Disembodied rationalism

Happy New Year to all my dancing friends. I celebrated the new year at Winter Solstice but I am enjoying the time today to relax and do some blogging.

I am answering the DYB friend who asked about "disembodied rationalism" or "rationality". This is not my term, rather one used in philosophy, particularly phenomenology, and of course in feminist philosophy. It refers to the Western/Cartesian concept of the mind-body split which is not present in many other cultures. You will find it referred to in discussions about religion, law, and a wide range of areas exploring the role of the human body in cognition. You can google the term and find a huge amount of literature, scholarly and popular, blogs, and books.

Embodiment is the opposite of course, integrating mind and body (and emotions), or going even further, as some suggest that the dividing lines between body and mind might even be misunderstood, based on centuries of dualistic thinking in our culture. Listen to this US neurobiologist Antonio Damasio on Big Think talk about current research into the way brain and body are involved in emotion.

http://bigthink.com/ideas/23022

So when I am journalling here about experiences "in" my body, I am not talking about mindlessness -
Watch Lil Jon's "Get Outta Your Mind" (warning, not a clean version) about mindlessness
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=041h-1_5yfo
Sometimes you have to be mindless to break the stronghold that rational thinking keeps us locked in
(by the way, I love that song!).

I am talking about not letting "rational" mind control the experience. I am training it to take a side seat when asked to, for the purposes of my own freedom and wellbeing. So that it can play a role as an important ally in my expanding consciousness, but not dominate the process. Rationalism is not God ruling over the temple of my body.

I will bring a copy of Spretnak's chapter on embodied/goddess religion to dance this week for anyone who'd like to read a sample of feminist thought on embodiment.

Healing Dance Network

Thanks to 'libramoon' at Healing Dance Network for putting me in touch with their group (see her comment last post).

Here is a quote from one of the network postings, where they mention the "embodied mind".  Some friends at Dance Your Bones have been asking about the "disembodied rationalism" I mentioned in a previous post and I will speak more to that in tomorrow's post, but here is an interesting quote and link to research on choreography and neuroscience by UK researcher Glenna Batson.

"Particularly relevant are the ways dancers physicalize thought. Dance is a prime example that cognition is for action."

"The processes of dance making are a unique form of embodied thinking and offer a unique window into our capacity for creativity and design. Today cognitive neuroscience has chosen dance as its muse. Over the last decade a rich dialogue has developed between neuroscientists and dancers. The dialogue addresses many issues around "embodied cognitiona" TM, in a movement-based art form that impact(s) widely on intelligentsia and society at large."

http://seadnetwork.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/batson_final.pdf

Doesn't this speak to what we are expeiencing at Dance Your Bones? We may not be choreographing dance for observers, but we are spontaneously composing dances each week, and then letting them go like prayers. "Sweat your prayers". http://www.danceyourbones.com/

Interesting to note that the world is reflecting on this as well. It makes me feel more commited to pressing forward with my own "meditation in movement" exploration. I hope it compels you too.

The longest night

Solstice has passed now, the longest night of the year. I like the darkness of these long nights. A solstice ceremony at friends last night has reminded me of the needed rest that happens in the winter. Dark, cold nights draw me into my home, into myself, away from the busy world.

I wish I could go visit old Methusaleh in California. He holds the secret to long life, conserving his energy deep inside. I think I will dance a dance of stillness in his honour when the session resumes next week, and to remember the long night.

Methusaleh is said to be nearly 5,000 years old

http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/wilderness-resources/photos/the-worlds-10-oldest-living-trees/methuselah

Restoring balance

Tonight as I was dancing, I was observing myself as I was healing myself.  By this, I mean I was actively noting how my mood was changing and the trigger thoughts that were connected to the changes. I had been feeling depressed, my thoughts caught up in old past defeats that were really draining my energy.

Sometimes when I practice ecstatic dance, I simply move and I don't worry about consciousness. But most of the time I try to watch what is happening in my inner world while I am moving. And tonight I observed my body shedding anger and hurt.

Daily pressures of Western ways of work take away my balance.  I had been feeling my strengths were not respected at my workplace, and the pressures of producing a large volume of work for an employer.

Towards the end of the session, I was simply standing rooted to one spot, waving like seaweed in the ocean current, feeling my knees, hips, and spine become supple, dropping my anger like scales falling off as I undulated. I must have stood like that for 5 to 10 minutes.

By the time I was done, I felt completely restored, the bad day behind me, and at peace.

