Movement

These past weeks have given me a greater understanding about the nuances residing in the life of movement. I have used this word -movement- lightly, now know it was a limited understanding, stemming from having a body that has moved autonomously and freely, almost carelessly.

Ever since I can remember I have relied on the strength, flexibility and the wondrous resilience of my body. When I was four years old my mother decided I was to begin a practice of corrective gymnastics to prevent future posture and back ailments. She found two wonderful teachers whose passion for a balanced structure and conscious movement practice, instilled in me a natural sense of knowing the nature of movement within my physical body. I remained their student for 15 years.

As I often do, I took this rich forming experience for granted and wanted something different. I dreamed of becoming a dancer, seeing friends going to ballet classes filled me with envy and wonder. When I asked to join them the response always was, "this is what is best for your body", an elusive answer at the time.      

In retrospect I now know that the two are one, that movement is dancing. If I could not practice it in a class, I imagined myself dancing, every night before sleep, in the privacy of my imagination. This ritual began when I was very young, it comforted me, giving meaning to my days, soothing the surrendering to my nights. It gave me a place in my world. I now see that my understanding of movement allowed me to intuitively create choreographies for a nocturnal imaginary audience; it was my prayer. I feeling as one with the movement of life.

Later as an adolescent, I remember going to the village disco and dancing all night, as one with the rhythms of Janis Joplin, the Rolling Stones, the Doors, Santana, Jimmy Hendricks; nothing else mattered as much, not even boys. In college I danced for years with Lucy, my long time friend, in an Afro-Haitian dance group, and felt the joy of being led by a great teacher and wonderful drummers. When I moved back to Mexico and found myself in a remote town, I began to teach what I knew, just to keep on dancing. In doing so, something invaluable was revealed to me. 

The innate understanding of rhythm, of innately knowing how waves of movement travel along muscles and tissues, and the physical coordination that came so naturally to me, was not everybody´s experience. The growing frustration I felt in my teaching came from sensing the hollowness of imitation, and led me to look for ways to reveal and guide others in finding and becoming their own flow. My wish was to bring their awareness in trusting their ability to allow, rather than lead, the body´s natural response to rhythm. 

Throughout those years I encountered inspired teachers and modalities which follow this train of thought. What if, rather than "making" our body move, we open pathways for spontaneous and natural movement? Charlotte Selver, John Pierrakos, Emilie Conrad, Gabrielle Roth are some of the wonderful teachers who matched my soul´s desire to embrace movement as a celebration of a physical and spiritual nature of our body. A body which knows how to move and teaches us, if we allow it, about the essence of movement, of Spirit itself.

For years, in my therapeutic and healing practice, I focused on restoring consciousness, thus movement, in all realms of existence in a person, knowing that any form of blocked energy ultimately leads to pain, illness and despair. The substance of this focus came from questioning and challenging my own life, by bringing awareness to the tightness that held hostage my freedom and the movement of my being. Throughout that time I continued to dance just because I loved it, it led me into energetic spaces where I could loose and find myself again endlessly, effortlessly. Up until that time I had not realized the impact of a physical impairment.

Today I can say I´ve had an opportunity to visit and experience movement impairment by having a knee surgery. The intensity of this time and space has led me to ask many questions. I felt sucked into a dark tunnel, a void that neutralized and altered all my thoughts, plans and projects, all swirling senselessly in a chaotic spin. The familiar flows, cadences and known pathways of movement disappeared, nothing worked as before. I could hear the fear of my screaming mind which kept saying "snap out of it", "get back on your feet", "MOVE" while all came to a complete halt, my work, social life, projects and future.

I finally had to let go into a complete surrender and open up to a painstakingly slow healing process. The richness of this time are the questions that came forth, as my brain continued to struggle to acknowledge the end of physical movement I knew it. As I laid in bed, I had no choice but to face the necessary pain involved in restoring the physical range of movement of a severely broken knee joint, imagining new avenues of motion.

In my stillness, a new form of dance was presented to me. An elaborate choreography of questions, sometimes answers, threading unknown territories of rhythms and pathways of energy. As I pondered upon these I remembered a waterfall Denis and I used to visit often as children, she is a good friend.

Her name is the Bride´s Veil, she has sung and danced in my memory for 40 years. As I thought of her I wondered:

Am I the rock upon which the water travels?

Am I water bouncing over steep ridges, bends and rounded edges?

Or is it, that I am both?

Are we a dance of matter and energy, flowing and weaving movement while clearing our path towards spiritual blossoming?

How does this interlacing evolve in our lives as we outgrow the vitality of our childhood and adolescent years and move into adulthood and the weathering of our physical possibilities? 

What if our innate capacity for moving and allowing the impulse of energy, as it rises from the very core of the universe, is meant to be in alignment with infinite possibilities to blossom as human beings? 

What if, by setting in motion and freeing the parts of our physical movement/consciousness that are stuck with limiting beliefs, pain and numbness, we open the way for us to become who we are truly meant to be as spiritual human beings?

What if the blossoming of our spiritual life is naturally and spontaneously -just so- and all we need is to be aware of the natural movement we do, as we step in and out of the ebb and flow of our daily lives?

How can we consciously dance while tracing the inter-relationship of subtle and physical movements, within ourselves and others, to sustain a greater level of existence?

 How can I favor, hold, maintain this level of awareness in my life? Am I doing enough? Too much?

As my knee mends and my movement expands slowly and carefully I realize that I have only one body, my home and refuge for the time I have left, here on earth. I am finding new landscapes inside my joint in the steps I take, in the visions I hold. I feel new, often fragile in my walk, weary of the familiar pain and yet so much stronger in the way I hold the precious understanding of my movement. I now see and rejoice in the fluttering of an eyelid, the curve of a new smile, the clenching of the jaw in anticipation of pain, the relief of a stretch, the relaxation of the hip bone as it settles on a mattress, the rhythmic pulsing of my organs and inner flows, of my breath.

Any and all movement, here and now, are the gifts I now see as the embodiment of the Absolute.