From a friend’s post on Facebook, I learned about animal communicator Anna Breytenbach and a black leopard named Spirit who lives at a sanctuary named Jukani in South Africa. I watched this amazing film about Anna’s work, which ends with the story of her work with Spirit. (Don’t skip to the end, watch the whole thing – it is life-changing.) That film included her mentor, Jon Young, an American tracker and naturalist.
During the film, Young spoke about the intuitive way that he tracks animals, and how at some point, he no longer uses his eyes to look at tracks, but instead begins to see something called “silver lines.” Later, an African tracker spoke of the same silver lines, and described feeling very distinct guiding sensations in his body that told him which direction to move. As Young and Breytenbach moved though the landscape, you could see both of them feeling into and opening to the energetic essence of the animal they were tracking. It seemed that they were harmonizing, letting their bodies, the landscape and the animal come into a single, aligned vibration.
Watching, I yearned to be able to intuit in that way, to feel that sense of connection with the animal that exists at the level of quanta, where we are all just vibration. Then I realized that they were describing the way that I make dances. I feel into the vibrational heart of the character or movement. I let myself be moved. I am listening for a resonance and attunement that tells me when I am “on.” Those are my silver lines.
With the horses, doing can get in the way. That is why I spend more and more time in being, even in the saddle. I love to ride, and I ride every day. I find that more and more my riding goal is about relationship, focusing on balance, awareness and tracking. Tracking is being aware of my breathing, the horse’s breathing, our moving connection and our emotional alignment. Tracking means looking for the silver lines that tell me when we are in sync, where the communication has opened out into pure vibration, below the level of thought and efforting. When that happens, I feel myself vibrating into joy, here now, feeling it all.
Today’s meditation with Deepak spoke of stillness and discovering how stillness can inspire action. Another way of thinking about that is how stillness can penetrate our action.
When I am teaching movement, both with and without horses, I often ask students and clients to become intentionally still. I call it the “intentional pause” strategy. Yesterday, with my spooky horse Amadeo, I had to do a lot of intentional pausing. What I noticed right away was that when we walked into the barn and stopped, I was holding my breath, and that I was not in my legs. Neither was he. We were both pretty high-headed. So I waited, just breathing and stroking his withers, until I felt all the effervescence go out of my legs and felt my feet sinking into the arena footing. He and I both took a lot of big breaths. All through the ride, he kept losing his mind – spooking, balling up, his ears like two crazy satellite dishes spinning on the top of his head. It felt a little like tryng to ride this bad boy:
Each time, I would slow, pause, and stand still and breathing until I felt him settle. Over and over, until I could feel that stillness start to come into the movement. Storms moving off, light breaking through.
On Wednesday, I had a wonderful improvisational session with percussionist John Marshall. He an I are percolating some work together – my dancing and his playing. We began with the strategy of alternating movement or sound with stillness. Each of us alternated in our own way, sometimes overlapping, sometimes in response to the other, but basically holding the thread of our own impulses for either movement/sound or stillness. It was a way of being in conscious relationship while also listening inwardly – holding inner and outer attention simultaneously.
What about the stress storms? Emotional weather? Too often, we get caught in the winds of continual, unremitting exertion, busyness, rumination,worry, rage – whatever. What I am finding is that I have to consciously weave moments of intentional stillness into all of that, as best I can. This morning, I kept repeating the serenity prayer. Other times, I lie down on the floor for a few soft, conscious breaths. Sometimes I go into the studio, and let my body speak in movement, in stillness. Little recuperations instead of big collapses.
Where do I feel the purest bliss? With the horses. Where can I drop everything except my love and my openness? With the horses or basking in the sea. I am looking for more ways to expand that bliss, to find little pockets of it everywhere. Like the idea of little recuperations, little moments of renewing, refreshing stillness, even in action.
Resistance is about believing that you are vulnerable or susceptible to something not wanted and holding a stance of protection — which only holds you in a place of not letting in the Well-being that would be there otherwise. There is nothing big enough to protect you from unwanted things, and there are no unwanted things big enough to get into your experience. —Abraham
balk balk, verb:
1. to stop, as at an obstacle, and refuse to proceed or to do something specified (usually followed by at): He balked at making the speech. 2. (of a horse, mule, etc.) to stop short and stubbornly refuse to go on. 3. to place an obstacle in the way of; hinder; thwart: a sudden reversal that balked her hopes. 4.Archaic. to let slip; fail to use: to balk an opportunity.
