I woke the next morning and walked down to the dance company’s third, final workshop. It was nice though nothing amazing like last night happened. Afterwards, I walked out into the inner yard of Whitman College. A slight fog softly stretched the space. I walked into it. I easily slid into friendly conversations with those I encountered (something I almost never do). Our conversations felt improvisationally pleasant. A bird flew past me. I saw it in astonishing detail. Not in the sense of x-ray, microscopic vision but in the sense of seeing the bird free of all the mental frames with which I normally look at birds (What are its field marks? What is the species identification? Male, female, juvenile?). I simply but really watched the bird fly and noticed qualities of its feathers I hadn’t seen before. My eyes tracked the bird effortlessly because the bird possessed astonishing detail worthy of seeing, observable only when one’s visual frame of reference is the flying bird itself.
That afternoon, after lunch, I walked back through the campus for a folk dancing class that was being offered. My eyes were shining; it was palpable. I could feel this power flowing strongly out from my eyes. The muscles around my eyes felt like how your face feels when you are grinning, an uncontrollable, natural emotional outpouring. It was hard to analyze. My eyes were shining because the world was so beautiful but the world was also beautiful because I was seeing it differently, seeing it with grinning eyes. Which came first, shining eyes or beautiful world?
In class, each time I danced with someone, I would look into their eyes and watch them start to shine in response. It was so easy for me to gaze into their eyes, women and men alike, because their eyes were beautiful to observe as light grew in their eyes. I knew I was the cause of this because their eyes weren’t shining when I first looked into them, but within seconds of eye contact, I could see their eyes beginning to shine. Also, no one turned their eyes away. They all looked easily into my eyes. I felt no sense of ego or power. I was simply observing the effects of something that was flowing through me but that included both of us. Our dancing was effortless in a way that was wonderfully fun. At some point, I realized that the key to dancing was to dance with the music, not dance to the music because dancing to the music creates a delay between what I hear and what I do that prevents me from being with the music.
Partway through the class, we learned a more complex dance that involved circles of four pairs during which you traded partners as you worked around the circle so that you danced with each partner for about twenty seconds before moving on to the next partner. Again I gazed into the eyes of each partner. One woman’s eyes lit up as I looked into them and within a few seconds, we were each gazing into the soul of the other and the beauty we saw there made us radiantly happy. Then we changed partners. With each partner, there was eye contact and shining eyes, but not like with that one lady. I danced around the circle, coming back to her again. Immediately our radiant eyes connected and our inner beings flamed with the delight of being recognized for the divine beauty that we are.
Around the circle I danced, enjoying each partner but anticipating coming back to this Dear One, and as we approached and saw one another’s welcoming grin of anticipation, our eyes shone brighter and we gazed deeply, being cleansed and restored by the light inspired between us. It was transparently clear that she was as enraptured with what was happening between our eyes as I was. Big grins on our faces and no looking away, a joyful embracing of one another’s eyeshine, our souls sparkling for the other to see. Our dancing was light and effortless because the real dance was within our eyes. We had not spoken but there was so much back-and-forth energy between our eyes that I felt almost telepathically connected with her. I had never met her before and I did not know her name, but we were soulmates.
We sought each other out afterwards, trying to understand together the mystery of this powerful connection we had shared. After the revelation of the divine radiance of another person’s soul, what do you do with that? Our culture doesn’t talk much about this situation. The Hollywood default value, I suppose, would be to become lovers. That possibility was definitely present, but Cindy had a boyfriend overseas in the Peace Corps and there was also a strong sense of sacred ground here upon which one treads respectfully, mindfully. I took her up onto the cliffs of the rosy finches and we sat gazing out over the vastness, sharing. We’d go walking at night. What is this connection and what do we do with it? What is life really?
The next few months were very disorienting. They remind me of an experience I had when my ears got plugged up with earwax. I had tried getting by as best as I could, but there came a time when it was difficult to hear anything, no matter how hard I strained. I finally had to go to a walk-in clinic where they used a large syringe to flush the earwax out. Much of it came out in one great glob and for several seconds I suddenly had bat hearing, hearing people’s voices echoing off the walls. So hard had I been straining to hear before that when the earwax was removed, I was suddenly in an area of human capability that we usually filter out: hearing the echo of voices off walls. In a similar way, when I had been in my primal scream depression, I had been so compressed within the imprisoning cell of logic that when it suddenly disappeared, I expanded explosively into unfamiliar capabilities. Things I had never bothered experiencing suddenly appeared possible.
For hours a day, I would lie on my bedroom floor at home, practicing something that the dance company had had us do a lot. I lay on my back, hands resting to the sides, knees up with feet flat on the floor. I slowly swung my knees in and out a couple of inches, trying to find that balancing point where the knee could balance perfectly upon the line between hip socket and ankle. When I thought I’d found it, I would try to relax all the muscles that connected with my knee. Was there some contracted muscle that was holding the knee in place, or was my knee actually in the lightest of dancing balance, with just a soft shimmer of muscles shifting the knee back and forth with no contractions?
