In the midst of these contentious and challenging times, the non-profit organization I have belonged to for over 30 years, Body Wisdom, has joined with other peace-building non-profits and artists to host Dances On Behalf of Peace, an 11 day, half-hour virtual international gathering. I am honored to be a community collaborator and invited speaker for this celebration of Inner + Outer Peace and the Physicality of Grace. The series began Feb. 19th and will meet every evening at 8 pm Eastern, 5 pm Pacific through Feb 29th. https://danceonbehalfofpeace.org/
As you see this invitation you might think, as I often do, even after all these years of dancing on behalf of myself and people and situations needing healing, “Why dance? What good could this possibly do?
Writer Alice Walker expresses it best in the title of one of her poetry books, “Hard Times Call For Furious Dancing.” She states something about dance that many people would say: “I have learned to dance. It isn’t that I didn’t know how to dance. I just didn’t know how basic it is for maintaining balance,” to have, what I call, a vital and satisfying life. And why is that?
A visit to my massage therapist this week pointed out again, that knot in my right shoulder that I imagine would look like a tightly coiled fist if I could see it. I wasn’t aware that it was there, though it’s been there before, and it’s taken quite a lot of effort from her, and relaxation from me, to help it uncinch. I couldn’t feel it until her skilled hands found it. Tense muscles become numb, and feeling can only return when they, we, let go.
I remember years ago accompanying Ilana Rubenfeld as she allowed what she called her “listening hands” to help a Jewish-American man release the tension in his back that had caused him a chronic 40 year, on and off, backache. When asked to remember when he first had the backache he related it to the time, as part of a military unit, when he helped liberate the camps in Germany at the end of World War II. The lesson I took from witnessing this session was– in order to have no more victims we must be able to let go of our reactions to atrocities and stop storing them in our bodies. It keeps the atrocities alive. Frequent dancing is one of the best ways I know to open our clenched fists, wherever in our bodies we have stored them.
Last fall, I was out of the country, off the grid so to speak when war came to people in the middle east. A text from a student who lives in Israel and who regularly attends my online Friday InterPlay class alerted me. The other students and I were so relieved when he got on with us for a few minutes and he seemed delighted to see our smiling faces. After he left, we danced on behalf of David and his family and the dance and the lines of the song took me to a place that its lyrics suggested, “I decided to be happy, I decided to be glad, I decided to be grateful, for all I ever had.”
That evening, I played the song again for myself and moved to it to reinforce those decisions that the song had encouraged me to make. “I decided to be happy, I decided to be glad. I decided to be grateful for all I ever had.” At first, I asked myself, how can you be happy when so many in this world are suffering? But as I danced, it came to me that how can we not be present to what everyone in the conflict is hoping for, for themselves, their families, their communities, and for the world. Could it be an obligation of those of us not living in the center of the storm to keep alive the loving, peaceful energy that the world will need in the future to get us all there?
Join me this evening, and every evening at 8 pm eastern, 5 pm pacific through Feb 29th. The event is FREE but you need to register at https://danceonbehalfofpeace.org/
