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The idiom “going around in circles” doesn’t usually carry a positive connotation, but that’s the shape our movement took during a recent “Dancing Mandala” 5Rhythms workshop. If it’s hip to be square, then it sure is satisfying being a circle.
A combination of dance, breathwork, and artistic expression, the event was touted as a three-part journey into our soul, using the five rhythms, five elements, and five points on the mandala (four around the perimeter, one in the center) as gateways into our essence. From the website:
While bridging the five elements—Earth (Flowing), Fire (Staccato), Water (Chaos), Air (Lyrical), Ether (Stillness)—with the 5Rhythms, we will subconsciously create a moving mandala. As a culmination of this experience, we will pause in the last rhythm of Stillness for a breathing meditation, then conclude and refine the energies by creating a visual mandala you will then take with you.
Woah. I registered for the workshop before reading this heavy-duty description, eager for any kind of dance and art combo. Meditative movement opens up all kinds of creative portals in me; I kept thinking back to my yoga teacher training at Kripalu, when, after days and days of nothing but yoga, meditation, and pranayama, we were handed large sheets of paper and crayons and asked to draw what our future looked like. Everyone was in some other realm of consciousness at the time, so the artwork that came forth probably contains about 12 layers of psychological interpretation. Six years later, I still don’t know what mine means but yet somehow I feel like I’ve been living in the middle of it the whole time:
Hands, feet, arrows, footprints, hearts, spirals…. Makes sense, right?
Well, the event was way more than a little dancing, a little painting. The workshop’s organizers—Nancy, Stavros, and Johanna—created such a sacred space that I was reluctant to even bring my cheap plastic water bottle into the transformed grade-school auditorium. Ivy-like garland lined the room’s perimeter, each corner containing an altar dedicated to one of the elements. Fellow dancer Phil consecrated our quarters by offering a fragile, authentic, handmade mandala thangka from India as decoration with a purpose:
Before class, we were asked to bring in a small object that represented one of the elements; as we walked into the space, we were encouraged to visit each of the elemental altars and find one on which to place our object. My object (a polished heart-shaped stone) represented earth, but I was very attracted to the second altar, accented with a tall glass vase filled with water. I kept thinking back to the Rilke quote that “chose me” during my recent Kripalu workshop: “May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.” So it was there next to the water that I lay my earthen heart.
I fell effortlessly into the dance once the music began, but I noticed one thing was really bugging me:
Yes, this beautiful centerpiece—which so perfectly represented the fifth circle of a mandala, the ether—was making me anxious. Now, at the time of our dancing it did not have the candles or paintings, but it was still a giant piece of real estate on which we could not dance.
Or could we? Now that I think about it, I honestly don’t recall the instructor telling us whether we could or could not dance within the circle. I think we all just assumed that this ring was revered, and it would be an act of profanity to step over the white line. Many times I caught myself wanting so badly to leap into the circle; I flirted with the ether, every now and then allowing one leg to hover over the edge during a spin. I wasn’t even fully sure whether there were rules, but I seemed to have imposed my own…and then challenge them.
Fortunately, we had an opportunity to work with these restrictions and challenges. Working in pairs, one person faced the center circle as the partner stood facing back, acting much like a gatekeeper to the treasures and freedom that the flowing white ring represented. One person danced her struggles, falling into a repetitive movement that the partner, serving as a witness, eventually copied.
Then came the uncomfortable part—the mover stood still and watched her dance being played out, a mirror image come to life. What a surprise to step back and see your movement through your own eyes, like reading an old journal entry. There was a bit more to this exercise, a transformation element that involved breaking through the struggle, and for most people the end result was a feeling of relief, like we had just crawled through a long and dark cave and finally stumbled on a pocket of light. Nancy’s next choice of music following this exercise was Michael Franti’s upbeat “I Know I’m Not Alone,” and with it came a dance of celebration. The energy among the entire group had shifted profoundly, and I remember bopping along, smiling like a goofball, feeling like we had all survived something big together, we made it through, so let’s just dance and have fun.
This partnering exercise was the pinnacle of the dance portion of class, a time that I could energetically and emotionally feel my individual self merge with my classmates. We had started as separate circles, our own little individual planets, and then BOOM! Suddenly we were not just stand-alone celestial circles anymore but part of a massive universe, everyone joining the same orbit, a cohesive, spinning mandala.
This mandala only tightened over time, especially during Stillness, as everyone stood around the circle’s edge. Even those I stood across from—separated by a ring of cloth and stones and other small objects—our dance was together. I was engaged in an intimate pas de deux with my stone heart yet at the same time participating in a much larger group dance prayer.
At the very end of class, each of us was given the chance to step inside the circle and do our own personal dance. It was an intensely moving moment, and many people’s expressions brought me to tears. I bit my lip and gripped hard onto those hands I held on either side of me.
