30 Days of Happiness - Day One

Reasons to be cheerful part one.

Today's Happy is Dancing the Body Ecstatic



Attending a two and a half hour dance/moving meditation class on a Sunday morning. Yes, I did indeed go and stretch forth my mind, body and spirit. It took a while for the seed to begin to poke her head out of the lovely rich soil in which she has been hibernating/hiding these past long years but when she did...boy oh boy was that fun.

I don't have a photograph of the class, so this rather saucy stripey-legged picture of Rachel Brice, tribal belly dancer extraordinaire, will have to represent my ecstatic dance experience. I will be going back for more. Oh yes indeedy.

And there's more...

To fuel my body and give me a reason to barefoot it (not to mention the skippety skip and jazz hands) around the house, I have ordered the divine CD Beats Antique by Tribal Derivations. Check it out at www.lastfm.com for all that's good about tribal belly dance music. Mmmmm it's heavenly, particularly the title track 'Derivation' - all sultry goodness. Plus LastFM is the best place to find new music. So far I've discovered three new artists that I love. Good times abound.

This post is part of my second year of '30 Days of Happiness' blogging. Given how Joni Mitchell Blue I have been on and off recently, I was looking for a reason to focus on all the things that are good in my life and, as usual, BlueBirdBaby came up with the goods. If you'd like to get in on the Happiness action, go visit Erin and leave a comment asking to jump on board, then get posting. You'll get a link to your blog and to your Happiness Posts from her blog. Plus, you get to meet her - one of the coolest chicks in blogland.

ps. If you think that dancing is just for skinny chicks, take a look at the vintage belly dancers postcard below...



Love it.

Little Gypsy Dancing Feet

Oh the ecstasy. Can you not feel it? I LOVE this photo. I wish I knew to whom it belonged but I found it on the internet and it were all by itself. This, to me, epitomises the wonderousness of dance. The pulse of spirit pleasuring the body in pure movement. The sheer delight of allowing oneself to be moved by spirit, shaped by heart and sung into being by the Beloved. I LOVE dance. I may have mentioned before that I have a background in dance and that there is a part of me (what am I? A Terry's chocolate orange? So many 'parts'...) that longs every day to pray in that way. I know. I know. Why don't I? I don't honestly know. Perhaps it is that I feel that I cannot do justice to it. That I have not the form nor the grace that I once possessed. But we both know that those are simply excuses to not allow myself to be embodied, to be possessed by the spirit of the dance and to dance my prayers once again.

Still - that urge grips me now as I sit at my computer. (Dance you idiot! Don't type!). I can feel my soul unfurling, probing, reaching towards the light, the melody, the bass. Pushing me to arch, to twirl, to (shock! horror!) gyrate! Oh ma goodness - somebody pass me the smelling salts...

* The delectable Rachel Brice

To me there is something awe inspiring about this connection to the dance that dances us. You can feel the heat of divine possession radiating off the dancers in these two photos. It makes me feel restless and edgy and I want...I want...I want. To be them. To cut some rug, to throw some shapes, to plunge into the warm waters of senseless shapeshifting dance.

And so - tomorrow I am away to tickle my spirit with exactly that. For two blissful hours I will leave my habitual life and step into my prayers with a full heart and an overflowing body. I will give myself over to nothing less than an act of worship as I allow my spirit to answer the call that throbs through me tonight. It will be heavenly. It will be vulnerable. It will be delicious.


Laughter will bubble up from dark places. Dusty corners will be swept. Tight muscles will be freed. My confetti heart will be thrown up into the air in wild abandon and I will not care where the pieces land. It will not matter. There is only to dance and be danced. I think this is truly where I touch God. Maybe stillness is not for me, not until I have truly let myself be moved? Certainly, Osho believed that the western monkey mind cannot find peace until it has first expended itself in movement. Hence his Kundalini meditations which begin with movement and end in stillness. I cannot fathom why I do not do this more.



Music has a powerful effect on me, as I'm sure it does on many people. Depending on the music I can be playful, dark, sensual, ecstatic, humorous, teasing, tribal, fanciful or powerfully erotic. When the hubble and I tapped into our inner God and Goddess during our Tantra journey (you dance for each other for 20 minutes each - argh!), I found a powerful place within me and a deeply, achingly vulnerable one. I had never before shown myself in this way to another human being. It was intense and moving to watch and to be watched. It tore down, if only temporarily, some high, thick walls inside me to allow my beloved man to see me in this way. I cried. And contrary to expectations, there was something so awe inspiring about being able to watch him dance for me, without judgement, without teasing, and to just appreciate the beauty and the vulnerability of this supremely intimate offering of love. I cried again. As terrifying as it may feel to do this for one another, I recommend that everyone have a go. It took us to places neither one of us had been before and indeed, may never go again.

