what does it mean to practice movement as meditation?
Everything moves. Stasis is a superstition. Even the glass in the window panes is far from solid. Even the bricks of the house, built so wisely by that third little pig to be formidable, are porous earth, porous by nature. Movement is definitional to life. Life moves. The cycles, the seasons, the weather, the rhythms, the sun, the moon, the flow of water, the tides, the heartbeat, the lungs, the migration of birds, of whales, of turtles, the growth cycles of plants and trees, the digestive system, the heart’s moods, the steaming decay of organic material on its way to becoming soil, the molting of cicadas, snakes smelling life with the flick of their tongues, even the sleeping winter bears still breathe in hibernation, the rise and fall of their chests not so different from our own breathing bodies. Since the beginning of the cosmos, there has been movement. We could call it change. We could call it time. We could call it evolution. We could call it heat or energy. We could call it Mystery unfolding. We could call it the breath of the Gods at play. However we call it, we are made of movement. We are made of change.
The dance allows us to embody the movement we are made of, to more fully inhabit our bodies as we learn to embrace change as a constant companion. The dance is a way to pay attention to movement as something that matters, whether we are moving a single pinky finger or our whole form. With whatever body and range of motion we have been given, the dance calls us into the practice of allowing ourselves to feel more deeply and be shaped by the many textures and moods of life. We play at allowing ourselves to be as varied and polyphonic as we are. We play with moving in new ways, paying attention to what opens up. We study the habitual ways we move and get curious as to where our movement comes from and how those well-trodden pathways may be serving us or not. We play at being vessels, flutes, and instruments through which life sings. We play at allowing ourselves to transform. Through the dance, we cultivate our capacity for sensitivity, intimacy with life, the ability to receive, to feel, to allow life to move us freshly. And the more we practice moving with sensitivity, as if our whole body were made of listening, we begin to remember the natural instinct within us, birthed through billions of years of evolution; we tap into a wild intelligence that is every child’s birthright. And as we open to this wild intelligence, which connects us with the vast web of life, we learn to hear the soul anew, the soul within us and the soul of the world, the soul within others, within our relationships, the soul of all things, often buried far beneath the surface and covered by layers and layers of societal conditioning. The dance unburies clues for how to care for the soul and thus care for life, how to resource ourselves from a wellspring of connection and creativity vastly different from and deeper than any of consumer Capitalism’s million dollar schemes for self-help.
“Care of the soul is not a project of self-improvement,” Thomas Moore writes, “nor a way of being released from the troubles and pains of human existence. It is not at all concerned with living properly or with emotional health. These are the concerns of temporal, heroic, Promethean life. Care of the soul touches on another dimension, in no way separate from life, but not identical either with the problem solving that occupies so much of our consciousness. We care for the soul by honoring its expressions, by giving it time and opportunity to reveal itself, and by living life in a way that fosters depth, interiority, and quality in which it flourishes. Soul is its own purpose and end.” (304)
In other words, the dance, our movement, does not have a self-improvement agenda. We are not trying to be “better.” We are not trying to achieve external goals. If anything we attempt to create conditions in which the soul has opportunities to reveal itself, to express what’s been hidden underneath, to play in the fields of not-knowing who we are or what’s next, to touch the possibility of deepening and coming more alive in those depths, to contemplate how life moves through us and through our relationships, to wonder at the places we feel stuck or hungry or riled up or resistant, to shake loose our own potential transformation, not as a project of achievement, but as a work of art and an ancestral offering both forward and backward in time.
And now, steeped in these murmurings of movement - non-judgmental, non-achievement oriented movement, movement with loving curiosity at its core - we are ready to ponder what meditation means. According to Merriam-Webster, meditation is “to engage in contemplation or reflection; to focus one’s thoughts on, reflect on, or ponder over.” This is the kind of meditation I mean when I say the dance is a moving meditation practice. When we dance, we are not trying to stop the activity of the mind in search for calm. Instead, we move with what's moving and bring to the dance the quality of contemplation. We move with specific questions, we explore the physics of being through pondering new and old pathways, we get curious, we wonder, we wander, always turning our senses to the scent of something real. We don’t dance mindlessly, but actually breathe life into our dance through focus. We break down the process in order to practice, to home in on particulars. In a way, meditation could be understood as a process of intensification of experience through the quality of our attention. When we pay attention, life takes on a different form – a deepening of contact, of intimacy, a sharpening of listening, a looking with new eyes upon what seems all too familiar and seeing something new, relating to experience in a fresh way, relaxing into instinctive intelligence. We let ourselves reclaim wonder, not jumping immediately to the need to know or predict or hypothesize. We listen attentively to what the dance is showing us. Meditation has a quality of staying with the not-knowing: contemplation as a place of intensity and focus but in an open and expanded way, opening the body and mind and allowing the universe to pour in rather than insisting that the human intellect pour out into a kind of definitive knowing.
Thus, in moving meditation, we uncover the natural movements we are made of and bring inner choreographies alive through dance, and then we dance with a quality of contemplation, a quality of staying with the not-knowing, staying with paradox, a quality of openness and curiosity, learning to follow the scent of the real, letting the universe pour in and through, letting ourselves be moved, touched, and shaped, witnessing the process with wonder, growing our capacity to stay with the changing tides, weather and moods, the stuckness and fluidity, the beauty and pain, letting the living process of encounter be our art.
In Care of the Soul, Thomas Moore writes, “The arts are important for all of us, whether or not we ourselves practice a particular discipline. Art, broadly speaking, is that which invites us into contemplation–a rare commodity in modern life. In that moment of contemplation, art intensifies the presence of the world. We see it more vividly and more deeply. The emptiness that many people complain dominates their lives comes in part from the failure to let the world in, to perceive it and engage it fully. Naturally we’ll feel empty if everything we do slides past without sticking. As we have seen, art arrests attention, an important service to the soul. Soul cannot thrive in a fast-paced life because being affected, taking things in and chewing on them, requires time.” (286)
We dance to let the world in, to intensify our intimacy with life, however messy, to tend the soul, to come more fully alive, to remember our relationship to beauty, to wildness, to the world of the senses and also to forces far beyond the human, to remember our responsibility to be alive while we’re alive, to have our attention arrested by the art of whatever is moving through, and to grow our capacity to stay.
This is one form of moving meditation, one way of speaking about what meditation means, one form of contemplation that can call our lives to deeper, more soulful encounters. One of many. As Rumi reminds, “there are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground.” I wonder what ways of moving and being invite you into deeper contemplation, intensifying the presence of the world?
*Moore, Thomas. Care of the Soul. New York: HarperCollins, 1994
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