Solo Contact Improv

I have been navigating living with intense neurological pain for four years.  The journey has taken many turns and my relationship to the pain has slowly but profoundly shifted.  My first response was double strength Vicodin for a month when my doctor and I both thought the pain was a temporary response to antibiotics clearing a Lyme infection.  When the pain persisted and continued to escalate we did a few more tests to see if the pain was related to any skeletal problems.  I finally accepted that while the infection may have decreased, the gradual 20 year nerve damage was not to be dismissed so easily.  At first I did what any normal person would do, I let my mind run wild with visions of living for decades with intense pain that no one could substantially change.   I tried more neurologically appropriate pain medications, but they made me feel weird and had only a minimal impact on the pain.  At this point I was forced to accept the unacceptable, a miracle that only became possible when I disconnected from the fear tapes and relied on the deeper wiser place that 35 years of meditation had introduced me to.   I could at least love, laugh and enjoy the rest of my life, even when it hurt.  I became immensely grateful for every nuance of beauty and wonder.

Gradually I was able to be present with the pain.  I could stay in the room with it, listen to its story, and marvel at how deep in time the roots were buried.  I could feel the myriad people who shared the deep fear at the root of it, most powerfully my mother.   I could sit beside it and listen.   I could allow the pain to be there and I could function, not physically, but emotionally and intellectually.  I figured out how to continue my consulting business at home, and my husband gradually took over cooking, cleaning, shopping and everything else it takes to run a house.  I just struggled to do as much as I could without biting anyone's head off or messing anything up.  I was with the pain, yet still separate from it, not fully interacting with it, holding it gingerly, a bit afraid of moving because it made it hurt even more.  It was easier to hide out at my desk and be "useful."

More pain, accompanied by violent and persistent muscle spasms, began making it even harder to work and cope.   Muscles that have been atrophied for years were regaining muscle tone and the ability to move, but only in violent painful spasms.  Perhaps this escalation is a good thing, or at least could be.  After my mother died unexpectedly, something shifted.  She too had suffered physical pain and difficulty functioning and we shared many of the same issues, but she was not easily able to release the fear and needed to rely on pain medication to make her life endurable.   At last she is fearless and pain free and her love and support seem to reach out to me in a flood of momentum that encourages wading in deeper.

Separate is no longer good enough.  It suddenly feels imperative that I stop working and release the strong competent watcher who could continue to answer everyone's questions while my body bravely struggled on.  I need full access to my power and creativity instead of just plugging into what I know how to do.   I long to surrender to not knowing and give myself space to explore.    Now in the midst of the rapid dismantling of my 20 year consulting business a new relationship to my body is just beginning to emerge.  It seems to be an odd blend of yoga and solo contact improv. 

My daughter, Lauren, is a dancer and for the last several years she has been exploring contact improv.  When I sent her a draft of this piece with my fuzzy way to think about contact improv, she sent me a fantastic description, which is so good I’m adding it as an addendum for anyone curious about really understanding improv.  Her  description echoes my experience:   “…, the subtleties can become very loud--the slightest shift of weight or muscle tensing in one's dancing peers can inspire a whole, impulsive new spin of movement.  In this way, our 'state of being' can be broadcast into life, something bigger, evolving, and constantly feeding the next moment.  And then sometimes stillness settles.  It just does.  One can think about it and search for it, but it is most satisfying when you relinquish control and let the dance decide for itself. “

My body is calling my awareness into this sort of dance.  If I begin a yoga movement and encounter pain and resistance and stay fully present I can detect tiny openings, a slight pull to move in some direction.  The movement expands and picks up momentum, moves until it reaches its limit and settles back into stillness.   If I rest in the stillness, the sensation slowly builds into another movement which I follow.  Lauren’s clear descriptions sift in and expand my capacity to trust the movement and I marvel that both my mother and my daughter seem able to send me clarity and encouragement.  After an hour or so I' m profoundly tired and sore and head off to a hot bath with Epsom salts followed by a long period of deep silence.