And so, I look forward to exploring music with my mind, body and soul tomorrow. I look forward with sharp anticipation to the moment when I can surrender to sound and allow myself to disappear into the notes. Perhaps I will emerge a different shape, become a different melody. Or perhaps I will simply 'become' myself once again.

And what tremendous freedom there will be in that my friends.



Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is no mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself. ~by Havelock Ellis

The Challenge of Acceptance, The Art of Nourishing

Storms

Have this playing as you read this.

I would love to come to you healed and say that all of your words had made a difference. They did. They do. But they do not undo, unknot, unravel the many shields of my self. I am deeply grateful for such kindness as has been shown to me and ever humbled that people whom I will most likely never meet, have taken the time to share their experiences, offer wisdom and advice (all of it good, sound advice) or to simply 'be' with me for a moment. It has been unexpected.

I am feeling a little less 'Noir'. There are moments of light, laughter and happiness - of course there are. It's just impossible at this point to tell what is going to happen next. I am, for once, not anxious to 'fix it'. I am allowing the 'what is' to visit and not feel like I have to escape from it. I know that I have been touched by some sort of sadness that goes very deep and that will not let me loose just yet. No matter how much I struggle against its silky grip.

I'm so tired and so weary to my bones of trying and getting nowhere. I'm so tired of never living up to my own expectations. So tired of always falling short and getting up and trying all over again. And so I have decided to stop. Not stop living obviously, that would be stupid. Just stop striving all the time. Stop trying to sit on my anger at the expense of my passion, my joi de vivre, my soul's yearning to be heard, to be free. Of course, it is easy to say and not so easy to do. Not so easy to 'surrender' when one does not know how to bend to the prevailing winds. How do you describe the act of surrender? What does letting go look like? Feel like? How do you know when you have achieved it? And what of anger? My anger is a part of it all too. I have yet to learn how to express my anger in more appropriate and manageable ways. I have sat on it for so long, all of my life really, and now it wells up at the slightest provocation and is destructive to the one person I want to protect from it more than any other. And yet. I don’t know how to let go and it’s not something anyone else can tell me how to do. How do you explain the process, the art, of surrender to someone who does not know what surrender feels like, what being empty feels like?

I have always known what I have to do. (Have to?) I have been searching for a way but seem incapable of actually doing it. Incapable of finding that middle pathway between self-loathing and self-love, between anger and passion, between nurturing others and nurturing myself. It was quite the revelation to discover that I don't trust myself. I don't think that I know how to.

My acupuncturist, Aisla, is an amazing and intuitive woman. Today, as I dissolved into tears in her office (yet again), grateful for just a moment when I could be 'me' and let the overwhelm come and not pretend to be on top of it all, to be coping, I realised that this is who I really am. This tear streaked, overwhelmed, oh so tired mummy who wants so desperately to be a good mummy and not a bad mummy all the time, who wants so much to be all that she hoped she would be as a parent, but isn't. This is it. This is as good as it gets. At least for now. And in her office, for those few moments, it's ok. Or at least, if not ok, ok that its not ok.

She sits her needles into my skin and they crawl or throb or itch and then she asks me what I think that I do well. I am quiet for a long time. Then I realise that I can offer her nothing. I can say nothing good about myself. Find nothing good to bring forward for us to talk about. 'That's very telling.' She says in her quiet way. 'Your inner critic is dominating. You need to bring out your inner encourager.' Yes. I'm sure I do. But what I need most of all is to let it go. Let go of the striving for constant perfection (especially when I don't know that this is what I am doing). I was moulded for the challenge, for the winning of battles, for being the best at stuff and honestly, it pretty much came easily to me. I didn't fail that much. But I did get scared of making mistakes. I don't know how else to play. So now I sit with the knowledge that this parenting, nurturing thing may be one battle that I cannot win. And why is it a battle anyway? Surely these things should be soft edged and soft focused and easy, not iron and unyeilding and frosty. If the way is hard, if the road you are on constantly brings you back to the same stiff, cold place of hatred and angst, then you are on the wrong frigging road. You'd think that would be obvious wouldn't you?

But its not. It never is. We can never see the beauty that stares us in the face or the courage we have in the face of adversity, when we are the ones doing the looking. I am well aware that this applies to me, of course I'm too busy looking at you.

