A couple months
ago, during a break in a 5 Rhythms workshop, I plopped down on the floor next
to a woman I hadn’t danced with before. She’d been sitting on the sidelines for
a while and seemed to be having trouble with one of her knees. When I asked her
how she was doing, she told me she’d come to the workshop out of curiosity but
didn’t think she could do this because she had a knee replacement.
I smiled at her
and pulled up my pant legs, showing her the six inch scars down both of my
knees. Both my knees are bionic, it’s doable.
I was born with a
rare knee disorder called congenital patellar dislocation. It can’t be
corrected and gets worse over time. The only real fix is a knee replacement.
I don’t have any
high school gym horror stories because I had a medical exemption from gym. The “don’t do that” list from various
orthopedists got longer as I got older. While I understood the reasons for the
restrictions, I also heard the underlying inevitability of my knees failing
completely.
Fortunately some
wiser part of me got early on that the big choice was what not about what I
chose to do physically but how I was going to live with this. I could let this
limitation become who I was or not. I could focus on what I couldn’t do,
complain and be resentful or I could focus on the places where I wasn’t
limited.
In college while
my friends and peers were backpacking through India and exploring the physical
world, I began exploring my inner world. My mind, emotions and spirit were not
limited by my cranky knees. Along the way I did pretty much everything the
orthopedists told me not to. I danced. I did physical labor jobs that involved
standing on my feet for hours. I hiked. If it looked interesting or fun, I
tried it and accepted that I’d be limping for a few days afterwards. Although I
learned to accept my physical limitations, I often felt envious at what other
peoples bodies could do.
Like many other
seekers, I latched onto the belief that connection with the Divine required
transcending my physicality. I didn’t ignore my body completely or deny its
innate wisdom. I did look at the messages it sent the way I regard the “Check
oil” light on my car….as something I could ignore unless it yelled.
By the time I was
forty-three, my right knee had deteriorated to the point where I was walking
with a cane. Based on a recommendation from my chiropractor I found my way to
Dr. Jones, an orthopedist who was more focused on quality of life than whether
I was old enough for a knee replacement. He took one look at my x-rays and
said, “You need a new knee.” If I hadn’t been using a cane, I would’ve jumped
out of my chair and kissed him!
Recovery from knee
replacement is a bit brutal. It involves intensive physical therapy, much of
which hurts a lot. My right knee replacement was surgery number thirteen on
that knee. Other temporary fixes included wearing a brace for five years that
went from mid-thigh to halfway down my calf. It helped but I lost a lot of
muscle in that leg. So after my PT I went to the gym to work on building
muscle. While I liked seeing muscle in my leg for the first time, the gym was a
chore.
Four years later
my left knee called it quits….replacement number two. I was forty-eight. For
the first time in my life I had two knees that worked!! That’s a miracle. It
didn’t hurt when I got out of bed in the morning. I could get out of chairs and
off couches without pushing myself up with my arms. I could walk down the
stairs like a normal person rather than crab walking sideways. Wahooo!!
I used to have a
body that seemed fine with being sedentary. Suddenly it wanted to move. So in
my late forties I started down a road that most people have mapped by their
mid-teens, figuring out what my body could do. The years I spent working on
mindfulness, being my own observer and learning to focus my attention made it easy
shift my old presets from “I can’t do that” to “I wonder if I can?”
The more I
consciously engaged my body, the more it had to say. I learned to deal with the constant knee pain
by compartmentalizing it and push the pain away from me. While that enabled me
to avoid prescription painkillers most of the time, it also blocked much of
what my body had to say. Suddenly my body didn’t like being still for long
stretches. It didn’t like some of what I was eating. When I got engrossed in
drawing and forgot to move it let me know long before my leg fell asleep.
This new level of
conversation with my body was humbling, exciting and baffling. I was used to
looking at my body the same way I do my car, as something I need to carry the
rest of me around. But my body is not car. While I am more than my physicality,
my body is part of who I am. I am innately connected to it.
The more I listened,
the more apparent this gap in my evolution became. Body, mind, spirit….oh. I’d spent years
focused on mind and spirit. To be all in with myself, my body needed to be
included. But how?
Going to the gym
helped meet my need to move and build muscle. I was downright gleeful the first
time I used the leg press. Me, on the leg press…Wow! After a year and a half of
stationary bikes, weights and treadmills I got bored. When I tried to go back
to the gym after spending six weeks in Joshua Tree hiking in the park I just
couldn’t do it.
Thankfully the
Universe had a solution….dance. I got nudge to check out 5 Rhythms during a
holotropic breathwork session. I like to dance, but the idea of doing that in a
group of people I don’t know gave my introvert a good scare. Groups have been
challenging for me for as long as I can remember. My comfort zone ends at any
group larger than six. I feel self-conscious, can’t figure out what to do with
myself. I’ve worked on this for years. I’ve learned to be okay in groups some
of time but that self-conscious, outsider thing is always lurking under a thin
veneer of okay. I’d accepted my discomfort in groups was just part of who I am.
So it took me a
couple weeks to sort through my mental noise and show up to dance. And holy
sh*t, I loved it! It felt familiar. It
felt powerful. Something about it felt like home. Before I went to my first
class I was hoping dance might be a new way to exercise. It is and there’s so
much more.
When I dance my
body becomes the conduit for creativity, spontaneity, clarity and instinct. In
surrendering to music and movement, I just am. Yes, there were many moments of
self-consciousness. They faded when I danced through them. It only took a
couple months for that outsider feeling to vanish with the Taos 5 Rhythms
tribe.
As I kept
dancing, that motion began to move me. During all those years of focusing on my
inner landscape I got pretty good at self-questioning. I could see how my
wounding showed up, find the root of my reaction when I was triggered and see
what I could do differently the next time. But all that took time and work. My
default response to new situations and opportunities was “maybe” unless I got a
strong “yes” nudge or could think about it for a while.
Suddenly I was spontaneously saying “yes” to
new things. I found myself being different in situations that would have
triggered a few months earlier. It happened so organically I frequently didn’t
notice till the end of the day. Where was this coming from?
Years ago in twelve
step programs I heard “You can’t think yourself into acting differently but you
can act yourself into thinking differently.” I’d seen how that worked for me.
Once I’d unscrambled whatever pile of fear and wounding I was dealing with,
doing something different was not going to get less uncomfortable or scary
until I just did it a few times.
But this being
different in old lurching places was more than just acting differently. I was
somehow bypassing the argument between how I felt and what I wanted to do. I
wasn’t thinking at all. I was just acting on instinct. Dancing brought me to a
place where my body was schooling my mind. Wow.
Two weeks ago I
spent the weekend at a 5 Rhythms workshop in Santa Fe. I’ve been to several
workshops in Taos. They’ve been small. This one I spent the weekend dancing
with 50+ people. Way outside my comfort zone. The workshop was incredible;
evocative, edgy, intimate, and filled with heart. The most miraculous thing for
me, it was the first time I’ve been in a group that large and felt like I
belonged. That familiar self-conscious outsider feeling wasn’t even lurking
under the surface. It was just gone. That is some holy shi*t.