I still hurt but I feel a flood of curiosity and excitement.  I am in my body, an amazing feeling like when I first learned to swim and could keep afloat and move.  I don't know where it's going,  I no longer remember what it's like to be without pain, but as I explore the burning fire I can perceive subtle differences where a movement has a flowing quality that is pleasing in comparison to the stuck contraction.    I begin to think that my brain and my muscles are struggling to reconnect to each other and need my conscious cooperation to rebuild the lost connections.  This may be a figment of my imagination, yet I am enveloped in a flood of enthusiasm that gives me momentum to get up and work with it again and again.  I am reminded of the earnest persistence my children showed when they learned to walk.  I am experimenting; I have nothing to lose, but I sense the possibility that I may have something to gain - another chance to walk again.

Contact Improvisation 

Lauren Ehnebuske Day sent me this fantastic description to help me in writing this, but it is also helping me trust the knowing inside myself that is capable of “following the flow.” 

Usually, CI happens with multiple people beginning to dance together with an awareness of one another and some kind of physical contact.  It is beautiful in that the more each dancer is centered and inspired in and of themselves, the easier and better the connection between the dancers becomes.  Ideally, each dancer could, theoretically, just be dancing by themselves--it is that fluid and easy.  If one dancer is just in a 'support role' mentality, there is a lot less for his or her partners to engage, and the partnership tends to fall off or take a lot of work.  That said, if one or more dancers is overly focused on themselves and not being present with his or her partners, the partnership is equally doomed.  The power is in simultaneous presence with oneself and the peers and/or world around one--the whole becoming something more powerful than any of the pieces.  Since it is improvisation, you never know where it is going.  You have to be fully present, able to respond with nearly no delay, yet also temper things with common sense about not hurting anyone or anything in the process or remembering choreographic intent.

To dance fully in CI takes all one’s faculties, mental/spiritual/physical.  Even a small shared rolling-point-of-contact* can be deeply engaging if one really pays attention.  (*Remember how in gymnastics I used to practice rolling a ball along my arms from one hand to the other?  Well, imagine that with another body instead of the ball, and that's an example of rolling-point-of-contact, though it can happen with any body surface).

There are multiple "camps" of CI.  Some say you can't use your hands, hoping to help people relate to one another in less familiar ways.  Some disciplines focus on a point of shared weight, which people can roll around between them (elbow to hip can roll into shoulder to thigh, for example) and idealize a dance where that point of contact is never broken, it just moves around.  The side of contact that I like to immerse myself in is more closely related to modern dance.  Literal touching is not necessarily constant as it is with the rolling-point-of-contact: the momentum of movement trumps it. The dancers are aware of one another's trajectories as well as their mass, and they can actually respond to the velocity as if touching, without touching.  They can carry it along, spin against it, go with it, and even bounce it back--all things that are more easily understood with a physical connection, but that can be quite tangible regardless of spatial contact among in-tune dancers.  Both main camps, rolling-point-of-contact and the dancier versions, rely on rotation to facilitate coming in and out of connection.  To come together, two dancers can spin like two gears, and when their paths are tangent, they have effectively eased together without going against either dancer's trajectory.  Also, all camps of contact rely to greater or lesser extents on improvisation--even a choreographed ballroom dance will likely involve in-the-moment responses to a partner's unanticipated weight shift.

After practicing CI a while, the subtleties can become very loud--the slightest shift of weight or muscle tensing in one's dancing peers can inspire a whole, impulsive new spin of movement.  In this way, our 'state of being' can be broadcast into life, something bigger, evolving, constantly feeding the next moment.  And then sometimes stillness settles.  It just does.  One can think about it and search for it, but it is most satisfying when you relinquish control and let the dance decide for itself.  When everyone in a group of dancers is tuned in, the "oiji board effect" can be incredibly powerful.  There is something in muscles and movement that seems to have a mind of its own

An intermediary to contact improv is dancing with the surfaces of the built environment around us.  All dance has to interact with whatever surface is taking the gravity of the dancers (usually just the floor), but this relationship can definitely be exaggerated.  Sometimes it's fun to roll my back along the wall, for instance, or go upside down and walk my feet along the wall, or push off the back of the couch with my arms.  Although the opportunity to be present with our "partners" in this case does not seem to have the richness of engaging other animate objects, it can still involve a way of 'experiencing' I associate with CI: open, playful, accepting, responsive.

