Last week I opened the 'treasure box' that I keep in my wardrobe. It is about the size of a big shoe box, and contains things like old pictures of my parents, my sketchbooks, letters, a few seashells and dried flowers, and my old diaries. It was these I was looking for. I wanted to have a look at them again as they contain a lot of material that I'd like to use to write here, like I've started doing with the '
dream' series. And inside them I've found some amazing things, some things that I'd forgotten, some things that I knew I'd written but not in such detail... But I also found something else.
I found the deepest abyss. I saw the younger me. Darkness, and sadness, but mostly anger and aggressivity. Cutting words. Uncontrolled, flaring and starting and straining and crashing against walls like caged animals.
I had this idea about her, the young me...I knew that I was angry, sad. And I knew that somehow I'm not like that anymore. But seeing it, hearing it, I realised that I was actually much worse than I remembered, and I wasn't even aware of it then.
I sometimes see around the internet imaginary letters to younger selves, or letters to future selves. I could imagine writing to this younger version of me...and then I realise she wouldn't understand a thing of what I'd tell her. It's been a long path that led me to being who I am now. She didn't even know she was starting on it, she didn't know what it was possible for her to be.
I found this in my diary. And then I find a shift. Very sudden. The writing style, the words, the things I wrote about, changed completely in the span of a couple of months.
I wondered about this tonight, about how amazing it is to look back to this other person and compare it to myself now. How amazing to have been able to get out of all that, to let the hate go, to grow. How on hearth did I do it?
And I realised then that, even though the growth was gradual, and still going on...the major shift, the first impulse, so profound that I can read two subsequent pages of my diary and not recognise the handwriting, happened as I'd started dancing.
I can actually remember feeling the difference in myself at the time. Obviously I'd started moving differently, but I also completely changed attitude towards everything around me. What was once aggressive, projected, thrown out energy, slowly and gradually was becoming centered, circular, spiral. I got out of my mind and into my body.
My healing started then, although with every journey of healing, the deeper you go, the more wounds you find, and also the more resistance, so the process is something I'm still working on. But I know now that was the first step.
As always, when I start asking myself questions, I am bombarded with answers. So reading the diaries last week led to a series of other messages, all teaching me the same thing, all showing me this same path. Maybe it's just my imagination, but I see correspondences everywhere lately, things converging. And I can't help but follow them, see where they lead.
Messages telling me about 'the dance' as something that should be applied to everyday life. Everything as dance, an ever-present state, but also a way to connect with something else. A way to connect also the audience to something else.
I knew this already, I think, but not as strongly. It gave me a new voice: at dance practice that evening everything was different, everything had a deeper meaning. The dance was speaking now.
Then a few days later another message, about dreams and dreamtime, using songs to 'call' on the physical world, the interconnectedness of all things and the possibility to travel though all things with songs. The duality of material and immaterial, and seeing them as interchanging.
All of this has led to this weekend, where we had a three-day workshop in Kashmiri Yoga, as I was saying earlier. The practice is very much based on stillness, and on listening to your body. Ideally you should be able to progress to an extremely deep perception of the body, then to the perception of the body as having no boundaries, then to the perception of the vibration in all things.
It is incredibly powerful, if you find a practice near you I really recommend it. It is very strange to arrive at the realisation of the illusion of individuality by concentrating on feeling our material body. You really feel that it is all connected somehow, it is all the same thing.
After the lesson we spent some time talking with the guru, about what we experienced and about a few questions some of us had.
One of the women in the class first asked a question. While she was practising the exercises, she sometimes felt a lot of energy, heat. When asked to elaborate she used the term ‘happiness'. She said that sometimes she felt that she didn’t know what to do with it. Hearing this the teacher smiled and asked why she felt that she had to do anything with it. The secret is just to listen to it, feel, and be. To let it be, and someday it will never go away. She said.
Someone else then asked about the tension. The pain. She was feeling pain in her abdomen when she had started the lesson, and it had completely disappeared with the practice. She asked where does the pain in our bodies come from, and how is it possible for it to go away so quickly during practice? The teacher answered that pain can have many causes, and that many times it is generated by 'the mental', or by emotions. But every kind of pain goes away when you listen to it. If you listen and you accept it without judging, it will unclench, and leave.
Lastly, another woman asked advice, as she sometimes felt that if she payed too much attention to her pain, she might actually start feeding it. The teacher answered her as well. You should not listen to your emotion with the mental. You should just feel it, without judging. Accepting it. The mental is a trickster, a trap. Always strive to go back to the body and escape the mental. Go take a cold shower if you have to, scrub with a bristle brush, walk in the rain.
So go back, let the mental go, just concentrate on feeling the body, if you listen and accept the pain, it will go away. If you need to get away from the mental, you just need to awake the body, have a cold shower, scrub, run, scream. Let energy manifest itself in the physical. Feel the pain, but don’t dwell on it with your thoughts, don’t try to will it away, just accept it. Accept everything. The mental is a trap, it takes you on distorted journeys of 'what if’s and 'i wish’s. Practice silence and acceptance. Know that the problem is not in what is happening, the problem is your reaction to it. Practice silence. Listen.
If you listen hard enough you’ll realise that it is all an illusion anyway, it is all a dream. We are not really here. We are not really physical beings. Or, we are, but that’s just the way we are used to perceiving ourselves. We are much bigger than that, and smaller, and multidimensional and constantly moving, vibrating.
And then you will realise that you are not a body, you are not an individual. You are a presence, a vortex of energy. We have no boundaries. We are all, and all is us. All the same energy.
And we've come full circle. Material and immaterial, the dream, the illusion, the energy. Energy expressing and freeing itself through the body. Speaking through the dance. And the dance shows us the illusion. And the energy leads to the body. And the body dances. And the real dance has no steps.