The breathwork that proceeded the dancing was anything but your typical belly-breath pranayama—more like 20 minutes of non-stop kundalini breath of fire. Good thing we were lying down, otherwise I may have toppled over! Stavros had warned us beforehand of the effects of such breathing—heaviness/tingling in the extremities, a panicky feeling in the gut that can lead to an emotional release. He was spot-on: The hyperventilating rocked my body, and I vacillated between wanting to sob and laugh hysterically. My hands and feet felt like they were all individual centrifuges, spinning spinning spinning with such intensity. At times they went from feeling like each finger and toe weighed 10 pounds to me not feeling them at all. Nancy (bless her!), feeling the need to support me but not entirely sure what to do, rubbed my feet, held my stomach, and placed a rock in my palm, which I swore was going to levitate from the energy pulsing in my hand. The vibration coming from my palm was so strong that I watched in amazement as the stone ever-so-subtly slid from the center of my hand out toward the edge.
The whole time we were panting and buzzing and crying and laughing, Johanna was secretly setting up individual painting stations for each of us, so that by the time we rolled up off the ground and opened our eyes, there, like magic, were canvases and brushes and a rainbow of paint blobs for us to experiment with. The original intention was for everyone to paint their own mandala, given the subject of the workshop; however, we were all in such a state of woo-woo after that wild breathing that everyone just started doing their own thing and Johanna was reluctant to interfere with the creative process. I tried hard to stay in the semi-hypnotic state and let my heart and gut do the painting rather than my head.
The results (displayed in the previous photo) were still beautiful, a tangible extension of the deep emotional work we had done on the dance floor. It was nice to have a “take-home” element by which to remember the event, although I’m not planning on hanging my creation on my walls anytime soon. My art therapist friend would have a field day with this one:
It was a long afternoon—nearly 4 hours of delving deep into our minds and bodies. In a sense, we were a bit like the monks who spend days, even weeks creating the most intricate sand mandalas, grain by grain. When their elaborate creation is completed, the monks essentially destroy it, brushing the sand together and letting it run off into the air or water, a symbolic act representing impermanence while also spreading forth the blessings and energy of the artwork to which they had committed so much attention and mindfulness.
Photo courtesy of Flickr user waltarrrrr
Each of us was a grain of sand, the workshop a means of coming together into one brilliantly colorful circle. During that final moment of Stillness, as we stood close and held hands, we were that completed mandala. And breath by breath, brushstroke by brushstroke, we gradually separated from each other—the monk’s hand sweeping over our collaborative art—becoming individuals again, yet with a new sense of spirit, energy, and wisdom.
Like the mandala’s sand flowing back into the river, we each went our separate ways after class but yet somehow feeling like we were now part of a much larger picture.
I think there’s some kind of universal phenomenon that when you’re by yourself, wearily and contemplatively driving down an empty road in the middle of the night, whenever you decide to click on the radio, the song that comes to life will be speaking EXACTLY to you. Even if it’s Nickelback or Carly Rae Jepsen or some awful modern-day remix of a song from the ’60s you used to love…somehow, in your vulnerable and delirious state of mind, that song is suddenly the most significant ballad of your current life. You nod along, yelling an emotional “Yeah!” to the deserted road, alternating between laughing giddily at the appropriateness of every word and sobbing between the bridge and the final verse.
I’m really bad at following modern music, so I didn’t know anything about “my” song the other night/morning, except that I had heard it played a lot during the Olympics. Google has since informed me that the song was “Home,” by Phillip Phillips:
Hold on to me as we go
As we roll down this unfamiliar road
And although this wave is stringing us along
Just know you’re not alone
Cause I’m going to make this place your home
OK, so, in all honestly, these lyrics are nothing amazing. Road metaphors? “You’re not alone”? Song Clichés 101. But again, at eleventy-baglock in the morning, Phillip Phillips had become my personal troubadour. Clearly, he had worked with the universe to get his song to play on my car stereo the very moment my desperate hand reached for the radio button.
A 5Rhythms class with Peter Fodera earlier in the day (a Waves class, too. See line 3 of the song. THE RADIO GODS KNOW.) had put me in this state. Peter had spent some time using new direction with us, material from a “Threshold/Gateway” workshop he’s recently developed.
His description:
Every journey begins with the first step, and often taking that first step through the threshold is the most difficult part of the journey. Gateways are often guarded by challenges or difficulties that we have to overcome in order to continue down the path. Beginnings take a great deal of faith and surrender.
As a way of getting us to take these first steps into each rhythm mindfully and with clarity, Peter abandoned the traditional 5Rhythms structure of transitioning seamlessly from one rhythm into another and instead stopped and started the music for each rhythm, giving us specific instruction for beginning each one. With his use of the word “threshold,” I kept thinking of a house, each room being one of the rhythms. What Peter was having us do was enter each room with a new perspective, maybe opening the front door with gratitude and appreciation instead of flinging it open in a mad rush.
- For Flowing, Peter scattered rubber snakes all over the floor as a reminder of staying grounded, the way snakes are. We were to dance only with our feet—no arms—with instruction to be aware of the snakes but not to pay attention to them.
- For Staccato, Peter cranked up a thumping, throbbing, bass-filled song and instructed us not to move. When we were allowed to move, it was only briefly, before we were asked to come to stillness again. It was torture! However, the lesson was clear: True Staccato emerges only when you give it time to speak, when its message is fully developed and ready to scream out to the world. As much as I wanted to shift into Staccato the second I heard that music, being still and giving things time to stir inside made the eventual hip-centric dance more intensely powerful than anything I would’ve done straight out of Flowing.