A lot of our lives are caught up in the mental constructs of "not hurting anyone" and "remembering our choreography."  The more these thought patterns dominate our brains, the less successful contact improvisation usually is and the less we can let in the powerful creative, "being" powers inside and among us.  When we have trained ourselves to instinctually not land on one another's knees or heads using what seems like muscle memory or brain stem thinking, then we are freer from the frontal lobe constructs (in which we live from day to day) while still being able to get along alright practically, and that's nice.  I am pretty sure that we can get further out of our minds as we usually know them by delving deeper into our presence with our partner(s).  When the flow is really happening, people don't get hurt.  If the flow is happening strongly and then one or more partners gets distracted and stops being present with the moment, bad things can happen instantly.  At the very least your partners will feel your loss and usually respond by being less creative.

At this point, you are already dancing.  You can mentally pull out, but you'll get hurt.  Follow the dance in its natural trajectory, whatever that may be, and you might be safer, more whole, and have more to offer the
world.  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDOMzj3MqL0&feature=related

The Pursuit of Passion

Months ago, in posting a response to an article by Chris Dierkes in Beams and Struts, he suggested that I try writing about my experience with Savitri.  My love affair with this poem is somewhat mysterious and it had never occurred to me to attempt to articulate it.  I was surprised when I found words showing up.  Judging from the responses I've received from friends, it is not an easily accessible article.  While not intellectually complicated, it points to a way of viewing reality that is unfamiliar and rarely articulated.  The real power is in a place beyond words, so writing can only hint and if you don't recognize the experience it won't make sense.  But I would encourage anyone attempting to read it, to hold it loosely, to let it speak to something deeper and more mysterious, yet fundamentally accessible to all of us and don't worry if your mind understands.  My special thank you to Joyce Jonte for giving me permission to use her images.

http://www.beamsandstruts.com/articles/item/1020-the-pursuit-of-passion

Dumpster Diving

This post was inspired when thinking of my new friend, Rebecca Stauffer, and my nephew, Asa Taccone, I can feel them both pulled to follow the aliveness.

I was realizing this morning that my spiritual journey has resembled dumpster diving more than it has any sort of “path;” random digging for what I needed when I needed it.  I’ve dug through more ideas and perspectives than I can even count, occasionally hitting a jackpot where I spent a long time gleaning everything I could, such as the decade of being enraptured by Ken Wilbur and the last decade captivated by Sri Aurobindo’ s  poem, Savitri.  Today it dawned on me that this plebian and apparently random process has produced results that I don’t commonly see elsewhere and hence there may be some usefulness, or at least novelty, in sharing some of the conclusions I’ve come to. 

Fully alive, the pull to act has a particular flavor; it is juicier, more vibrant, and more vivid than everything surrounding it.   For me, keenly feeling the inadequacy of all the ways I knew how to act and frustrated with the cultural conventions pulling at me, I was compelled to struggle to find a way to authentically navigate marriage, parenting and working.   I needed to figure out what it meant to really love.   I grasped at every hand hold I could find that felt real and alive, even if I didn’t understand why or how it could help.   This journey wasn’t easy or painless but it was convincing and it led me to deeply trust the reality I am embedded in and to feel at home and at ease.

 I suspect the pull of the real has different flavors for different people, as it should.  Yet there is something absolutely universal in the pulse of aliveness.  If you follow it through its myriad paths it leads you home, to the authentic, the important, the deeply satisfying.  But the goal is not some hypothetical wonderland; it is to the ever changing, effervescent manifestation of the most unique part of you.  From that place, life connects seamlessly with everything that is and the journey takes on a lovely lilting perfection.

There are tricks.  We think we need to run from pain, to protect ourselves, to move away from anything that hurts or that deeply challenges us.  We think we need to move toward what feels more familiar, more comfortable, more at ease, satiated at least for a moment.  But if you really pay attention, life sparkles more vividly when you dive in, when you allow yourself to meet each moment as it is.  Some moments are simple and beautiful, some moments are painful and scary, some are oddly empty or boring, some are heartbreaking, some are sad, some are joyful, and some are exhilarating.  But each moment holds a treasure when you can meet it as it is, as you are.  There is nothing to change, nothing to fix, nothing to do but to ride the real where it takes you, to let it pull you into the open free spaces where what is begging to manifest is calling, pulling, inviting.

