Yes, I seek to out run, to travel beyond and to hide in thick plumes of ash and smoke, this weeping wound which proves inexhaustible, is irreplaceable and is but a mirage. Yes, I seek to escape my own self-imposed human suffering. Like the whirling dervish who spins his way out of this realm, like the wizened yogi who bends her way onto another plane and like the sitting Buddha who meditates into silence, I too attempt to spin, bend and meditate. I too attempt to move myself from this human existence, from this perpetual, binary dance of pain to joy and back again. I too try.
My practice is no different from theirs. My suffering is theirs. My desire to seek nirvana, my hunger to expand beyond the mere confinement of flesh and bone, my thirst to once again reside in pure, undulating waves of pulsing energy is all of ours. Yet, like them, after every moment of achieved enlightenment, I must return, here, to myself. No matter how fast I spin, how hard I bend or how deep I bow, I cannot escape this. I cannot outrun this existence. I cannot flee that which makes me human.
So, instead, I try to keep showing up. Here in San Diego County, I try within a community of movers tat come together three times a week. When I first entered this group, I quickly became judgmental and rigid. I witnessed individual bodies writhing in shared space, but I did not note a deeper engagement. On the surface, all I could see was trance dance mysticism. There seemed to me to be little connection between music and meaning, movement and action, mind and body.
Initially, my rational, reasoning brain told me that this was not the place where I would find what I was seeking. As can be my usual response, I turned around and walked out. But, where was there to go? To a nightclub with its gyrating rhythms of pop culture and its noxious fumes of insecurities? Or, how about to a dance studio, where I would be encouraged to copy the people around me and non-verbally told to stay to the back of the room until I had proven my ability to dance like the teacher? I could stay home - and I did, just as I have always relegated myself to do - but what am I learning then?
After years of staying away, I finally ran back in. I had finally realized that, although I cannot change certain situations, I could certainly change how I entered into them. In other words, I had the power to affect my own intentions. Instead of looking outside of myself for the answers, I finally chose to focus in, to inhabit my needs, so that I could then share and luxuriate in the union that I was so desperately seeking.