- In Chaos, we were encouraged to let go of our heads, maybe even positioning ourselves on hands and knees and just letting the head go wild. I was at first resistant to this instruction, but when the wild music started, I had a vision of me standing in front of an out-of-control train, headlight blinding me, the engine roar growing louder and louder. It was so vivid that it dropped me to my knees, and then there I was, on my hands and knees, giving in to Chaos.
- Lyrical, a rhythm for which I tend to use my whole body, was initiated with instruction to dance from the fingers and hands. Any other day, I wouldn’t have liked this specificity, but given that Chaos had rendered me a sweaty, sprawled out mess on the gritty wood floor, I was OK with letting my torso and legs remain dead weight and my fingers do all the work. I eventually got off the ground and found myself engaged in a wonderfully lighthearted ballet guided by my hands.
- In Stillness, the focus is on the breath. Peter instructed us to be mindful of our inhales and exhales, maybe only moving on one or the other. This was a good lesson for me, because sometimes my Stillnesses are so poignant that I hold all the emotion in my throat and forget to breathe.
So here we were, crossing these thresholds in an attempt to come home in our bodies. However, even in a house/practice you are so familiar with, sometimes entering the room/rhythm in a new way or different manner throws things askew. How refreshing it is to step into your kitchen on a Sunday morning, coffee in hand, breakfast on the table? But what if you enter that same kitchen in a distracted tizzy, grocery bags flying everywhere as you attempt to put everything away in 5 seconds before you have to rush out the door again?
Changing up the manner in which you approach a rhythm can make the whole house feel like it’s falling down. I’ve always seen Stillness as the sturdy foundation of my dance but during Saturday’s class I felt more like I had descended into the heart of my home, the basement, without a flashlight. I was still in the same place—the deepest spot of my home, an earthen room of quietness where heat and electricity originate—but without that flashlight I felt lost in my own home. I got scared. The breath didn’t flow as easily, and I could feel my body tighten and tremble. I tried to feel my way around and remind myself where I was; every now and then I got glimpses of daylight, but I allowed the fear to overcome me. My Stillness shifted into uncontrollable shaking and sweating, an unnerving vibration coursing through my center like a furnace ready to blow.
It was one of the few times during a class that I wanted to exit the floor. I was facing so much resistance; emotions and thoughts were getting the best of me. However, two things kept me planted:
1. Like the song lyrics from above, I knew that everyone there with me was on an unfamiliar road. None of was alone; we were all there for each other. It was a safe place, a space for openness and exploration, a metaphorical group home for our souls and spirits to grow, heal, and learn.
2. As a Kripalu yoga teacher, I am very familiar with the practice’s philosophy of “BRFWA“: Breathe, Relax, Feel, Watch, Allow, the five steps to handling any kind of strong emotions or physical sensations. I dealt with a very similar situation during a yoga class in 2006; the recommendation is to simply ride the wave.
So I stayed in the basement that Saturday afternoon in Stillness, BRFWAing through the unease rather than running out the cellar door. If I ran away, my dance—my home—wouldn’t be complete, despite its internal tremblings and instability. I simply wanted to be there to the end.
Even though the sun has been rising later and later, I’ve been pretty good at sticking to my early-morning walk routine all through the summer. In June, I’d need my sunglasses at 6 a.m.; nowadays, not so much. Still, most days I am able to catch the rising sun gleaming off the underside of airplanes descending into Philadelphia, making all jets look like red-bellied Southwest planes, metallic birds with torsos aglow.
However, not all mornings are ideal for the outdoors, including today. With the remnants of Hurricane Isaac drifting toward the Northeast, today started drizzly and gray, a reasonable and seasonable temperature of 70° but the suffocating humidity ruining any notion of comfort (or straight hair). Mother Nature had decided my morning workout: Today I would dance.
Leaving my sneakers in the porch and remaining barefoot, I lit an orange pumpkin-scented candle, bowed my head to the flame, and began to flow.
It’s hard for me to dance first thing in the morning without some kind of guidance, so I made sure to compile a playlist before diving in. One might think that starting with a high-energy techno or rock beat would help shake off the sleepies, but I always prefer to follow 5Rhythms’ gradual build-up structure of Flowing, Staccato, Chaos, Lyrical, and Stillness.
The 5Rhythms structure is kind on the body, the way an opulent meal is to the senses: Flowing is a bit like a glass of wine before the appetizer of Staccato, which is then followed by the hearty and chow-down main meaty course of Chaos. Finally, there is dessert, sweet-like-blueberries Lyrical, the prelude to the final course of Stillness, that moment at the table when you’re sipping coffee with eyes half-closed, smacking your lips, and inhaling the memory of your fulfilling meal.