Often the path is not clear and there are moments when the wave crashes over you, darkness and no way to breathe.   It is these moments where you must kick for the surface, push your head up into the light and air and take a deep breath.  There are other moments when you are locked in a closet and it’s too dark to see the door and you have to listen deeply to the silence until you hear the hint being whispered in your ear, the hint that tells you which way to go, what rope being dangled in front of you is the one that is important for you to pull yourself up with.

At other times, the dance moves at a dizzying pace all around you and your head is spinning so fast you can no longer think.  The center calls and you can feel for the still point from which all the spinning comes, the still point where it can all rush by you, but you are solid, you are still, you are held in the embrace of the whole.

The wonder is that if we struggle through all the layers of fog and confusion and come to the place that is uniquely home, we are all at the exact same place, we can smile, relax, drink a cup of tea and laugh together about how something so simple could have ever looked so hard.

The Courage to Love

I woke up this morning thinking about Dr. King.  His words, either reading them or listening to him speak, can still move me to tears over 40 years later.  He served us all.  His willingness to feel the pain and suffering of his congregation, his community, both African-American and white, changed our hearts and minds.  He was able to instill both the courage to protest and the courage to hope.  The willingness to actually feel pain appears to have the magical ability to generate love.  Dr. King’s power came from his ability to call us all back to love.  This means for some of us that we had to face our own darkness, our bigotry and narrow-mindedness, our reluctance to allow ourselves to truly witness our neighbor’s pain.  It meant for others the courage to face powerlessness, despair or shame.  For all of us, he epitomized what it meant to hope, to dare to believe in human dignity.

It occurs to me that both white guilt and African-American struggles with self-esteem come from our inability to really feel this pain, to drink this cup to the bitter dregs.  We want to hide behind analysis and concepts rather than endure the wrenching reality of feeling our own pain.  We were willing to go part way with Dr. King but we hold back from truly allowing our hearts to break and until we do, until we can allow the immensity of this pain to be felt as a living, breathing reality in our bodies and our souls, we have kept it locked away from the power of our love.

Ideas are a wonderful way to make sense of things, but they can also buffer us from actually feeling.  Ideas can move us to anger or action, but they cannot move us to love.  It is only the courage to surrender fully, to actually feel the pain in our stomach, the tightening in our chest, our deeply held tears that has any hope of releasing and allowing us to access the real power of our hearts.  Love is not an idea – it is a vibrant power, the only real force for change that we’ve ever had.

Simple, But Not Always Easy

Words have not come easily lately.  Silence swallows ideas.  Only presence feels real.  Perhaps this presence communicates the love and care I feel for the people in my life, or perhaps some attempt to gather insights into words is needed.  I don’t really know, just as I don’t know if I can even capture in words the elusive essence of the simple joy of being.    It seems good to try to share.

I’ve always loved sharing thoughts and ideas with people.  I love the complexity, untangling perspectives in the midst of conversation.  It is more puzzling to share my wonder at the powerful impact of the Stillness that envelops me now.  It is more remarkable for what is missing than for what is there.  Peace is oddly indescribable and for that matter, uninteresting to write about.  It doesn’t need words, it just is.

I don’t think there is any way I could have imagined what it would be like if fear and anxiety left.  Like everyone I know, I assumed that struggle is absolutely necessary and even morally required.  How would anything ever improve if I didn’t fight with what is wrong? 

A radical shift in perspective made me think that the way things work is much simpler and much more mysterious.  Life is heart wrenchingly beautiful, just as it is.   Everything and everyone can be as they are and the creative movement that responds to life flows on a wave of love that I never would have believed possible.  Sadness didn’t leave, nor pain.  Everything flows and changes, sometimes easy, sometimes hard.  All the things I thought of as safe have proved illusory, all the things I thought I needed proved unnecessary, what I struggled to avoid has proved to be what I needed the most.  Nothing need be different than it is and yet everything still matters.   Instead of eliciting conflict, everything asks for absolute intimacy.

The future is riding this wave of what is and it is how we meet this moment that will create the next.  The “we” is not optional, we are not separate from each other and we cannot create alone, we are linked and move into the future inseparably as one.  I used to think that it was “just” an idea that we are “all one.”  I liked to think that if I worked hard enough and did it right, I could escape all the misery that afflicts my fellow beings.   Like so many others, I thought I could just figure it out and teach others how to do it. 

