Not My Mother's Body

http://www.nianow.com/story/2012/09/dont-stop-dancing


I hope you will click on the video link above and enjoy Debbie Rosas describing the history of Nia (part of it at least) and the rewards of the Nia lifestyle.

As I watched the video, I found myself smiling all over. Debbie said she started Nia because she wanted to "reclaim her body" and move from "thinking to sensation." When I stepped into my Nia class 17 years ago with Joanie Brooks at the Concord Athletic Club, I had no idea what those words meant. I'm serious: I was so far removed from my body that I didn't even know it needed reclaiming. The word sensation was also a question mark. When Joanie said sense your feet, I thought she was speaking in tongues. How? What feet? Do they smell or something?

After that first class, I started going to body school -- learning to connect and to listen and finally I learned to move. Not exercise, as Debbie said, but to move. There's a difference.

Last Monday in class, I caught a glimpse of myself and all my students moving through the room. It was one of those moments when I wasn't sure whose image I was looking at -- until it snapped that I was looking at myself. In that moment, I remembered what my mother looked like at 62. I have my mother's facial expressions but my body is very different. When my mother was 62, she weighed about 180 pounds and suffered from breast cancer. She was a brilliant school teacher -- a strong reader who taught others to read. Her brain was as large as her heart. I am forever indebted to her for making me love to read and to write. But she was very disconnected from sensation and from her body. She died at 63. Not long after her death, I stepped in to my first Nia class. One of the final lessons my mother taught me by example was: Take care of your body.

And thanks to Nia, I learned how to do that. I realized last Monday that I don't have my mother's body and that's a good thing. All these hours of Nia education -- in white, blue, brown and black belt trainings - have helped me reclaim a body I didn't know I had. I love the Nia lifestyle.

Never stop dancing. Ever. I mean it.

Broken Glass

It was a tiny jelly jar, half the size of a regular glass. I was in a hurry and picked up the jelly jar and practically threw it in the dish washer.

I heard it shatter. The force of it spread glass on my chest and sent the pieces flying all over the kitchen. My dog, Lucy, was at my side. I grabbed her and picked her up, examined her eyes. No glass there. I carried her to safety. I didn't want her walking on broken glass.

Then I had a sharp memory of me at 10 years old. I'm in mother's kitchen and a big bowl crashed into the sink. Mom stood at the cupboard, spun around to make sure I was not hurt and then she broke into tears. "You won't believe how far this glass has spread," she said. "It's very hard to clean up broken glass." We got to work and she was right: The glass was in the sink, on the cupboard, all over the floor, even in the sugar bowl. It took a long time to bring order to the kitchen.

Flash forward 40 years and here I am this morning: Cleaning up glass. The big chunks in the bottom of the dish washer were hard to get but, one by one,  I finally cleared them away. The tiny slivers on the floor weren't any easier. First, the broom. Then, paper towels. Finally, the vacuum.

Cleaning up the glass became a mending operation. I thought about the relationships in my life that are broken. There are only a few but the ones there are . . . hurt.  It's hard to walk on broken glass. I thought about how unskillful I have been in my conversation with a few friends and my children. I've said things too fast that I did not mean. As I type this, my thumbs and index fingers are bleeding. Now I've got blood on my keyboard. Mending relationships is like picking up pieces of broken glass.

It's slow and tedious.

Several people who participated last Friday night in Journey Dance asked for the playlist. So here it is:

1. Song: Shanti. Artist: Angel Tears
2. Song: Subterranean Sanctuary. Artist: Desert Dwellers.
3. Song: New Day Callin'. Artist: En Vogue.
4. Song: Manunae.  Artist: E.S. Posthumus.
5. Song: The Funk Is.  Artist: Kathy Kats.
6 Song: Tracking. Artist: Nomad.
7. Song: Tikal. Artist: E.S. Posthumus
8. Song: Believe. Artist: Ministers De La Fun.
9. Song: Hope. Artist: Rumacea.
10. Song: Amazing Grace Artist: Cecilia

I'm not sure how easy these songs will be to find, but happy hunting!

Why dream? Why dance? Why create?

When many of us speak of compassion, we mistakenly believe compassion is the work of helping others less fortunate than we are -- the homeless woman on the street, the child in trouble, the third-world country on the brink of collapse. It is true we need to help others and the essence of helping others is to be there for them without shutting down in horror, anger, or fear.