I am interested in little resistances. In the subtle strata of obstruction that sifts into each day, each hour, each activity. I have been talking a lot about the big obstacle of losing my daughter. In the midst of that, I have begun to notice little grains of resistance woven into my writing, my dancing, my thinking, even my breathing. These resistances are actually distractions, ways of avoiding what is hard, what is demanding. The body begins to reflect these small islands of tightness, breathlessness, mini-immobilizations.
Last night I did a teleclass on Embodied Horsemanship. I talked a lot about softness, opening, allowing and breathing as the portal and anchor for bodily attention and feeling. Being with horses is for me, the best way to dissolve resistance. That is because with them, I am in a state of feeling awareness, a joyful state, a loving state. Resistance cannot find a purchase there. When I leave the barn, I feel like all the interstitial grit is gone. I am rinsed clean.
In a discussion with some Consciousness Collaborative folks in Boston over the weekend, the question of “What is horsemanship?” came up. Someone had said that they work with horses but do not do horsemanship. I thought that was odd, and wondered out loud how one could spend time with horses and not be doing some kind of horsemanship. I thought about the word dance, and how narrowly defined that can be. The dictionary defines it this way: “move rhythmically to music, typically following a set sequence of steps.move in a quick and lively way.” A fairly 18th century definition and the one that comes up first on a Google search!
This article on the philosophic problems of dance breaks that idea wide open:
Avant-garde experiments use such everyday movements exclusively and without stylization. One choreographer, Anna Sokolow, says she sometimes wonders about “. . . the dividing point between movement and dance. I don’t know and I don’t really care.” Aestheticians and many dance critics, of course, do care about such things. Most would hesitate to call a person walking across a room (even with a radio playing in the background and another person in the room watching) a performance of a dance, although identical movements and accompaniments might be found in a performance.
The use of random movements is another rejection of formalized dance movement. Merce Cunningham, who has collaborated extensively with avant-garde composer John Cage, uses random selection methods for the choice of steps and step-sequences in his dance performances. Randomness and everyday movements again suggest that dance is in part a function of something other than the characteristics of the movement per se, such as the relationship between spectator and performer and the standards for appreciating and evaluating the movements. The room-walking would be art if the walker did it for the purpose of being observed, appreciated, and evaluated as a performance by the other person, and if the observer also appreciated the movement as a performance, despite the absence of a traditional theater. Standards for appreciation and evaluation as dance might involve unity, meaningfulness, and so forth, rather than non-art standards of, say, how efficiently the walker crossed the room to answer the doorbell or how carefully he walked to avoid toys on the floor.
Traditional assumptions about the role of music are also being challenged. Historically, views on the role of music have shifted from (1) the belief that music should provide only the “beat,” but otherwise not “interfere” with the dancing; to (2) the nineteenth-century view that music should complement, but not overwhelm, the mood of the dance; to (3) the twentieth-century view that music and dance should be integrally related, with the dance providing a visualization and expansion of the complex relationships in the music. Avant-garde choreographers challenge all of these views.
My own very spacious definition of dance is basically “any movement in time and space with intention in the presence of a witness.” Intention is the trick word here – what is the mover/movement-maker intending? The witness could be an audience of one or thousands. On the other hand, when I am rehearsing alone is it dancing? Yes. I find it easy to feel when my movement has morphed into some kind of dancing. On the other hand, the minute I enter the stable, I am practicing some kind of horsemanship. The thing that makes it horsemanship is the quality of consciousness in the relationship.
Horsemanship is, according to one definition, is “the art, ability, skill, or manner of a horse(wo)man.” I actually like that and find it commodious. To me, that includes all the practices of equine assisted this or that, riding, and spending any kind of intentional time with horses, regardless of the specific intention, place, time, horse or practice. Is there good horsemanship and bad horsemanship? You bet. Is it easier to determine than bad or good dance? You bet. An offended or bored audience can pretty much up and leave at any time. The horse is not so lucky. They have to stay around for the whole performance. If they do up and leave, it does not end well for the horse.
Yesterday, I spent a lovely morning with my friend Elvia, doing Embodied Horsemanship. What were we doing? We started with some horseless work – somatic movement awareness practices, some improvisational games, some of the softness and balance exercises from Mark Rashid, some conversation about intention, balance and listening. Then we went over to the Equus Effect and played with the lovely Tango. We focused on attunment, listening, on integrating some of the improvisation strategies and somatic exercises into the simple groundwork with Tango. We played in the Tellington-inspired labyrinth. Horsemanship? Yes.
My friend Ann Carlson has one of the stretchier approaches to dance of anyone I know. For your dance and cowmanship pleasure. (In case you cannot see, the anonymous-making hooded raincoats are filled with cash – a comment on the monetization and facelessness of our food animals).
