I React: Moving Through That Difficult Dance
Disciplines in Communal Creativity
The times are urgent, let us go slowly down into sanctuary.
The times are urgent, let us be slowed down by the beings that exceed us.
The times are urgent, let us be defeated by things that we cannot understand.
The times are urgent, let us defract our ways of knowing.
The times are urgent, let us be released from the traps of
the things we already know.
~ Bayo Akomolafe
Three times recently, I got caught off guard. I was unprepared to meet others’ strong feelings. My groin ignited. Heat rushed up my body like fire.
Pearl S. Buck reminds, “The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him… a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create — so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.”
I’m a super-reciever. When I am wide open, I catch love, joy, and others' anger, pain, and frustration. I spend my life figuring out how to hold on to myself and get back to solid ground. In particularly LOUD moments, if I take a stand and lose neutrality or love, perspective vanishes. Like it says in the Bible. “If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.” Gongs go off. I can’t hear anything outside my inner clanging.
When I flare up, I’ve learned to step away and walk. move, to take a few minutes to reset. When I return, I take some responsibility for my actions and their impact. I often apologize.
Does this happen to you, too?
I don’t know if others can pivot so quickly.
I’m privileged. I’ve booked 100 tools and helpers who support me to nurture the love that fuels my desire for repair. Plus, I’m a dancer. Movement is my nature.
That being said, when I can’t find neutrality, stepping back is how I love myself and others.
In another contentious flare-up, I ached with a heart pain that I hadn’t felt in ages. My thoughts and feelings began to spiral. Beliefs. Stories. Memories. Thankfully, someone invited me to stop spinning, and I remembered to stop. Wondrous ability! When I stopped resisting the hurt and allowed the pain, I felt it soften.
That’s when I heard the guide-dance, “Everything You Do Not Want to Feel, You Will Feel.”
There’s so much about life that I don’t want to feel! Do I have a choice?
Resisting feelings doesn’t work. Bodies turn resistance into resentment. Inevitably, we are the ones injured when we do this.
Let e-motion move.
Monumentalizing feelings doesn’t work, even though big sensations want the stage.
I can take the fire out of a sensation if I turn toward it.
Dumping on myself or others adds fire to the fire.
Can we dance with feelings, not as truth, but as consequential data? Feelings matter. But they pass. Life, love, and relationships matter more.
Dance and Pray.
Prayer is not sending in an order and expecting it to be fulfilled. Prayer is attuning yourself to the life of the world, to love, the force that moves the sun and the moon and the stars. BR. DAVID STEINDL-RAST
The Days Ahead
Wise people across various fronts warn that the coming days and months will be intense. We are encountering phenomena that humans haven’t navigated, brought on by AI, earth events, climate, and system breakdowns, and new forms of growth.
Chaos.
Without a reliable body memory or strategy to fall back on, without common histories of practice, we feel anxious, react, flare up. We are advised. “Let us be slowed down by the beings that exceed us. The times are urgent; let us be defeated by things that we cannot understand.”
Be defeated? Or? In the Great Dancing Mystery, will we surprise each other as we collaborate spontaneously at both global and local levels? My daughter sent a viral reel of soccer fans leaping across relational borders thanks to The Game and Each Other. I also saw the Great Dance of Connection in The Opening of the Barack Obama Presidential Center.
Somatic wisdom has an invitation. When thrown off guard– Move. Experience, Move, Let go. Notice. Isn’t this Love’s Way?
We do it all the time, unaware. Life moves us through and beyond resistance.
Move. Experience, Move, Let go. Notice.
In the days ahead, I pray for courage to dance and love my very real life, knowing that resisting sensations, mine or others, rarely works.
I pray to go slowly down into sanctuary, to move humanely through each challenge and offer others the same opportunity.
I pray to let go of “a right way to do things” and together seek new ways to dance.
If I maintain artful practices, community, and the guidance of The Dancing Way, there is reason to hope.
Speaking of hope…. I pray to meet you in the Great Dance!
Keep it by your bedside to read like a prayer before sleep.
Read it to one another, especially to children.
Share it in a circle as you pass it from person to person, reading one page at a time.
Have someone read as another dances.
Share it with those who wonder if they really belong.
The invitation, as the prayer says, is this.
Today, like every day
The Great Dance
needs you
and all of creation
all planets, stars,
trees and mountains and beasts
ocean and deserts
insects and humans
to join in the Dance.
If you listen to your bodyspirit
You can hear the Great Dance sing,
“Dance
Dance each morning
and dance each day.
And at night,
I will dance in your dreams,
for we are the Dance!
I dance in you
You dance in me
The Dance that is forever.”
Bless you, my dancing one.
Check out the Dancing Monastery and weekly online dance chapels with dance chaplains who lead gentle, improvisational sanctuaries that allow us to move and pray. I lead Mondays at 4:30 Pacific.
If body and soul are areas of exploration for you, check out The Art of Ensoulment Playbook. It maps twelve playful and powerful initiations that help me and the Ensoulment Coaches to track, practice, and share the body wisdom of soul.
Cynthia, thank you sharing your resonant, reflective, encouraging and inspiring voice! There is much here I would like to remember day by day in these times in particular.
Thank you, Cynthia for your learned wisdom about reactivity, your story and truth pointing a better way. The quote at the start, words of Bayo Akomolafe, I will hang onto. Your voice a guiding light at this time. Gratitude.