But many of us raised in established religious institutions failed to learn how to have compassion for ourselves. Eventually we learn the hard way that we can't really be there for others in an honest way unless we've learned to be with ourselves. It's easy to be compassionate for ourselves when we feel as if we are right, strong, when lots of people agree with us. It's not so easy when we are wrong, outcast, and filled with fear. That's when we turn our face away from our soul. It's no surprise that the soul feels insulted. If you want to be creative and compassionate, notice when your soul is insulted.

Dreams show us the truth -- we are right and wrong, we are good and evil, we are alone and we are connected. They teach us how to hold the tension within ourselves and find a middle way. Many of the dreams show problems we all have: dreams of lost keys, houses on fire, going down into tunnels to find something, showing up naked for a final exam, being chased by a monster or a rapist, dreams of flying through the air with the greatest of ease, or of swimming with dolphins. A dream is a message from a deeper part of yourself. They show us where we've been and where we are going. They invite is to feel what we feel. Listening to them is a way to connect with compassion.

So is finding open, nonjudgmental spaces where we can acknowledge what we are feeling without hurting ourselves or others. Dance can be such a space because moving physically offers relief from the same old mental high-jinks we live with day by day, that tired mental reality. When we dance, we allow ourselves to feel aspects of ourselves that we don't like (meeting other people's gaze, the anger that rises from imperfection, the discomfort from learning new skills) without pulling back.

Often at the end of a Nia class or at the end of my day, I ask two questions: What is it I most desire? What is it I desire to create? Figuring out what I need isn't easy for me. I have to work at it. Even if I identify what I desire, it's not enough. I have to use that knowledge as a way to honestly relate to others. I do this in my life as a writer. But as the video link below shows, any creative process is a practice of compassionate action.

Watch how closely the artist looks at the dancers. She never drops her gaze. This is compassion for herself and others in action:


http://vimeo.com/49045800

Out of the Blue

Not long before my friend, Linda Pace, died on July 2, 2007, she had a dream that helped me manage what became a storm of loss. In the dream, Linda stood in the backyard of a home she once lived in. On the ground she saw in clear, bold letters the following image: S-T-A-Y.

For Linda, the dream image became a talisman as she fought a vigorous battle against breast cancer. When she faced  painful procedures in the hospital, she would look up and meet my gaze with her marble-sized brown eyes, smile and say: "No problem. I can stay with this."

Her death hit me hard. She was more than a friend to me -- she was a fellow dream tender, someone who listened and cared about my hopes for my life as a writer, an artist who challenged my perceptions. When we looked at provocative contemporary art together and I couldn't connect with the work, Linda would laugh and say: "Look harder. Don't ever be afraid of looking." When she died, it was as if all the lights went out.


 Then out of the blue, the losses piled up, one after another. On August 23, 2008, my father died. On November 15, 2009 my brother and only sibling committed suicide. On January 17, 2012, my ex-husband and the father of my two children died in the Haiti earthquake. I remembered the image in Linda's dream: S-T-A-Y and decided I needed lessons in fending off the idea of total loss.


 I took meditation classes at the San Antonio Zen Center, located in a small, frame house on Woodlawn with honey-colored wooden floors and black cushions for sitting. The instruction was to sit and breathe. At first, I found the practice almost impossible. The moment I got quiet and still I felt everything I did not want to feel -- the anxiety, sadness and fear. After each inhale, I'd sustain the pause in the breath and then on the exhale I would say to myself: Stay. At first, I was as patient as a rattlesnake. Twenty minutes of silence and sitting was all I could sustain. Then, I made it to forty and then to an hour. At home, I created a place to sit Zen. I have a cushion and a rug. I sit looking out onto my back yard. On that cushion, I stay.

Slowly, I am making progress as a student of Zen. As I stay with the breath, I experience some of what has been lost. I feel the breaks in my heart.  At the end of each session, I bow in gratitude for all that I have been given. If there is no experience of loss, there was nothing to value.  Staying has become a way to salvage the goodness from each of these relationships, to make meaning out of some of what has been lost. Paradoxically, it's also ended a long estrangement from my own true self and provided an  opening to something new. So, here's my advice: S-T-A-Y.

"I Danced My Way to Self-Acceptance"

Nia dance classes transformed the way she felt about her body.

