I went to an Improvisational Contact Dance gathering for the first time today. What a beautiful community! I've been shown something so special through this practice and its group of warm, open humans who are eager to help one another grow more into their lives (as the members of many conscious communities are humbly apt to do). Contact dance is a metaphor for the life experience as we relate to one another and move through the world.
We face the stories that our minds create constantly -- sometimes we turn towards them; other times, we're more able to turn away from them in the name of presence. Many of these stories come up for us and interfere on ours paths to fluidity; for me, I struggle with dropping into the somantic experience in favor of giving in to my stories. Contact dance is something that "feels hard" to me, and this is for the reason that, throughout most of my life, I've categorized experiences as somewhere on a spectrum that includes that quantifier: Things are easy, things are hard; things are stories, man. "I'm not good at this" comes up a lot. The thought-pattern that says to me, "I'm not good at this, I'm not good at this", stops me from being fully in anything at all because I'm not recognizing that we are good, always. At everything. Good is a natural state of being; it's what and how we are. Our minds work hard to clutter up this simple truth -- and pile all sorts of un-truths on top it -- so that we act in certain ways that are in alignment with our believed state of being: We believe good to be subjective. We believe more and feel less. But we're still good, even when "I'm not good at this" is the soundtrack of our mind's experience.
Contact dance forces you -- the gentleness or harshness of this force being parallel to how you force things in your own life, of course -- to release this story. The flow of the dance shifts along with this process.
We find fluidity when we relate to each others' heaviness -- and it is through relating to heaviness that we find lightness: sweet release.
Because of ground and breath, we find life. Life is expressed through contact -- with ground and with breath, and also with one another. Contact dance is an expression of this manifestation of experience. As humans, we find ourselves most often with our feet on the ground, relating to a vertical axis. Through this relation to earth, we move. But our heaviness does not always want to move with us in this way -- and it is through respecting and relating to ground and the vertical expression, and then finding other forms of movement in order to release this heaviness, that we find deeper connection. That connection comes first when we realize closer contact with ourselves. We grow into greater contact with ourselves as we grow lighter, and through the space that's created by the shifting of heaviness, we find connection with each other. We give our heaviness to the ground when it grows too much for us to carry ... or we give it to one another to be held, moved, transformed. Through this relating, a dance evolves -- and we reach more deeply into the life within ourselves.
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