From early in a piece during Bodypoetics class in which I asked them to dream their bodies, to imagine they’d never met this body before. They’re encouraged to start on whatever plane feels right, and so Annie chose a chair for her experiment. I keep these classes small to ensure a depth of intimacy and safety.
I don’t know about you but I am cruel to this body. Even after 10 years of teaching this work, after 25 years of yoga studies, after so long of battling depression and making it smaller and smaller, after telling hundreds upon hundreds of women that beauty is ANY body moving…and being completely sincere in those statements.
I am still so cruel to this body.
This body that can make such beauty in movement. That surprises even me sometimes with its abilities. This body that my husband finds perfect in all its ways of being since I’ve met him.
I am still so cruel to this body.
And I know I am not alone in this so I know I can tell you this and not be judged as somehow deficient or a failure on the spiritual path blah blah blah.
As if anyone ever gets to the damn finish line. As if there is a damn finish line.
No matter how much I work on this, there’s always another layer waiting for me, and I think that’s actually the point — finding that next layer, never stopping, always persisting, falling and rising.
Because even just ten years ago, wow… my head was full of cruelties that make my present head look all soft and fluffy.
Progress. It’s all we can expect.
If you have a fantastic love of your body, congrats. This isn’t for you. I’ve never actually met a woman in person who has that kind of love. I’ve seen it projected on social media… #Thingsthatmakemegohmmm
So I teach what I teach because I need it. Isn’t that always the case? And isn’t that who we want guiding us?
Even now, as a teacher who is always on the path of learning, I know I can lose my grip on the beginner mind that some of my new students come to me with. That’s a huge challenge — to always be remembering that beginner mind and not your current version.
But being in my own beginner mind allows me to constantly be creating new maps and tools for people to navigate this dark forest of small self and old stories and unproductive coping mechanisms.
Which brings me to dreaming the body… a phrase that came to me just about two years ago but would not have come any sooner because I was not there yet. I could not even imagine such a phrase.
And beyond the imagining of such a phrase, I could have never come to any understanding of it, much less explained it in a way that it be helpful to others, that it inspire some sort of change in their minds, some sort of new in their movement.
And as we practice these things in dance, so they eventually come to impact the entirety of our lives.
Dreaming our body eventually will become dreaming our lives.