Here’s the music I chose to represent those sensations:
- Warm-Up: “Damascus,” Conjure One, featuring Chemda
- Flowing: “To Zion,” Trevor Hall
- Flowing: “La Guitarra,” B-Tribe
- Staccato: “Black Velvet,” Bonnie Raitt
- Staccato/Chaos: “Drumming Song,” Florence and The Machine
- Chaos: “Greg Didge,” Music Mosaic (from the album Didgeridoo Trance Dance 2)
- Lyrical: “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” Carlos Santana, featuring India.Arie
- Lyrical: “Pequeño Vals,” Marlango
- Stillness: “Singapore (….),” The Candle Thieves
- Stillness: “Swelling,” Sarah Jaffe
Most of these are songs I’ve danced to in other classes; I find that once I’ve experienced the music in a class setting, it has more weight, the same way hearing a song in a movie soundtrack makes it 10 times more intriguing. For example, every time I hear “To Zion,” I imagine gliding around the wheat-colored carpet in Kripalu’s Main Hall during Dan Leven’s Shake Your Soul class; the frenetic didgeridoo song brought me to the floor, the wall, my feet, and back on the floor again during a mid-summer night’s Dance from the Inside Out class. I remember waltzing around the spacious floor of Studio 34 with an imaginary dance partner to “Pequeño Vals,” and well, hell, I just love Florence. She had to be in there somewhere.
The sweetest thing about the practice was that after an hour of dancing, the flickering flame of the candle I had lit at the start of the dance was being upstaged by something greater: the sun!
This day—filled with thunderstorms, flash floods, and tornado warnings—had about 60 minutes total of scattered sunlight; I am happy to have experienced at least 5 of them as a sweaty, satisfied mess of a body sprawled out on the living room carpet.
”Dance is important…. It can be a reason for a person to get up in the morning”
~ Jeanguy Saintus
When I am dancing by myself, I tend to find “partners” in various inanimate objects around the house, throwing my body against the carpet during an episode of chaos, draping my leg over the back of a chair, grasping onto a door frame as though it’s two arms on either side of me, pressing my back against the wall like there’s another human being supporting my weight, or engaging in a pas de deux with a set of curtains during a moment of stillness.
The aftermath of clawing on the carpet during Chaos
Recently, I even discovered that I can balance my arms on the kitchen counter while walking my feet seductively up the back of one of our wrought-iron chairs. It’s my sexy dance that I do while waiting for my corn to heat up in the microwave.
While I enjoy my creative ways of turning the whole downstairs into a jungle gym, there is one big thing missing from my dances with furniture and flooring: connection. No matter how hard I press my hands into the archway dividing the living room from the dining room, I won’t feel a pulse in return. My skin makes contact with paint and drywall; any energy radiating through my palms stops where the wall begins.
Even the curtains, so wispy and balletic in nature, are unable to cradle me like human arms. They make for a beautiful prop but not a true partner.
Many times during a 5Rhythms class, we are asked to take a partner. Sometimes the instruction is to do nothing other than dance your dance while simply being aware of the other’s movement. Sometimes, especially during workshops, the instruction is more specific and requires some level of trust, such as the time I had to dance while blindfolded, depending on my partner’s energetic cues to prevent me from colliding with other dancers.
The beauty in this work is that–unlike dancing with a wall or a kitchen chair–there is now some level of connection. The energy/prana/chi emanating from my hands and feet has found a safe place to flow, and in return, my partner’s energy mingles with mine. It’s a dance of mutuality.
For example, during last week’s 5Rhythms class, I happened to be partnered with the studio owner, Rhonda, for the last 10 minutes of Stillness. Our connection has been growing stronger by the month, but this time it truly came through during the dance: We linked hands and arms, leaned on each other for support, rolled on the floor together, held the weight of the other’s skulls in our hands, ran fingers through hair. It required a lot of trust and a huge opening of the heart. It’s not something everyone can do right off the bat, but that night it felt like we were conversing on an emotionally deep level that words would never be able to justify.
To end class, we stayed with this partner for an eye-gazing meditation, in which each person stares into the other’s left eye. This was the Stillness to end all Stillnesses, because, really, what act is simultaneously so still yet so moving? On the outside we may have been motionless, but it’s darn near impossible to look someone straight in the eye for 5 minutes and not feel things stirring inside. After class, we were both a bit weepy.
In this type of work, you may not know your partner’s stories or have an answers to their questions, but you can offer your unbiased presence. Likewise, the mere acknowledgement of your existence by another can be so comforting, a silent yet powerful dance that surpasses any exchange between human and home furnishings.
During a 5Rhythms class this past weekend, guest teacher Daniella Peltekova ended our first Wave by playing the closing song from the movie Babel, Ryuichi Sakamoto’s “Bibo no Aozora,” a simple and sweet piano-and-strings melody that accompanies what is perhaps the film’s most powerful and achingly sad moments. In this final scene, the deaf Japanese teenager Chieko, her handicap a giant wall hindering her ability to connect emotionally and physically with others, is so desperate to experience human connection and touch that she invites a police officer over to her apartment and stands nude in front him. After he rejects her, she moves outside to the balcony of her high-rise apartment, standing naked against the railing—perhaps contemplating suicide—until her father finds her and embraces her clothes-less body.
Even if Daniella chose this song simply for its melody, I found the connection so appropriate for the practice of 5Rhythms, where every class is a metaphorical shedding of clothes until we are standing in Stillness, so exposed, so vulnerable, so naked.
I think back to the days I used to go clubbing every Friday, when I’d be surrounded by women in halter tops and mini-skirts, my body packed tightly against others’ breasts and bare arms. There was a lot of partial nudity going on there under that disco ball and dry ice machine, but bumping and grinding to Beyonce in a tube top and jeggings is nothing compared to throwing yourself head-first into a 5Rhythms Wave, putting it all out there on the dance floor: screams, cries, laughter—everything–good, bad, beautiful, ugly.
