Reflections from the Dance

Andrew Holmes encourages us to dance more!

September 1st 2022

Most of us begin dancing the 5 Rhythms with an evening..

(In the very earliest days, that wasn’t possible. There were very few teachers, and someone only came to London, where I lived, once a year.. So my first experience was a four day workshop!)

But most of us dip a toe in for a couple of hours, to see whether we like it.

And if we do, then we come back.

Evenings are easy. They don’t ask too much of our time or money.

Evenings are fun. They give us a good workout, blow away the cobwebs, connect us with others.

And they’re useful. They help to bring us back to centre, to process the ups and downs of our daily lives.

If an evening is all that you’ve tried, then you may begin to feel that you know what this dancing is about ...

- the day after the night before -

Rachel Kurtz, Saturday 7^th May 

 

If you're old enough you might remember the Vogons saying that in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. If not, and you're curious, you can find out about Vogons here. Resistance to Vogon capture is understandable but often we resist things that are in our own interests. Resisting nourishing practices does not serve us and brings us closer to a Vogon-esk existence of monotony and loss of perspective. This type of resistance is best dismantled.

 

I have been dancing 5 Rhythms since winter solstice 1997 - that will be 25 years this winter - and I can still be blind to how easy it is to get in my own way. Then my resistance was suspicion and my own insecurities. I had seen Gordon and Joy who led the local 5 Rhythms group, many times around Whitley Bay but had never spoken to them. I was projecting all sorts of things onto them that I felt I wasn’t - cool, confident, unconcerned by other people’s judgements and I was intimidated by this.

It was my first 5 Rhythms.

I wasn’t sure how my 73 year old body could handle it, nor my introverted personality.

I felt instantly safe in the room - damn cold but it soon warmed up (and how, didn't need heating after a while).

The whole process felt so natural…a return to childhood in a sense when I wanted to dance freely but of course in those days ‘not allowed’.

It was a deeply spiritual experience, full of insights, connection to Source and insights into self - those stuck places, old hurts, place of freedom.

(I wrote this after a Dance group in Bologna with Olivia Palmer)
I was touched by Olivia's reference to ‘the challenge of stillness’, and also have noticed the ‘lying on the floor’ trait in some dance groups. I’ve puzzled before about it, and after Olivia's comment, this is what I thought:
One of the complexities lies in the word ‘stillness’ in English; others lie in the idea of ‘still mediation’ and stilling the body to complete passivity, for other meditative/connective reasons.