 

To actually feel this oneness is much more humbling.  Feeling my own pain, my own fear, my absolute vulnerability and feeling it echoed in every person around me brought an end to any illusion of control, to any idea of being great.   In fact, it brought an end to believing in any idea.  I know this sounds truly weird, but until you’ve experienced the end of your mind’s abilities, you can’t know that there is a way to know that is beyond mind.  You can’t know that this way of knowing is unimaginably trustworthy.

What is it that is so different?  The answer is so simple that it’s very hard to see and even harder to believe and there’s no way to know it except by living it.  There are two powerful points of awareness that occupy my attention now.  One is the simple awareness of my being, the fundamental aliveness pulsing through me and everything around me.  It is aliveness beyond the boundaries of my body; it is the fundamental sense of existing that I share with every living thing.  When I was totally occupied with my mind, I paid no attention to this primary sense of my aliveness.   The other point of awareness is the amazing stillness that all of life rests within.  Every thought, every sound is surrounded by silence, a palpable presence that grows stronger when I attend to it.

There has never been a moment in my life when this awareness wasn’t there.  I just didn’t understand its significance, its power or its beauty.  I’m positive it’s there for everyone, always.   It’s here now.   It reminds me of the ruby slippers in the Wizard of Oz.  Dorothy had the means to go home the whole time; she just didn’t know how it worked.  Obviously if you’ve spent your entire life thinking that you’ve got to get somewhere else to be happy and at peace, it’s a little hard to believe that paying attention to such simple things can make a difference.  But we are addicted to our minds and our minds, while being wonderful useful tools, can’t make us happy, cannot bring us peace or teach us how to love.  Our essence, the essential part of our being, connects with a deeper level of wisdom and knowing, a wisdom calling to be known.

Oddly enough, the craziness of our lives might just be calling a few more of us to tap our heels together and go home.

Journey

I’ve been reading A Long Trek Home, by Erin McKittrick.  Erin is the daughter of a good friend and I’ve known her since she was a child.  On June 9, 2007 she and her husband, Hig, embarked on a yearlong 4000 mile trek by “boot, raft and ski” from Seattle to Unimak Island in the Aleutians.   After their trip, Erin wrote this book.

I began reading Erin’s book with trepidation.  My favorite activities in earlier years were skiing when I lived in Colorado and hiking after I moved to California.  Walking in the wilderness was when I felt the most alive, the most connected.  I’m not able to do that anymore, it’s a trek to walk around my yard.  Would it be hard to read about something I used to love and can’t do anymore?

Erin’s book surprised and delighted me.  While the audacity of what they did is way beyond anything I could ever have done, the spirit is completely accessible and deeply appreciated.  It is the story of two people paying absolute attention to every small detail of a year of their lives.  Not all of the details are pleasant.  While there is a predictable amount of physical discomfort, Erin’s descriptions are never dramatized.   Each adventure, each challenge to be met and worked through is offered as just another step in the journey.  Some steps are easy and beautiful, some challenging, frightening, or wildly creative, but each one is only a step.  She maps a journey through incredible natural beauty mixed with sober descriptions of the impact of logging, mining, and eroding fisheries on the fragile coasts of Alaska and British Columbia.  It is a story not just about pristine nature, but also about the people who live and work along the shoreline. 

I don’t want to attempt to recap her story, it is best appreciated by reading her book, but I would like to share some of the personal revelations I had while reading it.  I’ve been on my own journey, a vastly different kind of journey, but one that is oddly supported and encouraged by what Erin and Hig share.  My journey involves navigating day after day of intense pain.   The same spirit of curiosity and endurance applies.  The same need to pay attention and savor absolutely every detail, engaging every moment so that no moment of beauty or connection with the animals and humans who I interact with is missed.  Even the moments of struggle and indecision add up to a powerful sense of engagement and richness. There is no time for fearful thoughts about potential disasters that lay ahead. The challenges and opportunities of this moment are all consuming.  Sharing this adventure with my long term partner, we work together, each doing what we can to serve the journey as a whole.