It's not that I want to be someone else. I don't. I do sometimes entertain wild fantasies about being somewhere else, but I don't actually want to be someone else. Unless that someone is Cate Blanchett perhaps or Kate Bush. I'd trade lives with them for a day. But then I'd want to come back here and be me again and cuddle my girl and hug my man. So no. It's not about that. It's about not knowing who I am. It's about not being able to find something lovable, something bright and good and inspiring about myself to offer up to this life. It's about truly not understanding what about me makes this path so bloody hard when I have so much love to give to it.

If I abandon everthing to a single moment,
then I reach you.
O light-hearted beautiful of the world,
give me that heavy cup.

Give it,
and then I'll be saved
from sorrow and helplessness both.
I'm so tired of feeling oppressed by anxiety
and all of anxiety's troublesome friends.

give it to me,
for then I'll be drunk with God's glass
and be annihilated completely.
I'll open my wings in absence and fly away to the placeless place.
RUMI

I have spoken before about the process of 'becoming'. And it is to this that I want to surrender. I have no choice really because what I am doing is breaking me into a million tiny little pieces. But how? How do I reach into the deepest still beating part of my heart and bring it forth into the light? How do we touch that little part of ourselves that is Divine and allow it to lead? I am so used to putting my intellect before my heart. My mind over my body. But thinking has brought me to here. Again and again. There is no thinking my way out of this.

Nurturing
And what is nurturing?
I can tell you what it is not. It is not driving yourself daily to accomplish the impossible. It is not running like a greyhound around the same well worn track after the same scabby rabbit who is always out of the reach of your snapping jaws. It is not trying to make yourself something that you aren't and never were. But I cannot tell you what it is. I could reel off some trite magazine worthy observations about 'time for you' like having a long soak in a hot bath (my bath isn't long enough to lie down in - why do they not build them with a sodding head rest for Gods sake?), or taking a mini-break (not when you are mini-broke), eating well and getting enough rest. But then what if you don't cook well or just simply don't enjoy cooking? What if your rest is held entirely in two chubby little hands over which your deepest desire to get a full 8 hours have no dominion? What if you truly don't know what nourishes your deepest self? What then?

Nurturing does not come naturally to me. I've said this before. I can't tell if its because I'm lazy (as I sometimes am) or because I am just lacking in energy and inclination (does that class as lazyness?). Right now, with so little time and energy and freedom, it feels like I have nothing left to give. I am having to learn about nurturing myself and my family one day at a time when I thought that it would all come so easily to me. I realise now that I simply don’t trust myself to be a good parent. I believe in instincts, just not mine.

* Sadness & Light

Acceptance.
So in this place of 'no trust' I sit. In this place of 'self-loathing' I wait. Inbetween these moments of sadness and light, I open. I wait to accept myself and this and it. And I know that nothing can truly change until acceptance seeps as deeply into my skin as the striving I wear like a tribal tattoo. I am unravelling and it feels raw and frightening and my skin feels blistered with all my shattered hopes and dreams. What comes out of this blistering darkness I wonder? I guess there's only one way to find out.

'Some hearts are ghosts and they drown in dark waters,
just as silt grows heavy and drowns with the stone.'

The Dance of Becoming

I've been listening to Oriah Mountain Dreamer recently. I love the quiet yet intense way she writes. I love that for all her peace and self awareness she still struggles with the self same things that I struggle with. That her journey towards living fully and passionately in the moment and 'loving well' is still fraught with all the same dilemmas, habits and patterns that mine is. It's not that I am comparing myself to her (either favourably or unfavourably), its more that I have compassion for her struggles and find that they inform my own.

Today, as I drove my little girl to her nanna's for an afternoon of sultanas and gardening (and probably very little sleep), I listened to Oriah talk. In a culture obsessed with pro-active self development, knee deep in positive affirmations designed to 'change' and 'free' us (and I am an active surfer of this wave of self development), her question was not “Why are we so infrequently the people we want to be?” but rather “Why do we so infrequently want to be the people we really are?”. I found myself holding my breath. There was a truth to this question that landed in me with an almighty thump. I have (and am) fighting so hard to become a better person that it had never really occurred to me that it's not about changing myself as much as it is about allowing my truest self, my essential nature to unfold. Instead of trying to batter my stubborn mind, ego and patterns into submission, I could be surrendering, allowing my real self to manifest. And not towards any other end than that of self-realisation, the very thing that we are all limping along towards in our own strange and wonderful ways. The thought that maybe instead of fighting myself and my nature I could be exploring it in thoughtful, compassionate ways was new to me and I turned it over in my mind like a bright, shiny penny. Oriah's book The Dance is all about this - ending the struggle with the Self and finding the truth about who we really are. We are not flawed beings trying to become whole. We are whole. The struggle is really in letting go of the illusion that we are flawed. Our essential nature is like God's own, pure, passionate, shining. We need only to remember that in order for the struggle to be over.