Even in the winter, when my standard 5Rhythms dance attire consists of a long skirt, leggings, a hoodie, toe socks, and perhaps even a scarf, I am more naked than I am when changing in the gym locker room.
When I say naked, I mean vulnerable, being radically open to any and all possibilities and realizations. Reaching for another’s arm. Allowing another’s arm to touch yours. Making eye contact with that stranger with the tears in his eyes. Unleashing the angels and demons inside of you during Chaos and then caressing this new (and sometimes scary) sense of self during Stillness, exploring this new you with precision and awe, like an archaeologist tracing a magnifying glass over the walls of an Egyptian king’s tomb.
Emotions crop up. Hearts expand. Curiosity grows. Mysteries unfold. The naked soul is exposed.
Winter time—with all of those holiday obligations, family gatherings, office parties, and pollyanas—tends to seem like the season of overdoing, but I believe my peak of exhaustion always comes in the summer, as in, right about now.
Ever since Daylight Saving, the hours of extended sun, the increasing heat, the mating bunnies and the birds, and just being able to walk outside without the need for a coat the strength of a sleeping bag has led to one huge steaming pot of prana churning in my gut that makes me want to dance, run, swim, frolic, chant in Sanskrit, and speak in tongues, all at the same time. The moment those clocks leaped ahead one hour, so did my heart, and my calendar has since been jam packed.
I have given my fullest to every engagement—whether dancing Nia, 5Rhythms, Let Your Yoga Dance, Wu Tao, Journey Dance, or even just dancing in the living room with the air conditioner intentionally off so I mean it when I say I’ve sweat my prayers—but now that it’s August—today is unbearably sticky and humid and everything August is supposed to be—I am tired. I am exhausted. My feet are dirty, I haven’t showered, my hair’s a mess, I am sleep deprived, and my husband just told me that I smell (it’s true).
This is me.
I attended a special 5Rhythms workshop this weekend, a 7-hour extravaganza titled “Riding the Wave.” This was the class description:
In this summer Waves workshop lies an invitation to experience moving with ease, effortlessly, from a place where we allow ourselves to be moved, a place of being rather than doing, a place where we let the music play us, where we become the dance. Come explore how to let go and ease into the caressing waves of the 5Rhythms, and allow them to carry you to the quiet shores within.
It sounds so idyllic, doesn’t it? Summertime waves. Seagulls. The seashore at sunrise. Ebb, flow, back, forth. Ahhhh.
Not for me. My dance was more like last year’s Hurricane Irene. A board-up-the-windows-and-prepare-the-sandbags kind of dance. The kind where it’s very tempting to just follow the “evacuation route” sign from shore to mainland, but instead I opted to stand out at sea and allow the waves to take me.
The exhaustion never sets in right away. I mean, check out this picture of me right after class, with teacher Rivi Diamond.
I am glowing! I survived a storm! I have salt all over my face and dirt on my feet, and I am loving it!
Part of this glow is that, despite throwing myself through one hell of a wave, I was fully supported the entire time. That’s the one really, really beautiful thing about dancing as a group—it’s a tribe, and everyone is there for each other. We do not dance to critique or judge or compete. We move to be moved, and when that movement gets scary or sad or intense, so many people are right there alongside of you, some friends, some strangers.
For example, this is me and Lauren:
I met Lauren once before, briefly, at a previous workshop. We didn’t even remember each others’ names this time around. But we were paired together for a “waves-versus-steady shore” dance, in which one person danced their waves and the other acted as the watchful island, a witness and support system to caress the crashing water. I felt comfortable with Lauren and wasn’t afraid to let my waves crash around her. Likewise, I enjoyed being Lauren’s shore, her movement stirring my sand, bits of me breaking off and entering her ocean so that we became one unit rather than two parts.
And this is my new BFF Valeria:
Valeria and I partnered up at the beginning of class, after instruction to make eye contact with someone you know least. We were complete strangers at noon and left the building at 7 p.m. hugging, kissing, exchanging contact info, and vowing to do coffee and dinner and dancing! We danced “Summertime…and the Living is Easy” together, easily following Rivi’s instruction to hold onto the partner’s head, neck, shoulders, back, and hips, the one partner’s hands being a supportive “shore” for the other’s ebbs and flows. At the end of class, during our final check-in with each other, Rivi gave us permission to tell our partner what we needed: talk? tears? distance? a massage? Valeria and I didn’t exchange any words, but our conversation was touching and profound. It was such an honest display of emotion and longing, with tears, snot, massage, and gentle touch. It is how every human should be held and received.
Even during the most wickedly intense portion of class for me—Chaos—the supportive shoreline was always there. We had stretched out in a giant circle; those needing to ride the wave went in the center, and those with more solid footing stayed on the perimeter. That perimeter saved my life. I was drowning in dance, throwing myself in the waves, screaming (literally), thrashing my now unbound hair, but my eyes always found a steady support there around the “life preserver” ring, whether just a smile or gesture or transfer of invisible energy. This tiger was on a rampage, but the cage around me expanded and contracted as needed, never constricting my movement yet giving me a sense of loving containment. In return, when I saw friends in need, I screamed, shook, and vibrated along with them.
