walking to the subway, shopping in Whole Foods, or sitting at a social dinner. I may have honed the skill in a vaulted room, bamboo swaying out the window as classical Persian music played, but awareness on breathing and embodiment fit in any room anywhere.