Relating in dance #1

Relating cannot meaningfully be imposed, but is uncovered in the extension of trust.
While one can exercise methods or techniques toward such discovery, these are only bringing one into a place where realisation can occur.
The willingness for insight or realisation is the essential determiner of the outcome and not applied force or method.

In this sense our primary relating is within ourselves,  as an expression of self acceptance in expression.

As we see ourselves, so will we see others. If we are judgemental and rejecting of ourselves, we will experience as if others are carrying our own thoughts. Therefore an unjudgemental circle of trust will not reinforce a tendency to withdraw or retaliate in a sense of justified defence.

The attitude of defence is often one of damage limitation, of presenting one's self so as not to attract or merit blame - with all the feelings of rejection, invalidity, hatred and rage, that are associated with guilt, with exclusion, and with unworthiness or denial of love. Much of our social adaption and learning, works to suppress and limit our exposure to the hateful, but it does so at a cost of also denying or suppressing the life principle itself.

The desire or calling for dance has within it the desire to feel and be life in expression, and in joining in dance as a community, to share in and witness that expression.

If this desire is suppressed by a defensive attempt to limit and control our experience, we essentially usurp the movement of life with an imposition of forms of correctness in which we feel some sense of temporary protection and validation - relative to a hostile environment.  And because we cut ourselves off from our life expressing by such controls, we feel less at rest in our wholeness, and more susceptible to threat. Fear becomes a self-fulfilling loop of experience in which the seeming answer or protection, actually fuels and feeds the conditions of division, conflict and the need for defence.

Hence we dance in 'suits of armour', with little free attention to notice or behold the expression of being that is presencing itself as our relatedness - our sharing life.
But if there is any movement of the call to joy alive within us, we will have moments or periods of being-in-expression that are portals or stepping stones out from the mind of thinking, and into the mind that aligns with feeling. It may be these moments are brief, if our desire to get a handle of control on our experience interrupts by habit - because such moments are clear experience of being in harmony with - yet not being in control over - our experience of ourselves in the world with each other.

Investing in such Self-revelation so as to give it honour and welcome in our life is simply a matter of not persisting in suppressing it. This might be a simple moment of releasing what doesn't work, or it may be a process over time in which we notice the ways in which we are still attached or identified with in some protective or personal sense, and shift our identification by degrees until we feel safe enough to trust or move more freely.

A culture of joy establishes the conditions for learning are present, and each of us finds our own way in relaxing and accepting our inclusion in such joy - for though we can lead a horse to water, we cannot make them drink. Self-inclusion is the basis from which we relate in wholeness of presence in which 'life finds its way' because it knows itself. But the definition of joy in terms of a self-specialness will lose its way and will not realize it does this but to itself.

The dance has always spoken to me as a way of releasing self-specialness (in oneself or others).
One can say that everyone is special - but really it is that we are all significant, as the presence of life in expression - as the movement of relatedness of which we cannot really separate out from excepting in imagination that always becomes fearful and always loses the 'music' and the joining.

I thought I was going to write some simple examples of things that I have found helpful - but as the above paragraphs appeared I accept that a foundational perspective is essential. To abide in an expression of trust without attachment to outcome is to break the habit of a coercive intent.
The movement of trust is like a small quiet voice beneath the clamour of the mind in reaction, yet when it is desired, it can be discerned, already present.

Brian

If we build on the sand of merely wishful thinking, it will not stand.