On a chilly day in the fall of 1989 shortly
after my 33rd birthday I realized that the burden I had been
dragging around beneath my head was my body, and I began to suspect that it
held wonders. I knew a lot about bodies; after all, I was not just a physician,
but an Osteopath. It was convenient and interesting to have a body so nearby,
but I tried to not let it get in the way of my life. It invariably did anyway,
and did more so as I continued to get older. It even distracted me occasionally
with something pleasant or even pleasurable, so when it got my attention that
fall day, I chose to listen and follow where it led me.
My body led me to an ice-skating rink in downtown Poughkeepsie, New York. “Learn To Skate” is what the
marquee on the front of the building commanded me to pursue, and in a moment of
slipping out of character I thought, “that’s a good idea.” I went inside and
inquired about how to learn to skate. I was coincidentally just in time for a
beginner’s class. They collected seven dollars, asked my shoe size, handed me a
pair of navy blue plastic skates and pointed to the far end of the ice, where
traffic cones walled off a corridor. I was perplexed about how to get there. I
asked if there was there a special walkway for beginners. Could I walk around
to a backdoor that would let me in the far side of the rink by the lesson area?
When they told me I had to skate to get there, I burst into tears, overwhelmed
by the decades of ignored and unresolved fright, fragility, hopelessness,
helplessness, and clumsiness of my physically awkward childhood.
I fumbled with my wobbly
and extremely uncomfortable blue plastic rental skates. I managed to get them
on, and then desperately gripping the railing, shuffled to the lesson area. I
arrived red-in-the-face, tears dripping down my cheeks, to meet the instructor
and the six other members of my class, all eight to twelve-year-old girls.
Within an hour I could
push off with the side of my blade and glide on one foot. I could turn a corner
by tilting my outstretched “airplane wing” arms. I realized that if I began
gliding in the trajectory of a circle that I ended up spiraling in towards the
center. I became fascinated with spiraling and spinning. It felt so good to glide
on the ice and move in such unexpected ways that I forgot about being
self-conscious. I stopped caring about what my teacher and classmates thought
of me and the people watching us from the other side of the traffic cones
disappeared.
The friction of a moving
blade on the surface of the ice melts a drop of water beneath it. The skate
blade sluices across the thin trace created by this freshly melted ice water
between the blade and the rink’s frozen surface. The interface of the movement
of my body, the blade, the liquid water, and the ice created sacred shapes. My mind
quieted and all I could do was feel the emergence of circles and spirals
between my body and the frozen water. What had been frozen into my body began
to melt and move from me into the ice. I felt my past become the
foundation on top of which I skated.
My intellect had
objectified my body and walled “it” off from my experience for most of my life.
There is no actual “it” in this story. I had fractured myself into pieces,
dissociated, and objectified my own body. I’m not sure why I did this, but I
trust that there was some good reason for my young survival mechanism to create
this strategy and agenda. What once might have helped me get through something
difficult was being perpetuated for too long, far beyond its necessity and was
now hindering me from experiencing life fully. In moments of bliss on ice, I
felt my sensation of embodiment shift back into phase with my sense of
wholeness.
I regularly ice skated
year-round for about 7 years, until I found myself living too far from ice to
rationalize the drive. I became bored with the repetitive nature of the few
things I had learned to do while balanced on a blade. Skating was technically
so difficult to execute that I rarely felt free to express myself fully without
risk of falling. I had reached a plateau of learning and creativity due to some
combination of the limits of my free time, my body’s natural limits of
strength, balance, and flexibility, and the threshold of my capacity to
assimilate any more kinesthetic learning of this particular form. My interest
faded, but I still yearned to listen deeply and feel my own movement
unfold. My relationship to my body was only beginning and I needed a new
venue to explore embodiment.
This is around the time I
met Emilie Conrad, and for those of you who don’t know that story, please read my book! (click here to buy a copy)
Twenty years later, lying
in bed with breast cancer eating away at my bones, I did what many dying people
do; I pondered my regrets. Astor Piazzola’s “Oblivion” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GaBi6jXNfc) could
have been the soundtrack of this ordeal. In the early days after my diagnosis,
the pain was so excruciating that I could barely breathe. I had to minimize the
movements of my inhalation and exhalation. The tumors in my crumbling sternum
and ribs wreaked havoc with this primal movement and I learned to adapt by
breathing deeply into my belly without moving my chest.