Near the end of class, I experienced a brief sensation of aloneness as I walked through a “graveyard” of bodies, people spread out in various shapes of savasana. It was as though everyone’s old self was dying, melting into the earth, and I was joining them in this passage. It was a bit sad, but when I closed my eyes I saw all of my classmates’ faces so vividly, each of them crying along with me. It may sound mournful to have that kind of vision, but it was actually an uplifting one, a bit of an energetic reminder that everyone hurts, everyone cries, everyone needs each other.
So yes, there was much thrashing and crashing during the workshop, but also so many moments of “steady shore” support, whether rocking shoulder-to-shoulder like a human raft out in the Caribbean, watching an amoeba of human beings expand and contract like seaweed, and using the rhythm of Stillness to support each of the other 4 rhythms (what a relief to dance Chaos with the undercurrent of Stillness!).
I emerged from the waters sun-kissed, salty, and a survivor! That was one helluva ride! But, as I mentioned at the start of this post, I’m feeling it now. It’s summertime, and the living is…sometimes exhausting. But the truth is, I don’t think I’m ever going to chill out and stop dancing. As long as I’ve got the rhythm of Stillness guiding me home, I think I just might be OK.
Our “beach.”
May what I do flow from me like a river,
no forcing and no holding back,
the way it is with children.
This was the quote I drew from a bowl full of folded pieces of paper that sat in the center of a circle of women gathered for the Embodied Meditation program I took last month at Kripalu. The quote, from Rainer Maria Rilke, brought a smile to my lips—here I am, author of Flowtation Devices, randomly selecting a verse about allowing my essence to flow.
I re-discovered this piece of paper this weekend, tucked inside of my wallet. It was good timing—it was my birthday weekend (today’s my actual birthday!), and it reminded me about all the flowing and growing I’ve done this past year.
When I started dancing 5Rhythms two and a half years ago, I never imagined it would become a life practice. It’s a little bit like what happened with yoga—I started taking classes because I danced and thought it would help with my flexibility, and soon I was trying to learn Sanskrit on my own and reading about the yamas and niyamas. With the 5Rhythms, I was looking for a cardiovascular workout that wouldn’t further damage my aching hip, and now I use the dance as therapy, a practice in interpersonal communication, and as a means of fostering connection with not only the people I dance with but the world around me.
I was so thrilled to take a pre-birthday 5Rhythms class this past Friday, a class during which my dance really felt like a 31-year-old transitioning into her 32nd year. I had strong eye contact with others. I laughed. I was spontaneous in my movement with others. These things were once so hard for me, because back in the day I just wanted to dance; I didn’t quite grasp the connection bit yet.
At one point, I partnered up with a female classmate who usually keeps to herself. I can see she always feels the music very deeply, but it is rare for her to engage. However, during Friday’s class, something opened up between us. It was a Lyrical song, and we were both still feeling the vibrations from Chaos. The dance that emerged was new for the both of us—a very sensual, feminine, sometimes intertwined-arms partnership, our eyes locked, our sweaty hair matted on our cheeks. It felt like a motion picture version of the Visions of Arcadia art exhibit. I wasn’t trying to force this connection, but I began the dance with an intention to be radically open—to let what I do flow from me like a river—and the result was quite rewarding.
Off the dance floor, I try to move in the same manner. For instance, every morning I go walking around my neighborhood before work. I frequently pass a woman who keeps her eyes straight ahead and never gives me so much as a half-nod when I pass her and say “Good morning.” But every morning, I keep trying. “Good morning!” ::silence:: It was tempting to just give up and greet her with the same muteness, but something clicked late last week—I got a return “Good morning!” Granted, it was rather mumbled and void of much emotion, but it was connection! (And I may have given myself a little victory fist-pump after I passed her.) 🙂
My greater commitment to conscious dancing this past year (attending more classes, classes in other areas, workshops) has been so helpful in getting the real me to emerge. Sometimes I say that the dancing has changed me, but I think it has just taken what has always been inside of me and transformed it into action.
For example, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been walking around with my iPod in and just wanted to break out of my stride and DANCE when a particularly powerful piece of music came on. Well, the other week, I did. I dance walked! Around the creek, with joggers and cyclists and dog walkers. I can’t tell you how awesome it felt to be outdoors, saying Yes! to dance when my body craved it so much. Instead of thinking, “Ooooh, how I love this song. It stirs my heart. Wish I could dance. Wish I could dance. Wish I could dance,” I just did it. I danced!
And then Saturday afternoon, there came a beautiful sun shower; well, a sun downpour, really. I stood in my upstairs hallway, hypnotized by the combination of brilliant sun and driving rain, soaking the tree leaves outside the window, falling on the roof. I had a sudden desire to run outside, naked, arms outstretched, and take it all in, the way characters in European avant garde movies do. The impulse was so strong that I ran to my dresser, pulled out my bathing suit (it was the closest I could get to naked without having the cops called on me), and dashed outside. Who is that girl in the Speedo, standing on her front walkway, arms outstretched? Me, and it felt amazing. Not just the sensation of standing in a downpour with the sun shining on me but the sensation of listening to the voice inside of me that craved so desperately to fully take in this meteorological display.
