A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending a Five Rhythms workshop in Montreal with founder Gabrielle Roth. Starting in the sixties, she identified how dancers responded to music when it was structured as a wave of energy, with different rhythms building on each other. The dance waves she created help participants to explore dance as a form of meditation in movement. It was wonderful to see her still facilitating this work at the age of 71!
Working on a masters thesis this year on white identity, I have been thinking a lot about Western rationalism and how it has repressed non-western forms of knowledge (indigenous knowledges), women's knowledges, etc. At this workshop, which was focused on the heart (emotions), we spent a lot of time dealing with fear and anger. I was not surprised that Roth would focus on these two emotions, and all their varying states, in a room filled almost exclusively with white Canadians. I don't mean to say that other cultures don't repress fear or anger, but generally my experience in other cultural systems has shown me that many peoples are much more comfortable with expressing anger, and fear can be acted out in more visible, even dramatic displays. British-descent cultures hold very tightly to their 'rational' mind, which often hinders the expression of these emotions. Many people at the session struggled with this.
I have been very interested in the concept of what some researchers call the "imaginative mind", the creative, feminine/receptive aspect of mind that balances rational mind in its ability to leap bordered queues and linear tracks to find new solutions to problems, and make connections to unseen realities. Imaginative mind communes with the emotions, whereas rational mind seeks to function independent of feeling (in the Western paradigm). Imaginative mind is my ally in dance meditation, as it interprets the emotions released by moving the body. Together, the three allies, body, emotion and imaginative mind, help me to explore my inner states and become more fully conscious.
A constant emotional state for me these days has been fear, as I dealt with the anxiety of what was going to happen in the knee surgery I was waiting for, as well as putting a solo performance on stage for the first time in 17 years. A few weeks before surgery, I had an embodied experience where I was stretching my frontal core by arching and twisting on the floor. Due to the pain and fragility of my left knee, I had been clenching all the muscles up my thighs and deep into my abdomen right up to my chest. My partner had been treating these deep muscles with osteopathy and had helped me to identify which ones were gripping in fear.
As I lay on the floor, arching and twisting, looking to the floor as if in a pool of water, a man's face rose up from the deep, a face clenched in terror, and I knew I was being presented with an image of my fear by my imaginative mind. Fear was living in those muscles and body cavities.
Where does fear live in your body?
For more information about Five Rhythms, see Roth's web site at:
http://www.gabrielleroth.com/