I’d become aware of a contracted hardness of a muscle somewhere (sometimes far from my knee or leg) that couldn’t relax. It felt like a spherical knot of contraction. I would observe that spot as I continued to move my knee slowly back and forth, growing more precise in my sense of where and when the spot would contract or when it would relax. As my knee moved ever so slightly, say, to the right, that spot would contract. I would calmly move my knee back slightly to the left, allowing the hardness to subside. Then I would move my knee to the right again, slower, with greater awareness that I was drawing near a spot of reflexive clenching. I would feel the contraction approaching and before it clenched, I would move the knee ever so slightly back to the left, relaxing that sphere of tension. Back and forth I drew gently closer to that point of clenching and then, at some point, that point released its tension. The sphere of contraction melted into the massaging muscles around it, often accompanied by a spontaneous inhalation of breath that felt wonderful.
Other times, instead of moving my knees, I would begin by slowly, slowly, rolling my head to the left and right, looking for any location of stiffness, and then dropping my awareness into that place. This would usually lead to connections in the shoulders and down into the wrists and hands. One contraction would make me aware of another contraction elsewhere in the body, somehow connected to the one I was working on, and my awareness moved to massaging the newly-noticed contraction. In this way, my mind moved through a complex web of connections throughout my body. I might flex a wrist or stretch a shoulder or straighten my leg to rotate my hips in a delicious stretch. One time, feeling strong, I pushed an exploration in my belly and suddenly there was sharp pain! I rolled into a ball and almost passed out. I was seen by a doctor who found nothing wrong. I stopped pushing so hard. I realized there was no virtue in pushing the muscles to either extreme. My goal became keeping them supplely balanced in the least-effort middle. It’s more effective to gently nudge the balancing point back and forth across the balancing line than impatiently trying to push it to an extreme, trying to force it to release. It felt like the releasing happened when the muscle realized that it wouldn’t be forced to do anything. As it felt itself being moved back and forth near that clenching point, it realized, on its own, that the gentling felt better than the clenching and it hopped off the ledge and released.
My shimmering attention moved lightly from point to point through my web of muscles until something pleasantly released somewhere, accompanied by a deep, spontaneous inhale that felt pure and right. An inhaling of possibility, of being alive, of power to heal and grow, and my consciousness drifted to a quieter, larger space. The dance company wanted us to work intuitively. These spontaneous inspirations of breath guided me. My living body contained a wisdom that could be instinctually acknowledged and trusted. I felt like a caterpillar, within its chrysalis, rearranging its form into a butterfly. At every opportunity, I would lie for hours on the floor doing this work, trusting the feedback of breath to lead me right.[1]
[1] I came upon the following short article about the process that the dance company engenders in participants. It matches my experience and is written by a mentor I respect.
One of the places this floor work led, after more than a month, was a feeling of energy fields around my hands. Science has strongly shaped my understanding of the world and all my life I thought of my skin as the edge of my body. To believe that this feeling of awareness somehow extended beyond my skin went against my understanding of the world.
What convinced me the energy fields were real, not imagined, was their ability to affect others. From an inch or two away, my hands would feel a “knot” of their energy, a place where the energy concentrated and hardened, like two magnets brought even closer together so that one feels resistance building between them. I learned not to force the knot. Instead my hand would move away and then move around the knot, exploring its feel as my hand moved inward and outward. Somehow, my fingers would eventually come to rest precisely on a sweet spot at the heart of the muscle knot. Sometimes my fingertips would be in direct contact with the other person’s body, sometimes not. My energy was trying to find the right, light balancing spot where the knot did not resist the interaction between our fields. It was like a softening that did not slide off to either side. Then I would lightly press into the spot. Very lightly because if I pressed too much, the knot would tighten again. Just a little because the power lay in a resonating harmonious sequence, not in any single move on my part. So just a little press on my part and then a rising as I let the other person’s energy field press back. As their pressing subsided, I would press again. A vibration gradually developed within the knot as my fingertip energy and the knot’s energy moved back and forth like surf or breathing – or like rocking a car back and forth to get it out of the mud. At some point in the deepening vibration, the knot released.
The amazing thing to my rationally-bred mind was that the other person would report a pleasant loosening of tension in that part of their body. This wasn’t some imaginary projection on my part; there was confirmation by another sentient source. (Several years later, this kind of massage would help my future wife fall in love with me.)
As these experiences accumulated, they formed a technique. Don’t push against the resistance. When I feel resistance beginning to grow, allow the resistance to push back in the other direction. Going with it allows the resistance to relax, to be able to come back to this spot in a softer mood. Find the right distance where there is a flow between us and play with that, squeeze, move it. The knot is a holding, a fear of letting go. By allowing itself to be moved just a little, it begins exploring what letting go feels like until it is ready, on its own, to let go of its clenching. Barriers melt into dances of energy.
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