Photo courtesy of Flickr user Ikhlasul Amal
I have no reservations on my birthday today about “getting older.” With age comes practice, experience, and wisdom…and a few wrinkles and dark circles under my eyes as humble indicators of the ever-unfolding journey.
My first experience with 5Rhythms was in April 2010. The class took place in a suburban yoga studio, which resides in the basement of an office building. The space is warm and nurturing, but—being in a basement—there are no windows, no view of the outside, and the ceiling hangs low enough that jumping with your arms above your head is something to do with caution.
It is a sweet spot, a second home where I have experienced moments of great tenderness. The monthly class draws a small crowd, enough to have moments of connection with everyone in the room. Metaphorically, the space is a bit like a living room fireplace—cozy, sensual, with the invitation to sink in, let go for a moment, and then return to softness before drifting to Stillness with an empty glass of wine in your hand.
And then there’s New York.
New York City is the heart of 5Rhythms, the headquarters for the practice.
If my monthly class in suburban New Jersey is a crackling fireplace, dancing with Tammy Burstein on a Friday night at the Joffrey Ballet School is a 6-foot high roaring bonfire at Burning Man.
This past Friday marked my first 5Rhythms pilgrimage to Manhattan, thanks to the transportation coordination of one of our tribeholders (I would have never gotten there myself). I was both excited (working with a master teacher, dancing with so many personalities) and terrified (little suburban girl in the big city!).
The funny thing is, to get to the 5Rhythms space, you have to climb to the 5th floor of the building, brushing past leotard-and-tights-clad Joffrey Ballet dancers. In the locker room, I change into my Target yoga pants and flowing floral shirt from Kohl’s as the young girl next to me donned in skin-tight Capezio ballet wear fixes her immaculate bun in the mirror. We walk past rehearsal spaces with girls lined up along the barre, the sound of an instructor counting off “and 1, and 2, and 3, and 4,” everyone’s movement synchronized, coordinated, legs and arms moving as one.
I realized that that terrified me more than anything—the memory of always aiming for perfection, the instant sense of competition when slipping into ballet shoes and lining up with other girls whose battements were just a little higher than yours, whose triple pirouettes looked more solid than your doubles. Being in that environment—if only for a few minutes—made entering the 5Rhythms space that much more relieving, a coming home of sorts.
The barres were pushed to the sides of the room; the only light illuminating the space was a strand of Christmas lights strung around the perimeter, the setting sun outside, and the ever-glowing lights of Manhattan at dusk. People of all shapes, sizes, races, and dance attire begin filtering in the expansive space, and like that we all knew what to do. Just get out there and dance. Music played, we moved. The feeling of being surrounded by so many people (40? 50?) who looked so comfortable in their bodies was incredible. It was a struggle at first to sink within myself and find my own dance when all I wanted to do was step back and watch everyone else. A woman sat off to the side and sketched the whole night. I wish I could have seen what her eyes saw.
I didn’t make too many connections during the first Wave, and that disappointed me. So many brilliant people were in this space, and I yearned to share a moment of movement with them. As I slowed down into Stillness, I almost let this melancholy take over me until Tammy said to the group, “Learn to be confident with yourself the way you would with another.”
Those words were all I needed to hear. As the next Wave began, I knew that I had to dance for myself first. The purpose of the practice wasn’t to seek out acceptance from others but to find it within. The magic is that once I stuck to that creed, connection began on its own. I shared a heart-thumping, fourth-chakra Chaos shake-off with one person; a theatrical Broadway-esque dance to “This Little Light of Mine” with another; and a slow and intimate linkage of hands and arms with Jason, Tammy’s husband. As I shimmied past others, there were brief but personal moments of connection, whether through eye contact, an exchange of vocal out-breaths, or fancy footwork.
The second Chaos of the evening was by far the most powerful, when it felt as though every body in that room was gasping for the same breath, sweating from the same pores. As the pulsing techno music reached its climax, everyone in the room joined in a guttural scream, arms flailing, sweat drip-drip-dripping. It felt like I was in an amusement park, riding every attraction at once—descending down the first hill of a roller coaster, spinning on the Gravitron, pulling the cord on the freefall. I was simultaneously losing control but being so acutely aware of it, dropping and spinning and plummeting yet also feeling like everything was suspended in time. It was the stillpoint in the Chaos, a moment of such madness but with a mysterious current of calmness underneath.
Crystal-clear clarity washed over me after Chaos into Lyrical, my senses open to everything around me: The clocktower next to our building chiming nine times, echoing in the cavernous streets of the city below. The pinpoint top of the Empire State Building peeking above the flat-topped buildings in front of us. The aroma of pizza wafting through the open windows, the light breeze brushing my cheek. Car horns honking, trucks idling, engines revving. The reds and greens of the traffic lights glowing. Silhouetted bodies around me moving like chess pieces coming to life. The sight of another person’s apartment across the street, a painting on the wall. The muffled sound of piano music coming from the ballet studio below. All of these things became part of the dance, the movement of just being.
I sucked in all of these elements around me as the final Stillness began, my hands caressing the floor as though it were another’s chest, coaxing them into this sweet stillness with me, my fingertips brushing over an invisible collarbone, sternum, rib cage. There was nothing but floorboards under my skin, but I felt so much life. When I walked outside onto 6th Avenue, the subway rumbled below in return, my feet vibrating from this underground turbulence: the chaos, the stillness, the musical meditation of Manhattan.