This article was originally published in MORE magazine, November 2008.  It describes the interconnection between dreaming, writing and dancing

I grew up in a Southern Baptist home where dancing was prohibited. In the winter of 1957, I was 6 years old, one of those kids CBS tried to protect by shooting Elvis Presley only from the waist up for fear that the sight of his gyrating pelvis on The Ed Sullivan Show would overstimulate what were euphemistically called our physical impulses. CBS need not have worried about me. Preacher after preacher had told me that my body was a vessel for the glory of God. I believed them, and I came to see my body as something to be despised, a mere suitcase that carried my brain, my spirit — and all my dangerous emotions.
I remember a Friday night in sixth grade when most of my friends went to the Methodist church for a sock hop. I spent the evening on the back porch, staring at the stars and begging God to let me live my life free of bodily concerns. Instead of feeling deprived, I felt morally superior.
Today I look back at that overly pious 13-year-old who longed for a disembodied life, and I think: Be careful what you pray for. The year after the sock hop, I was unprepared when one hot afternoon I started my menstrual cycle. The sight of my blood was terrifying. I thought I was dying. My mother assured me I was not, but her explanation was not comforting. "Every month?" I asked plaintively. "This thing will happen to me every month?" Now my body was unfathomable.


As a young woman, I avoided not only unpleasant sensations, such as jittery nerves from too much caffeine, but also pleasurable ones — even those as simple as deep, slow breaths. Denied the respect it deserved, my body slowly extracted its own revenge — mysterious aches and pains, a punitive relationship to food, cyclical dieting, shame about sex, and constant weariness.
I married at 30, and not long after that my gynecologist discovered large fibroid tumors in my uterus. Five surgeries later, I came to terms with the fact that I would be unable to bear children — or, at least, I intellectually came to terms with it. My husband and I adopted a baby girl in 1984 and a boy in 1987. I have loved my life as a mother. But secretly, I felt branded by the harsh biblical term for infertile women: barren.


My husband and I split up shortly before my 43rd birthday. Deep in a post-divorce funk, I complained to my friend Naomi Shihab Nye, who is a poet, about feeling depressed and out of sorts. Naomi invited me to try Nia, a type of exercise that incorporates jazz, modern, and Duncan (spontaneous) dance, along with yoga moves and blocks and kicks from martial arts. "I think I love Nia so much because I feel my body and spirit humming together in harmony," Naomi told me. "Nia always clicks my heart right back into my body and makes my body snap back to happiness. There’s a fluency in it that feels like language, like silence, like music, like breath."


Just before this conversation, I’d had a dream in which I was standing in front of a dark closet. I opened the door and found a skeleton inside. To my surprise, the skeleton was shimmying and shaking like a very happy hula girl. So when Naomi made her suggestion, I was open to it.
Waiting for my first class to start, I looked around and saw a lot of middle-aged women, none of them ideal physical specimens and a few as ungainly as I was. Instantly I relaxed, thankful that this would not be a competition. The teacher said that dance is one of the few tangible ways we can change our mood and improve ourselves. Then she added, "Only those who need this work are driven to it."
I felt certain that I would bend stiffly and sway as if stricken. But when the music began, I let my legs go loose and dropped my shoulders, and in that moment, the skeleton in the closet, the one I had buried in childhood, came alive. By the end of that first class, I was tired and shiny with sweat, but I felt the hum of happiness, and I knew: This is for me.


Instead of working out to burn calories and physically exhaust myself, I started moving for sheer pleasure. The process of physical and emotional self-discovery, of surrendering my masochistic, shame-filled attitude about my body, had begun.

Initially, dancing an hour a day seemed impossible in terms of my schedule. But I soon saw it differently: It’s because I’m so busy that I need the daily commitment to my own movement. Eventually I lost 15 pounds, but not by depriving myself. Food became a source of nourishment instead of something to fear. My stamina increased. I slept soundly at night. My resting heart rate went from 75 beats a minute to 65.
I also overcame a strong resistance to making noise. I’d felt foolish shouting "Hey!" or "Hah!" while kicking and throwing punches. Then I recognized that I was scared of the sound of my own voice resonating through my body. Now these exclamations feel explosive and powerful. The physical expression of any emotion — sadness or elation, anxiety or tranquility — is my way of staying close to my heart.

After dancing for five years, I became certified to teach Nia. I’ve continued my training, all the way to a black belt, and I lead three classes a week.

