Giving up on Body

Photo: Barbie Robinson

Since I offer contemplative dance, many of the people in my programs tend to be older. (BTW I am not convinced that a contemplative approach is only for the more mature demographic, but it seems to be the assumption in our times!) And because it is dance, most of the people tend to be women. As a mature woman myself, I have been at the coalface of the implicit assumption that as we age our Body is going to let us down and that we are better off to give up on most of our expectations of Body.

And those expectations are usually that our Body must look and function as if we are still twenty-five years of age. If that benchmark is not fulfilled, then we are somewhat less in our Body. Most of us will inevitably land on the side of “somewhat less” of a Body. Especially with our lower Body, we take it for granted that we will not be functional to bend our knees, attempt squats, or move our hips. We have spent a lifetime sitting on chairs in front of screens, so anything weighted or deeper than this position is considered unnecessary.

How to dance when the dance holds a weighted lower Body central to a transformation of consciousness? Even before we get to this, there is the stage of inviting people to consider that Body has the power to transform consciousness. Because for thousands of years we have located that power in the mind.

Even when we have embodied modalities, many of them embody templates of the mind. Many mind-body practices end up embodying the mind. I am not saying this is not valuable. Any embodiment is better than none. But a Body-led expression is another cosmos which is not referential to any of the known mental paradigms. This is why ritual dance is the most ancient language of Body-led rituals of transformation of consciousness. Because dance has the power to be about itself when freed from word and thought.

Even when people come to Body-led dance, they are still enmeshed in the enslavement of Body to mind and its language of words. We are so entrenched in a word-dominated consciousness that we do not realise the power of word to subsume all other ways of experiencing Reality.

The Body is made to dance. Every part of the Body moves. The bony architecture of Body is the source of dance. In the Indian dance text, the Natya Shastra (circa 500 BCE to 500 CE), dancers are urged to employ nuanced bends and rotations of every joint to render movements multi-dimensional. This is not just superficial guidance for the dance to look good, rather it is vital to the archetypal experience itself. Dance reveals the nature of Body and through that the nature of a multi-dimensional and pulsating Reality.

However, in a Body-transcending culture, we assume that once our benchmarks of muscular and dominating Body are realistically unattainable, we must live despite Body. And yet it sometimes takes only the simplest of supports and attention to re-integrate Body into our lives and to allow dance to emerge. In my individual programs I have often invited women to seek professional advice and help to improve their mobility, especially in the lower Body. When they have done so, it has transformed their lives both functionally and in terms of expression, groundedness, and the resulting change in their Body-led consciousness. These are deceptively simple things, but they have a disproportionate effect on our experience of life and reality.

Ayurveda, one of the traditional medicine systems from India, holds that as we age, we increase our Vata or wind energy. This is the mental energy of thought, abstraction, and restlessness. Left unbalanced, it pulls us out of Body and our weighted presence on Earth. Rather than disregard these impulses, it would serve us to address how we can return to a grounded gait which is how our connection to Earth becomes an experiential reality.

Not giving up on Body is not the same as doing the things we did when we were twenty-five. It is simply living more fully in the dance of a Body that holds greater wisdom, experience, sensation and unfolding than was ever possible before this moment in our lives. It is not just our minds that hold maturity and experience. In my experience, Body holds deepening intuition and nonlinearity as we age—things that often require a longish stint in life to recognise and honour.

And when we can turn towards Body, I have found that being mature also brings a certain freedom from seeking approval and affirmation. All which fertilise the soil of Body’s dance of transforming consciousness.