I silently pondered and
surveyed my life. I had no serious regrets, but I wished I had learned to speak
another language when I was young enough to have been fluent. Now it was too
late and seemed somewhat irrelevant and not worth the energy.
I also wished I had
learned to dance with a partner, but no dance ever called out to me. I could
never get past the conventional gender roles with which you had to agree to
participate. Most ballroom dances seemed exceedingly stiff and structured.
Swing dance was too athletic and seemed frivolous. Salsa struck me as too fast and peppy
for a zaftig Jewish girl like me. I tried Contact Improvisation, but it frequently led to what felt like a "puppy pile" and a lot of projection of people's needs on other dancers. Argentine Tango is what always got my
attention. I found the music deeply moving. It’s probably best that I couldn’t
understand Spanish so that I wasn’t turned off by many of the songs that have
melodramatic and dated lyrics. Learning this very difficult dance seemed out of my limited reach as I contemplated my cancerous decline.
I told myself that these
regrets were not so bad; I had lived a full life and done my best. I had loved
well. I hadn’t done too badly in the thinking realm either. I achieved great
things in my professional life. I was generous with my friends and family, and cared for other people for a
living. It was in the domain of feeling that I had always been challenged. My
tendency was to feel too much, too little, or the wrong thing for the situation
at hand. Because physical and emotional pain so dominated the feeling realm of
my early life I tended to avoid emotions and sensations that might bring my
suffering into the forefront of my attention.
Perhaps it was this
avoidance that allowed me to miss the growing presence of cancer as it spread.
I quickly dismissed this possibility because it only led to more regrets during
a time when I was soul-searching to decrease my burden. Why blame myself for
the way things are? There's no way of knowing how or why some things happen. I realized
that if I was going to make it through this ordeal I had to learn to be in a state
of nonjudgmental acceptance without the emotional charge of self-blame. I have
spent the past 6 years cultivating this state of acceptance. It has allowed me
to live with the presence of cancer in my body without emotionally (and
physically) decompensating. This acceptance of the way things are has guided
the choices I make and the way I care for myself. Surrender to the course of my
life has profoundly deepened my appreciation for each precious moment.
This acceptance has also
allowed me to get curious about dancing Argentine Tango. My teacher, Tomás
Howlin, likens tango to moving meditation, but points out that
in meditation you can sit there sometimes looking as if you are
meditating, while actually daydreaming and fooling yourself and others. In
tango, if your attentiveness to the moment wavers for a second, the connection
with your partner and the music is interrupted and the dance is lost. Tango is
meditation with instant feedback.
Tango requires a
willingness to be uncomfortable and has increased my capacity to endure
discomfort. This discomfort arises as you see all your habits and ways of being
that don’t serve you in this dance where relationship, listening, and
connection are foundational. The saying, “wherever you go, there you are” sums
it up. All of your habits in relationship, compensations, and avoidances that you’ve made work
in the rest of your life, show up as impediments to the dance. And in turn, the
dance offers a chance to finally examine and let go of these strategies that
don’t really work. The gift of tango is freedom, but you have to climb an
extremely steep slope to obtain it.
Tango without courage and
vulnerability is nothing but a technical performance, like a movie set that has
striking visual effect, but no actual depth. This dance is spontaneous,
improvisational, precise, and intimate, an unlikely combination of attributes.
It has its awkward and occasionally painful moments, but the rewards make it
all worthwhile. There is amazing pleasure in being able to communicate
intention and movement and to share creativity within a constantly changing
shape of space. Tango offers a way to live with uncertainty and meet
the unknown with grace and fluidity.
Occasionally and usually
unexpectedly, a blissful and transcendent dance unfolds. Two dancers seamlessly communicate and respond to each other and the music joins them as a third and equal partner. This joy is the reward
for patience, presence, and persistence. I don't mean the kind of transcendence in which
you leave your body. What I mean is an embodied transcendence
that transforms everything in its path to Grace.
Osteopathy taught me to
listen to and engage with other people's bodies. Ice skating awoke in me the
desire to move. Continuum Movement taught me to listen to my own body and my
environment, and to explore the mysteries of movement, stillness, breath and
health. Cancer teaches me to stay and surrender to the necessity of the moment.
Tango combines all this life experience as I learn to listen, to lead, and to
follow in new and unexpected ways.
(In the coming weeks, you can find more about embodied tango as a personal and radical political act at www.TangoProvocateur.com)
