In my body.
Prompt: Body integration. This year, when did you feel the most integrated with your body? Did you have a moment where there wasn't mind and body, but simply a cohesive YOU, alive and present? (Patrick Reynolds)
I don't have a single moment -- but this is what dance does for me. And I've known since I first started belly dance -- I valued that night of the week because it started to get me back out of my head, and back into my body, because there was such a difference, such a disconnect. Grad school will do that to you, as you push head things so much. A lifetime of body hatred will do that, too. And undoing that came later, but dancing, developing a partnership with my body, was a start.
I sometimes still feel that, belly dancing. But getting reasonably good at it, performing, honing... it changed the focus of a lot of the time. And it's still working with my body in a positive way, and I still enjoy it, but it left space for more to be unlocked by dabbling in the 5Rhythms practice. And it's something that's... so damn hard to talk about. But getting into the Flow, and just being in one's body, and experiencing, and rolling, and pulling things in, and letting things out, is a tremendously healing experience. I feel like the langauage starts to go to the same places that people go when they're talking about meditation, and I think it is that, in its own way. Bodies move, and being there with yourself, while you do that... well, it's transformative.
But if dance is the expression, the practice, fat acceptance is the theory. Because that kind of integration doesn't seem like a good thing until your body seems like a place you'd want to be. When your body, your fat, your appearance is something you're hiding, or mitigating, or escaping from... why would you want to spend time living there? And so starting to unpack that, finding the intersections and support for all the minor epiphanies along the way... that's been tremendously important, too.
And it starts to spill out over into everything else, so that -- seriously -- I don't have a moment. I've got lots of moments. And it's a wonderful thing, and a long time coming. And so worth it.
I'm playing along with Reverb10... a prompt for each day of December. Join us!
This entry was posted on Dreamwidth. Please comment there using OpenID. Comments:
I don't have a single moment -- but this is what dance does for me. And I've known since I first started belly dance -- I valued that night of the week because it started to get me back out of my head, and back into my body, because there was such a difference, such a disconnect. Grad school will do that to you, as you push head things so much. A lifetime of body hatred will do that, too. And undoing that came later, but dancing, developing a partnership with my body, was a start.
I sometimes still feel that, belly dancing. But getting reasonably good at it, performing, honing... it changed the focus of a lot of the time. And it's still working with my body in a positive way, and I still enjoy it, but it left space for more to be unlocked by dabbling in the 5Rhythms practice. And it's something that's... so damn hard to talk about. But getting into the Flow, and just being in one's body, and experiencing, and rolling, and pulling things in, and letting things out, is a tremendously healing experience. I feel like the langauage starts to go to the same places that people go when they're talking about meditation, and I think it is that, in its own way. Bodies move, and being there with yourself, while you do that... well, it's transformative.
But if dance is the expression, the practice, fat acceptance is the theory. Because that kind of integration doesn't seem like a good thing until your body seems like a place you'd want to be. When your body, your fat, your appearance is something you're hiding, or mitigating, or escaping from... why would you want to spend time living there? And so starting to unpack that, finding the intersections and support for all the minor epiphanies along the way... that's been tremendously important, too.
And it starts to spill out over into everything else, so that -- seriously -- I don't have a moment. I've got lots of moments. And it's a wonderful thing, and a long time coming. And so worth it.
I'm playing along with Reverb10... a prompt for each day of December. Join us!
This entry was posted on Dreamwidth. Please comment there using OpenID. Comments: