by meghanleborious | Jan 3, 2015 | Notes on Practice
This blog consists of my own subjective experiences on the 5Rhythms® dancing path, and are not sanctioned by any 5Rhythms® organization or teacher.
Today I went to one of my favorite places—a quiet spot next to a river that my grandfather loved. Though it was cold, I sat in meditation on the ground, patiently attending to my breath, to the icy wind grazing my cheekbones, to the sheer bank on the other side of the river, to the glowing late afternoon sun behind the trees, to the ground beneath me, to the moving water, and to everything reflected upside down on its surface.
This week, I was not able to formally practice 5Rhythms; and I find myself considering broad themes within my own practice, rather than specific experiences that have arisen in a given class.
When I started an intensive formal meditation practice in 2007, I slowly came to understand that mindfulness and awareness are two ends of a certain spectrum of experience. Before then, mindfulness and awareness seemed like vague synonyms, but after they became quite distinct. Mindfulness, strengthened in meditation through strategic attention to one thing, such as the breath, is about sustaining focus and overriding the mind’s tendency to disperse itself. Awareness, strengthened in meditation through equanimous attention to everything that arises, is about being wholeheartedly present and open to what is happening in a given moment.
I quickly realized that I had a strong tendency toward mindfulness, rather than awareness. I found I could hold my attention to the breath like a vise. Within a few months, I could sustain mindfulness of breath during almost all of my waking hours. When it came to awareness—and the receptive, accepting, patient quality that awareness engenders, it was (and is) much less intuitive for me.
I came to 5Rhythms and to formal meditation at almost exactly the same time; and both found me eager, dry tinder ready to be set alight. Having two core practices was a lot like having two fluent languages, since it gave me insight into what is unique and what is universal no matter what language you are speaking. What I learned from my meditation teachers, I investigated in the laboratory of 5Rhythms classes. What I learned in 5Rhythms fueled and deepened meditation practice and study. When I found concepts in both traditions that aligned closely, I paid them extra mind.
Today by the river, I got cold as soon as I decided I was done meditating. Nothing changed, except that during formal meditation I was emphasizing mindfulness and concentrating on my breath, and after I wasn’t. I have had the same experience dozens of times—wherein as soon as I stopped formally meditating, something about the environment was unbearable, though I had been perfectly at ease just moments before during the period of meditation. This, to me, offers evidence about the potential power of mindfulness practices to affect how we experience our lives.
In dance, Flowing is where I find my ground. I attend to the physical sensations of the feet again and again, ideally until I feel satisfied that I have established a ground in mindfulness. Until that ground is well-established, it is pointless to move on. Otherwise, I run the risk of causing harm to myself or others, and it is unlikely that I will be available to subtle aspects of practice. During the course of a wave I move back and forth again and again on this continuum between mindfulness and awareness. In dance, often the return to mindfulness is a return to the sensation of the moving feet—a key teaching in Flowing. If I am lucky, I may find myself eventually moving un-self-consciously in Stillness, with awareness of breath and spirit.
Perhaps because of my tendency toward mindfulness, I fall easily into states of concentration. As a child, I set up all sorts of focusing games for myself, such as sitting in the garden and gazing for long periods at a single vegetable, looking into a mirror, or staring at length into the ocean. I never didn’t meditate. I didn’t acquire any language for it or any formal training until my late teens, but it was something that I did intuitively.
In dance, this concentration often expresses as trance states. I go through long periods when dance is quite normal—perhaps psychological, emotional or social—but not archetypal or mystical. I also go through phases when different planes of reality are rendered in sharp relief. I might imagine that I find messages hidden in time, that I communicate with spirit ancestors, or that I see compelling visions, such as jewels pouring out of my palms. I might even feel like I have specific memories of different lives I’ve lived. Sometimes, inside a trance, I catch a glitch in a particular movement and repeat it again and again until its repetition opens the doors of time and offers some key insight.
The transition from Chaos into Lyrical is the time when I am most likely to look up, look around, and notice everyone and everything in the room. My hair, wild with the rigors of Chaos, gets pushed away from my eyes. I often lighten up, and start to move energetically throughout the space, dancing with many, but rarely settling into a dance with one partner. For me, this moment has often been accompanied by the clutch of fear, perhaps in part to do with how I relate to awareness.
There is more that I want to say tonight, as I sit engaging in this rather intellectual examination of how I experience my practice and how mindfulness and awareness get enacted for me. I love to travel these trajectories, but I just stepped outside on a bright moonlit night, standing among windless trees and noting the glitter of winter frost. I remembered that the magic, the beauty, of practice is that moving brings me to life, and wakes me up to the life I am already living. Any frame I care to set up is just a lovely exercise. Really, the words are just a rounding off of the real experience–a quest to understand and communicate what is, ultimately, wordless, timeless and inexplicable.
December 29, 2014
by meghanleborious | Dec 18, 2014 | Notes on Practice
This blog consists of my own subjective experiences on the 5Rhythms® dancing path, and are not sanctioned by any 5Rhythms® organization or teacher.
Somehow on Friday I managed to arrive a little late to Tammy’s Night Waves class, although I arrived in front of the Joffrey building thirty minutes before the start of class. I would not say that I am chronically late, but I do note a pattern. Class nearly always begins with the rhythm of Flowing—the rhythm that is the most opposite to how I see myself. I have written extensively about how important and challenging the teachings of Flowing have been to me; and wonder if this might not have something to do with my occasional late entrances.
