Hello dancing friends,
This is my first ever blog, an historic moment!
Another historic moment I was remembering recently was my very first 5Rhythms dance class in Brighton, Uk ten years ago. Someone had mentioned this class to me where you could go along and dance yourself silly with a whole bunch of other explorers. Being a non-dancing, really never ever, not me; sort of person, I was surprised that I felt this big pull to go along and check out the class. I was really nervous, especially as everyone else seemed to know each other when I got there, so I found myself a corner in this fairly dark ballet studio complete with mirror along one whole wall. Then Kate Shela the teacher started guiding us into movement, she was small and funky and feisty and I liked her straight away. As I looked around the room, feeling so self-conscious and stiff as a log, I noticed two things:
1. No one else was the slightest bit concerned about what I was or wasn’t doing, they were all more interested in what they were doing.
2. Many people had this incredible FREEDOM in their bodies, moving with such fluidity, trust and openness, and I wanted THAT.
So I kept coming to class, then started going 2 or 3 times a week with different teachers, as often as I could, as I began to feel I was on this amazing journey of discovery through my dance. It was the journey of re-embodiment, literally getting out of my head and back into my body. This is not an easy trip to take, by only living from the neck upwards there will be a lifetime of stories and sensations unexpressed in every part of the body and beginning to feel and release these is big.
It was an amazing couple of years for me of intense aliveness and also the messiness that goes with remembering the body. Luckily the body is a wise teacher and usually knows how much we can assimilate at a certain time, when we begin to trust it. I had a lot of tears to shed to begin to soften my heart and often my dance would be a reclaiming of my body, these elbows are mine, these feet are mine – I had been so out of touch with my body I didn’t know it at all. The 5Rhythms were my catalyst for this process and also the place I began to trust to be able to go to deeper layers of my being.
The dance was my healer and it still is, giving me a practice to explore and understand my life and to keep myself moving and growing.
Keep dancing – Sacha
