Actually is it exactly 135 today, but it began as a thirty day ‘challenge’ to myself, and has grown into an integral part of my life and days. I wrote this piece soon after the 30 days were over, and for some reason did not post it, until now.
I have come to the end of my 30 days of dancing and to the beginning of a life of dance.
I can’t quite believe that 30 days have passed already. In many ways I am, of course, entirely the same person who began 30 days ago. In just as many ways something has shifted fundamentally.
For one, I feel lighter, brighter. Even when I go through spells of tiredness, or irritation, I seem to stay with these for not quite as long. I feel less attached.
Over the last few weeks many things that had been scheduled – and that I wanted to do or be part of – have slipped away. I have noticed myself be able to let go more easily. It feels like I am more able to be in this moment with what moves in me. And if it doesn’t move; if it gets stuck, or I get irritated or anxious, I bring it into my dance. I literally dance with it, and invariably it does move through me. Out and away it goes.
My decisions are also affected. They seem to be coming from a more present, immediate place. My mind is learning that it can relax a little. How does this choice or decision Feel? How does this Feel? I check my gut, my heart, my body – and then Choose from that more embodied place.
Not always. Mind likes to get involved and sometimes she complicates things still. But over the course of the 30 days it feels like a muscle of tuning to a different place is being grown.
Each day in the dance (over the last 2 weeks in particular) I am making a moment of ceremony of giving permission to live from this place. “Yes” I say. “I can listen to more than mind. Yes I say, I give permission to my Inspiration, to my God spark to guide me.”
Later, mind will wonder whether I am making it all up. But each day for split seconds in the grace of dance I say Yes to living from a different Centre. And each day I feel the impact subtly, slowly but fully in my life.
I am also learning about Self Love.
Through my dancing, I am recognizing my desire to be liked and loved by as many people as possible. It has entered my dance in a very visceral way whenever something has been amiss with people around me – and I have come to see that much of the discomfort is from this fundamental desire to be liked (I suspect we all carry it!). To simplify I think it would be accurate to say that most of the agony I experience in my every day comes from the impact of my sense of my standing with people – when I think I am judged by others.
I no longer wish to be in the world from a place of seeking to be liked. So the Yes each day, whilst not exactly a No to others, is also a Yes to coming from a place beyond the politics of relationship. It is a deep Yes to what feels like the right way forward for Me. Not for you. Not for Paul. Not even for my children. Often what I do wish for myself is good for them also. And when we take the long view – it probably is in every single instance.
And in it I find a far more fulfilling Love for My Self. Delight in myself. I love myself in the dance. Why would I not spend all my days dancing then?
I love myself in the dance. I love myself after the dance.
Someone who loves themselves has so much more energy, vitality, life force, capacity to be creative, luminous, beautiful.
At the end of 30 days of dancing I feel more creative, beautiful and luminous.
And I no longer feel shy to announce this.
It reminds me of one of the stories of the Buddha where a King and his Queen had become meditators. The queen arrived and told the Buddha that she had realized in her meditation that she loved no-one but herself, and had told her king, and he had said he had the same realization. And the Buddha had said, very good. You are on the path. This is the place of beginning. How can you love another, when you truly don’t love myself?
And so I am learning to Love myself – and I know and feel and trust that is leading me into a richer more honest loving of everyone around me.
I am learning Love again, through the only being that I have – my own.
Dancing Universe 