Last year Prissy Atherton, one of my longtime students, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer at age 65. Prissy was one of those beautiful, well-mannered women, with a cap of gray hair and neutral polish on her nails. Prior to her illness, she’d danced to maintain her good looks. When I went to visit her, Prissy said that even though she was weak, she still danced a little at home every day. "I feel myself gently leaving," she told me. "My body is so vulnerable. Moving is precious to me."
I confided to Prissy that as a 13-year-old I’d believed a lie: that my body was inherently flawed. Now I understand that underneath the fear of my basic physical needs was an interior deadness, a terrifying lake of lifelessness that was the primary source of my misery. It was death in all its forms that I feared. The simple truth is that it is physically impossible to feel dead while moving.
Prissy was a believer, a spiritual woman. That day we talked about the need to create our own ordinary sacraments in daily life. One definition of a sacrament is that it is a physical reality through which the divine makes its presence felt. The need for communion with what’s holy seems to be essential to us humans. Our brains and body are hardwired for it. Much of our yearning for material things is a disguised form of hunger for this contact with the numinous. Through dance, I make this connection. In the end, I dance to heal an old religious wound, to experience the pleasure of moving as a sacred act, not something shameful. I dance to free myself from the sin of not dancing.
A month or so before she died, I arranged for Prissy to go to the Nia studio after hours. She was in a wheelchair by then, but she rolled it onto the floor and let her feet, hands, and head move freely, allowing what Prissy called her life force to express itself. I was not there to witness it, but the name of the room where we do Nia is Laughter, and Prissy later assured me that laughter had been part of her final dance. "Thank you," she said a few days later. "It was a blast."

Jan Jarboe Russell is the author of Lady Bird: A Biography of Mrs. Johnson. She teaches Nia at the Synergy Studio in San Antonio, Texas.

Nia: The Love Your Body Workout.  The Nia technique blends dance, aerobics, martial arts, and yoga. Created in 1983 by fitness instructors Debbie and Carlos Rosas, Nia is an acronym for neuromuscular integrative action — that is, the interaction between mind and body. In contrast to the "no pain, no gain" mind-set, Nia focuses on the joy of movement. The choreography includes 52 basic moves executed at varying speeds and in different styles, including muscle-warming stances, heart-pumping karate kicks, free movement that encourages emotional expression, and poses that stretch, balance, and align the body. Nia classes are taught for all ages and fitness levels.

Dream, Write Dance

A dream is a depth marker. It tells you where to dive. 

Join Jan Jarboe Russell, Nia black belt, dreamtender, and writer, for this workshop which will be a deep dive into finding your own wildest dream. What do the images from your night dreams -- those diamonds that sparkle as you sleep - have to tell you about what it is you want to achieve, the obstacles to living your dream, and the magic key that unlocks your potential and your creativity?

The workshop includes amplifying your dream, writing (or drawing) your dream, and moving your dream through dance.
This work is based on the premises that ALL dreams come in service of health and wholeness. All dreams reflect inborn creativity and ability to face and solve life''s problems.

During the workshop we will explore your dream, flash-write or flash-draw your dream and what it might mean, and move the dream. At 4 p.m. we will move into the regularly scheduled Nia class and give full expression to our dreams within the greater Nia community.

Date: Sunday, Sept 23
Time: 2 pm to 5 p.m.
Where: The Synergy Studio.
Cost: $30.

Nia, Journey Dance Equals Joy

I've been in a southwestern corner of Colorado all week. I've seen double rainbows, streams and rivers, smoke on the mountains, and about a million different ways to experience the word: Cloud. All of this reminded me of a book I read long ago called The Cloud of Unknowing. It was my first taste of the truth of mysticism -- to what the experience of living as the beloved inside the beloved, imagined as a cloud of unkowning. I am a secret mystic and have decided to not have that be a secret any longer. I see "signs" of the sacred everywhere. This week I've been flooded with sacred images. To be in a place where nature is still nature, disconnected from the Internet, and where the sky is as open as a love letter I've been longing to read is . . . well, to be at home in this world and to be connected to all worlds. 

While walking in a mountain stream, I stood still and felt the current of the river swirl around my feet. The image of river is central to Nia. As white belts, we learn to ride the river of sensation and slowly we begin to experience Joy in all our cells, bones, ligaments, joints, in the beat of our heart and in the beat of the music. This Joy is good medicine. It heals shame and restores life. So as I stood in that mountain stream, I decided to do a little dance. The music was the water and the rocks and the experience was luscious. Cold water on my feet. Belly at ease. Palms of the hand touching clean air and finally . . . the cloud of unknowing. In the current is the joy.