The difficulty of course is in living with this awareness every day. I move in and out of consciousness of my essential nature with alarming speed and frequency. Sometimes I think that a more flawed human being it would be hard to find. Sometimes I become frightened at just how powerful my mind really is and how it can keep me running around the same endless tracks like a greyhound after the rabbit. Just when I think I have fully understood something it is gone from me like a snowflake in the snow - I know its there, I saw it land but no matter how long or hard I search, I cannot find it again. My mind tortures me endlessly with questions. It comes up with endless ways to touch God, Great Mystery, the Goddess, Great Spirit or whatever else you care to name it. It keeps me awake at night wondering if I have correctly carried out this meditation or that visualisation and asking when I will get the results I seek. The trouble is that focusing on the results we want, on the goal we intend, keeps us from truly being present, here and now. It keeps us from really being present with ourselves. I very rarely know how I am really feeling. I very rarely ask myself. At the first sign of emotional discomfort I am off. My mind comes up with a million different things that I really must do and, of course, there is my daughter. Strangely enough though, she is present to herself. That is why I find her needs so hard to deal with sometimes. They are so 'now', so immediate and there is no 'later' for her.

Ah Oriah, you do get me philosophising. My eternally questing nature seeks truth and then bolts at the merest shadow of it. I seek a more ready access to and connection with the Divine and then hide when it appears. I search endlessly and then pretend that I don't find because sometimes to face the truth of who we really are, to enter fully into the dance of becoming means giving up all our dreams of who we could be if we only tried a little bit harder. I am guilty of that every day. The thought that I might not achieve the lofty heights that I seek for myself, the prospect of not having 'something to show' for my life terrifies and depresses me. It is as though it is not enough to merely live a good life, we have to achieve, achieve and achieve some more. We must parade our awards, our gifts, our achievements before us, wave them ahead of our parade to let people know that we amounted to something. In my darkest moments I fear that I will simply disappear into the role of 'mother' and never reappear to 'become' anything more. I don't see the beauty of the work of the mother. I don't learn the lessons brought by my child. I see only an endless pit of need that I can never fill and I worry that I will be left with an empty heart where once there were lofty dreams.

That is not to say that we shouldn't dream. Of course we can and must (I don't like the word 'should'). I think our dreams are the Divine's way of showing us where our journey may take us and putting our feet firmly on that path. Without our dreams we would be chained to life, merely existing rather than living. I think the danger comes when we let our dreams become an excuse for not being here now. Then we are in danger of becoming caught up in that cycle of attainment - seeking always the next and brightest thing before we can be happy. I see it in myself all the time. Oriah's longing for being passionately present and loving well echoes my own. I think it is a universal thing. In each of us that longing cries out to be heard, to be noticed, to be assuaged by love and by the Divine. Our souls laments are keened into the desert of modern life and when our needs are not immediately satisfied, we think we have not been heard, that we have been abandoned and that we are alone and we give up. We are always heard. Our knock on the door of the Divine is always answered it is just perhaps that we don't always recognise this. It may come in a form that we had not anticipated or expected. It may come in a way that is not comfortable for us and so we dismiss it. We expect our journey to be straight and narrow with no unexpected potholes or speedhumps along the way.

For me, this journey is circular - or more accurately, a spiral. I dance into the centre of my own being, rest briefly marvelling at how different the world looks from in here, before being inexorably drawn back out again to dance with life. In I go again, sweaty and breathless from twisting and turning on the edges to find a tiny window of repose before the music draws me back out again. The Dance of Becoming reminds me of the fable of the Red Shoes, how anyone who wears them must, no matter how exhausted they become or how much they want to stop, dance until they fall down dead. I think that's how many of us interact with life every day. Maybe when we can stop seeing our spiritual journey as a dance unto the death and see it for what it is, a spiral dance of surrendering and becoming, being lost and being found again, we will truly be 'in step' with our essential natures. It helps me sometimes to remember that my dance of becoming is a dance with God, with the 'Beloved' and then I can sit back and let him lead.

So, if music is the food of love then let the dance be the eating.
Bon Appetite.