Trance dance

I am very interested in how dancing can help me attain a state of meditation that I can only describe as a conscious trance. I don't always find that state as a result of the wave (the Five Rhythms flow of music), or I may only enter it partially, but I do find I can achieve it more and more frequently after 3 years of practicing ecstatic dance.

Some would call this trance dance but when I was younger and attended trance dance raves, I would experience the crowd as moving towards an unconscious state, not a higher consciousness. It was full of Freud's libidinal energy that I talked about in my last post. Looking back, I would now say I - and perhaps the others dancing with me - we were emptying our minds to a state of nothingness, just a living body moving to rhythm. Emptying is a common term when we think of meditation. I am not saying what we did was a bad thing, it just isn't what I am practicing now when I move with an engaged imaginative mind. Or perhaps what ecopsychologist Laura Sewell called the 5th skill of ecological perception - the intentional use of imagination.

I went looking recently for some video clips that might capture a visual of this process. I started with Western yoga trance dance as it is often seen as related to ecstatic dance.  Here is a link to American Shiva Rea's "liberation dance", much like Gabriel Roth's Five Rhythms videos.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boFGjvtmxEk&feature=fvwrel

Rea has built onto her career in yoga, expanding into dance. When I watch her videos, I notice some similarity to our practice but like Roth, she chooses to film beautiful, young, able-bodied dancers on a white sand beach in order to market her product and so the movement takes on the inevitable aura of being staged for the camera. But when she says she is "dancing for healing, dancing for life, dancing for truth", I have to admit we share a common goal.

Then there is Osho's Dynamic Meditation, a cathartic method designed for Westerners who have difficulty meditating but that avoids the pitfalls of Latihan. His method also uses dance but he encourages the practitioner to avoid rhythm in the early stages of the practice. Instead of trying to watch the mind, Osho says "throw out your garbage rather than wasting time in watching it" and so movement/dance clears away the debris so that one can meditate. This clip shows someone moving through all 5 phases of the program.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5Ao--mbIho

One more. Check out this voodoo dancing from Togo, in still photography. These images by Alan Tobey from 2008 capture the inner world of the dancer without us actually knowing what they are seeing in their imaginative minds. The dancers seem unconcerned about how their dance "looks".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6b17j9zpR_M

I will post more about voodoo dance later.

Chaotic libido

September marks a return to the dance floor for the new fall session of the collective I dance with. Seeing everyone again has reminded me to get back to this blog and continue my reflections on the role of the moving body in spiritual development. 

I am very conscious when I dance that I come to share energy with others in the group and I know people appreciate it. When I was injured last year, I know how much I appreciated being surrounded by others who were fully committed to dancing freely. They drew me out and kept me moving.

My first week back I had a lot of energy to share and our DJ had taken some risks to play some unusual music. I really enjoyed the rise from fast flow through to chaos (rhythms in the Five Rhythms approach I have discussed previously) and a few others and I were ready to stir up the room! While I followed my body on its rise to chaos, I started reconnecting with my old reflections on erotic life force. I had read a beautiful text by critical theorist Joe Kinchloe about the radical love needed to change ourselves and the world, and he also talked a lot about libidinous energy. He stated;

     "Knowing and learning are not simply intellectual and scholarly activities but also practical and sensuous activities infused by this sacred notion of radical love ...Educators who want to make a difference in this context, to fuse learning to libidinal energy, and help students connect to the cosmos cannot be intellectual chickens. They must have the knowledge and the guts to stand up to the promoters of stupidification and their pedagogical poison ... With this notion of a life affirming eros wrapped in radical love, we can create a critical pedagogy that speaks more convincingly and meaningfully to a wider audience around the planet." 1

I really felt I was embodying this libidinous energy in my dance tonight; not the libido of Freud's "primitive sex drive", but more of what Jung saw as psychic energy, or what Reich called orgone energy. To me - life force quite simply. I am very committed not only to expressing my life force as it is connected to the cosmos, but also to sharing it with others, on the dance floor, in the classroom, in my writing. When I express it fully in ecstatic dance, I leave the dance floor feeling balanced and aligned. If I only commit half heartedly, I will not leave my rational mind. It is too well fortressed, and buttressed by everyday life. It takes total commitment to leave that plane.

But if I do commit, the goddesses within start to speak, and maybe a few gods :-)

And this is why I dance.

1. Kinchloe, J. (2007). The Vicissitudes of Twenty-First Century Critical Pedagogy: A review of Ilan Gur Ze’ev (ed.) (2005). Critical Theory and Critical Pedagogy Today. Toward a New Critical Language in Education. Haifa: Studies in Education (University of Haifa). Studies in the Philosophy of Education (2008) 27:399–40.

Where does fear reside?

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/