Increasingly, the movement and embodiment practices that I teach are less about activating the physical body - though this of course is part of it. These practices have become more and more about inspiring an experience of innate joy in the living soul and body.
As a teacher of movement, somatics, dance and yoga for over 20 years, I have watched people infuse their physical practices with the same anxiety, trauma, pain, and listlessness that they experience within their life.
I have watched people violently exercising for years - attempting to control, sculpt, form, and reform their physical bodies so that they might reach societal standards based upon a false sense of radiance and beauty.
The self-hatred, self-abuse, self/mutilation, and flagellation are byproducts of a fractured relationship to self and spirit, which is the status quo of our dominant culture.
When people cultivate such experiences through their movement practice - they are reinforcing these psychosomatic realities within their lives. A potentially profoundly healing experience then becomes one where we allow our loops of suffering to be heightened and underscored, never breaking free of the prison of our ancestral trauma and life history, never liberating ourselves from our own experience of self-loathing.
When we begin to engage gentle, rhythmic, harmonic practices through our daily movement, we begin to infuse the life of the cells with our own divine radiance.
We begin to cultivate the beauty rather than the ugliness, the wholeness, rather than the fragmentation, the dance, rather than the war, the song, rather than the noise, the soul, rather than just the physical form.
We move into a living relationship with the human spirit, one which reflects the unfolding beauty and mystery within our daily experience, and one that honors above all the sublime nature of the cosmic dance which is at all times infused with pure joy.
This is the ecstasy of the great dance, of which we all have the capacity to embody.
