All of Creation Sings Praise With Us

Making My Way Back to The Dancing Center

I had no idea I would be in such a mega-growth spurt this summer, so much so that I wonder if there’s another book in me, something about body, soul, power, and accountability.

As I slowly integrate my experiences on the island of Patmos in Greece and in remote Holden Village in Washinton State, where I taught alongside Marla Durden, all I know is that what I need to write won’t fit in a post or two. I’m a “depth processor,” a fundamental trait of high sensitivity that puts me among the one-fifth of humans who feel and notice more deeply than others. Making meaning is making sense. Sometimes, I laughingly call myself “a meaning monger.”

From the book Flashlight by LiziBoyd

Sensing deeply is a gift and a curse. It's difficult to dim my sensations, which makes overstimulation real. Challenging emotions like anger, grief, frustration, and sometimes too much love can run me. As a consequence, I am constantly sorting through complex physical experiences inside, with those I love, in groups, and with big entities like the ocean or the nation.

High sensitivity is probably why spiritual, artistic, scholarly, and shamanic lineages evolved. Those of us who pick up a lot of unaccounted-for data, who get overstimulated and overwhelmed, need manual tools to settle us. We also notice and process on behalf of our communities.

Sensations work on me until they find a form, a place, a method. This is why I am SO GRATEFUL for movement, art, breath, and vocalizing. Each one has unique neuropathways that help me literally move and spend down the energy of life’s experiences. In addition, as I hook up my visual, kinesthetic, and spatial intelligence and imagination, I find new ways of seeing things. One short dance or a single improvisational song helps metabolize and transform confusion into something more creative and whole.

And I've learned that drama is drama. Intensity is a symptom, not the whole of reality. I must let go of harm.

Contentment, serenity, and life's quiet ecstasy beg to center me in everyday hymns of praise to artistry, yummy food, affection, good humor, cheeky fun, and beauty. In InterPlay, this ability to notice and have more of the "good," orients us to the physicality of grace where we get to have more of it.

Thank heaven for artists whose grace moves us! They’re everywhere! Just this month, playmates Mairi Campbell in Edinburgh sings from her album The Living Stone, and Asherhah Weiss is celebrating a new book, You Are Amazing Like a Rocket: Pep Talks for Everyone, from Young People Around the World. Sara Nesson pays homage to her aquatic nature, passion for the wilderness, and a life altered by ME/CFS in her Body of Water solo performance. David Mann, partner to Penelope Mann, just published Becoming Better Men: Stories from Seventeen Years of Letters, offering rare, interpersonal storytelling from white guys learning from one another and Mary Cohen shares her chant on the 150th episode of Breath of Song with Patricia Norton.

And then there’s the amazing Allison Russell

The Divine Soul Print, The Dance of Love and Life, is steadfast in everything in spite of global volatility and all these embedded histories of violence. Even when it feels like there is no escape, I choose to move toward the graciousness flowing through my brain, muscles, breath, and soul, what I call the Dancing Center. I am with Bayo Akomolafe, one of the great mythopoetic seers of our time, who says,

Dancing is a more-than-human intelligence. Dance is theory and practice; dance is an unspeakably creative act of anticipation and divination; a politics, perhaps: it is how we shrink from the Other, or how we embrace bodies around us; how the universe paints eyes on the butterfly's wings, how the plover bird knows to negotiate a hybrid body with the crocodile, how the fungal spore disorients the zombie ant, how our bodies know how to die.

I suspect we will need movements that come to see dance as a decolonial politics. Why else would they be called movements?     

Unfortunately, I notice that the more I honor the living, moving agency in all sovereign beings in our interconnected choreography, the more challenged I am by hindrances that disrupt basic connection with the Dance within and around me. I don't want to get stuck anywhere that perpetuates harm, including myself.

How do I/we 1) metabolize and transform hardship and hostility with creativity, 2) honor one another's sovereignty as souls, 3) co-create health with all our relations, and 4) uphold our own and one another's lineages?

We need each other as co-researchers. That is why I am offering a Free Gathering of Sensitives: Wisdom for These Times on August 23, 4 PM Pacific. We'll explore the wisdom of sensitivity as we circle up, listen, and discern what role we might play in the coming days. We'll honor the support and attend to the support we need. 

This gathering draws on my Art of Ensoulment Playbook on How to Create from Body and Soul, InterPlay Tools, and a gifted and diverse community of coaches who are actively exploring the body wisdom of soul in their personal and professional practices.

Thanks so much for reading and sharing your comments and questions. This post goes to my whole list as a kind of letter from one body to another. Take Care.