Tammy had several beautiful teaching points. One was to note that there is often a particular rhythm that people distance themselves from. This could show up as just not being into it, stopping movement completely, telling yourself a story about how misguided everyone else is and how on point you are, literally leaving the room (or, perhaps in my case, showing up just a bit late, leaning the tiniest bit away from the teacher of Flowing.)
I reflected on a period lasting a year or more when I noticed that I would go wild with the joy of Chaos, then, the moment the music transitioned us into Lyrical, instead of carrying that joy into levity, I would panic. For months, I could not resist going to check my phone, certain there had been some sort of emergency with my small son. I knew it was just a function of my triggered mind, but I had to go through with checking nonetheless. It was as though the kind of joy that arises for me during Lyrical was too much–harder to face, for example, than grief, guilt or aggression.
On Friday, the room seemed emptier than usual. I wandered for some time before I found a spot to sink down temporary roots to unfurl and stretch. Tammy began the wave subtlely, suggesting that we focus on different parts of the body, leading me to a contemplative, interior mood.
I’ve been reading a book called “Mindset” by a renowned educational psychologist. The researcher’s position is that most people align with either a “fixed” or a “growth” mindset. People with a fixed mindset tend to believe that you are born with certain abilities that inevitably express as talent. People with a growth mindset tend to believe that you are born with a range of capacities and that hard work and the ability to incorporate feedback are the keys to success. The interesting thing (and important for my own insight) is that even seeing yourself as smart, competent, creative and capable can be problematic. In this case, research shows that people will defend their smartness, creativeness or capableness—even shying away from working hard because hard work might somehow disprove their inherent talent, especially if they were to work hard and fail.
People with a growth mindset tend to see failure as a challenge, or as information they can use to grow. This brings me to Tammy’s remarks about people who check out—or even literally leave the room—during a particular rhythm. The growth-minded amongst us are willing to hang with discomfort and challenge, and are willing to at least try to stay in the room even when all our sensors tell us to run screaming. It seems like the rhythms that are least comfortable might offer the greatest possibilities for challenge and growth.
As has been true lately, I found all kinds of new ways to move. In Chaos, there was a marching, driving, military song. Tammy made a suggestion about moving with resistance. I balled my fists, drew my elbows back taut, and marched away—then released again into boundless, unrestrained Chaos.
As the first wave ended I found myself in a shamanic-like trance. Tammy said something about experiencing multi-dimensional breath. I first took this to mean space in all directions, and expanded the ways I was moving to include all possible heights and orientations. Then, I took it to mean all times and spaces that have existed, moving into different territory entirely. During the period of Stillness, I experienced compelling visions.
The fixed mindset/growth mindset information, along with Tammy’s suggestion about staying with it even when you want to check out, led me to think about how I, myself, have been affected by fixed mindset. As a child, I could sense two things about myself. The first is that I had an iron-hard core of strength that ran right through the middle of me. All I had to do was pause and turn inward to sense it. The second is that I was smart. I grew up believing I was smart (I can even remember the moment it first formed as a construct), and being told that I was smart all the time by well-meaning parents, teachers and relatives.
When I was 7 or 8 my Dad was slightly contemptuous when he believed I mispronounced a word. Around the same time, my uncle told me my favorite author, Stephen King, was “a fountain of trash literature.” I took both of these incidents as an affront to my smartness and began to set up architecture to support my vision of myself.
As I was considering the idea of fixed mindset, I also thought about all the energy I wasted wondering if I was a “good” artist. It wasn’t until after I had my son (and no longer had time to waste on neurotic internal dialogues) that I realized the question is completely un-important. Since I don’t believe there is any inherent meaning or any inherent self, there is no point whatsoever in considering this question. What matters more is making, process, progress, challenge and growth.
I went through a period when I realized that I was actually quite arrogant, and that I had developed kind of false meekness in an attempt to hide the arrogance. I had no choice but to express the arrogance for a time, in an effort to find some kind of authenticity. After a recent conflict with my son’s father, my mother told me that I can be kind of “rigid, sometimes” when it comes to things that concern my small son. She also told me it can come across as haughty. Ouch. The same week, I asked my boss to mediate a dispute with a colleague (hoping she would take my side); and she told me if I wanted to make any real progress—right or wrong—I would have to find some humility (implying, therefore, that she thought I lacked humility, at least in this instance). Ouch.
When I get similar feedback from more than one source, I have to at least entertain it as a serious possibility. Do I lack humility? Have I developed a kind of arrogance, perhaps to defend my self-perception as smart? OUCH. (Did I just write that?)
Thankfully, I am willing, even when I want to disconnect from the rhythm at hand, to at least stay in the room. Through practice (both 5Rhythms and in a meditation tradition) I have attempted to root out what the educational psychologist calls “fixed mindset,” yet I keep finding hidden reserves that surprise me.
On Friday, I danced with a friend I love to dance with and was sad when our dance dissolved. One of the last songs of the wave kept switching back and forth between a driving chaos track and a bounding Irish jig and I found myself in every different part of the room, moving quickly through both high and low spaces.
Often writing about my experience of 5Rhythms practice leads me to cathartic insight, poetic awareness or profound gratitude. Sometimes it ties itself into a neat bow by the last paragraph. On this occasion, it gives me more information to consider as I go about making my life, and, hopefully, to use to inform my practice both on and off the dance floor.
December 14, 2014, NYC
