Body Schools Mind = Holy Sh*t

    

      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.