The landscape isn’t as grand or varied as the Alaskan wilderness, but savoring life’s simple details creates a feeling of wholeness and connectedness.   I move slower now so I have lots of time to notice the small things, to feel thankful for the never ending flow of beauty.   I can enjoy the sense of accomplishment I feel when I navigate yet another hard spot and come out on the other side able to laugh and feel love and gratitude for the guidance that got me through.   I meet the next moment with greater strength and resilience as I learn that it’s not too hard, I can do it.

My life has always had moments of beauty and moments when I paid close attention but a different quality emerges when all of life is met with presence.  There is no “time out.”  I used to be just biding time, getting through this moment so I could get to the next when I would really pay attention.  If every moment is challenging, then each must be met with total awareness.  The wonderful thing is that a beautiful life doesn’t come from everything being easy or exactly right, it comes from staying fully present with it just as it is.

It’s a bit of a stretch to compare the incredible trek Erin and Hig took with my own journey, but it gave me a great deal of pleasure to share their story and to allow their courage and endurance to flow into my life.  It makes each small step a little easier. 

Check out GroundTruthTrekking and A Long Trek Home by Erin McKittrick, published by The Mountaineers Books, Seattle, Washington.

Inner Sparks

Don read me an article from Scientific American  this morning called “Inner Sparks” which is an interview with Charles J. Limb, a surgeon and sax player  working at Johns Hopkins Medical Center studying human creativity by studying skilled musicians improvising music while having their brains scanned in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine.  The study highlights the parts of the brain that “light up” when improvising and the parts that “shut down.”  During improvisation the medial prefrontal cortex turns on and the lateral prefrontal cortex is inhibited.  The lateral prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain involved in conscious self-monitoring, self-inhibition, and the evaluation of the rightness or wrongness of what you’re about to do.   The article highlights one of the reasons creative endeavors are so satisfying.  In the flow of creativity, we are not judging, condemning or questioning ourselves.

I will never be a skilled musician.  In addition to creativity, it takes musical skill, practice and focus.  But what fascinated me about this article is that I’ve experienced this cognitive shift in my own life, an increased urge to engage in creative activity and a very noticeable decrease in my level of inhibition.  It is definitely not a given that these two shifts result in a miraculous ability to create masterpieces, it may just be a superb opportunity to embarrass myself.   But, oddly enough, being embarrassed is no longer enough to inhibit sharing my enthusiasm for the amazing beauty of life and my excitement about the potential power of unconditional love.

It may be that the nerve damage which is creating pain has also damaged these parts of my brain, or it may be that the deep shifts in my psyche as the result of surrendering to the deepest part of my Self have shifted my perspective.  In any case, I’m willing to exchange ecstatic love for constricted struggling.  I suspect this willingness could be an embarrassment to those connected to me.

Possibly responding to the embarrassing “born again” quality of my enthusiasm, my daughter sent me an article this morning about Rick Perry.  The Texas governor officially proclaimed April 22 to April 24, 2011 as Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas.    It is an interesting example of how anything that smacks of the spiritual, especially for lovers of rationality, evokes a sense of separation from the practical.  While I certainly think praying for the wisdom to meet our lives with an inspired level of creativity can be concretely effective, the hard part of Governor Perry’s prayer is that he’s asking “for the healing of our land, the rebuilding of our communities and the restoration of our normal way of life.”  Our normal way of life is what got us into this mess.  It will take looking from a decidedly “not normal” perspective to actually heal anything, let alone rebuild our communities.

This “not normal” perspective is the one beyond the limits of our rational minds.  Higher level creativity springs from wholeness of heart, mind and spirit.  The intuitive ability to perceive any situation and determine an effective response is heightened and the urge to respond with merely learned or habitual responses is inhibited.  It is a place that calls for authenticity, a demanding willingness to participate in life and to face each moment as fearlessly as we can.  It is recognizing that sometimes we will still create messes and we will still have to clean them up, hopefully having gained a higher level of clarity about what works and what doesn’t.

God isn’t going to fix it, but the creativity of the universe is ours for the asking if we have the courage to reach for it.  It means abandoning a lot of what we thought we knew, as well as our blind spots, our fear, and our sense of limitation.  It means opening to the kind of love Christ modeled but that hasn’t been tried yet by the rest of us.