Photo Courtesy of Flickr User muckster
An interesting thing happened in 5Rhythms class last weekend: The stereo crapped out.
5Rhythms is movement meditation practice guided by—you got it—music, so you can imagine how this threw a wrench in the instructor’s plans. We were 20 minutes into a 2.5-hour long class, and now, instead of a thumping, bass-filled surround-sound, we had only the tinny whisper of music straining from the instructor’s laptop, such a small sound in comparison to the huge room we were dancing in.
Luckily, the teacher was pretty quick on his feet and miraculously found a way to teach the 5Rhythms through sound rather than music. Either he’s just really good at extemporaneous instruction or there’s a component of 5Rhythms training titled “Music Crises 101.” Either way, it worked.
For a portion of the class, we became the music, vocalizing “Flowing” sounds, so that the room became a chorus of oooohs and aaahs and sing-song laughter. We made sound together; we sang alone. I see these people dance all the time with my eyes but never before had the chance to hear their dance with my ears. Where did that deep, throaty sound come from? Was that inside you all this time?
We used clapping and stomping for Staccato, a gong to facilitate the release of Chaos, flew around the room like birds for Lyrical, and gathered close to the laptop as the subtle sounds from the speakers settled us into Stillness. At that point, the lack of music wasn’t even a factor, as sometimes silence can produce the loudest of Stillnesses for me, especially when the energy I’ve amassed from everyone else in the room is making my cells vibrate like a subwoofer cranked full volume, my pulse the underlying melody to the song that resides within.
Sometimes the energetic music we make with each other is just as powerful as the most stirring ballad. Thanks for turning a moment of Chaos into just another beautiful Wave, Richard!
“Those who dance are thought to be quite insane by those who cannot hear the music.”
~ Angela Monet
When Bryan and I decided to go to Washington, DC this past Saturday, my #1 priority was to get to the National Gallery of Art to see Thomas Cole’s The Voyage of Life. It is the four-part series of paintings that inspired Jeanne Ruddy’s Out of the Mist, Above the Real, the dance piece I saw a few weeks ago. The piece moved me greatly, and how fortunate am I that a day trip to DC allowed me the opportunity to see the original artwork behind the choreography?
Once I got that off my chest, we moseyed around the museum and admired Manet, Monet, Renior, and Degas, among others, including a visually striking photography exhibit on the circa-1984 New York City subway. Although snaking through an art museum without a guidebook or plan of action makes me a bit discombobulated (I feel like I need a trail of breadcrumbs to remind me where I’ve been), the act of turning a corner and coming face to face with something surprising, stirring, or moving is what the museum experience is all about.
I hesitate to interrupt this artistic discussion with talk of food, but I feel it is my duty to share with everyone my love for the Mitsitam Cafe in the National Museum of the American Indian. If you need to break for lunch at one of the Smithsonian museums, this is the one to do so.
The food court is broken down into stations representing the various regions of the Americas and the foods indigenous to that culture: Northern Woodlands, Mesoamerica, South America, Northwest Coast, and Great Plains. You can mix and match food items, creating one melting pot of a meal. It reminds me of World Showcase in Epcot, but without the need to walk a mile in the central Florida sun to collect your global cuisine.
Our meal, clockwise from upper left: Indian fry bread; buffalo chili; cedar-plank fire-roasted salmon with wild berry glaze; pumpkin cookies; red beets, candied apples, toasted walnuts, cherry vinaigrette; braised chard; and quesadilla with chihualua cheese, spinach, mushroom, and huitlacoche.
So much tastier than chicken fingers and fries!
We did a lot of walking, probably close to a half marathon (13 miles) by the end of the day, including a ridiculously strenuous climb up a non-working escalator in the Woodley Park-Zoo Metro station as other (sane) people watched us from the functioning one. The ascent was steep and loooong; it looked like a fun challenge at first but then just got hard. We further punished ourselves by standing in a 20-minute line at the Zoo to see a panda bear that was dead asleep and then walking through every twist and turn of the Asia exhibit hoping to catch sight of the sloth bear that was nowhere to be found.
One thing I did find, though, was each of the 5Rhythms. Even when I’m trekking around the nation’s capital, my mind is never far from dancing and the rhythms that tie us all together. For example, I witnessed kites soaring high above the National Mall lawn (Flowing), a flock of Canada geese audibly pecking the grass under their webbed feet (Staccato), a group of hyper schoolchildren in matching T-shirts and hats scramble onto their tour bus (Chaos), a young girl in a cream-colored dress run with her same-colored dog up a grassy hill (Lyrical), and a group of veterans in wheelchairs being pushed slowly around the Vietnam Memorial (Stillness).
I think the practice of 5Rhythms, coupled with yoga and meditation, has helped sharpen my senses and my awareness of all the little dances taking place within the larger dance. When you look at a satellite map of a city, everything looks either gray, green, or blue. Look closer, and you see, hear, and feel the rhythms:
Flowing:
National Museum of the American Indian
Staccato:
Washington Monument
Chaos:
Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden
Lyrical:
U.S. Capitol Building
Stillness:
Vietnam Memorial
A completed Wave:
Atrium, National Museum of the American Indian
Flowtation Devices 