Sensing and feeling the mid-line can be a challenge when most of us feel out of kilter and out of balance a lot of the time.  A couple weeks ago my lovely Amadeo had a nice big buck while I was riding.  I was feeling fragile emotionally, and so not quick enough to come up out of the saddle to protect myself.  The result: a coccyx sprain.  I walked around feeling rotated, disconnected and fragmented until my next osteopathy appointment.  It was frustrating and interesting to feel that off my mid-line.  Andy Goldman, my osteopath, encouraged me to ride my mid-line in sync with the mid-line of the horse.  So on my next ride, I paid attention to my newly centered tailbone, feeling it connect to the horse’s tail, and sending my energy up my spine through the center of the occipital ridge while seeing/feeling the horse’s poll.

The result was a surprising deliciousness and sense of connection and balance in the ride.  I also noticed that Deo’s crookedness tracking right was connected to the way I close the space between my right shoulder and sternum (shifting my mid-line too far to the left), effectively closing the door to his ability to open to the right!  When I opened that space, with a feeling of widening and softening, he began to straighten and soften!

Revelations!

Then today, while coaching a performer (the lovely Sari Max), I asked her to notice her mid-line with a couple somatic exercises of moving away from and then back onto a centered mid-line.  Then I asked her to move from lying down to standing pausing along the way to look at where her mid-line was in that moment,  The result was that her movement from floor to standing was beautifully effortless and grounded.  Then we took that same sense of mid-line into the text of the play, connecting a physical sense of center and balance to the emotional through-line of each line.  The result was a deeper authenticity and groundedness in the language and movement.  Brilliant and transformational!

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There was a beautiful article this week in the New York Times Style Magazine.  It was written by Abraham Verghese about a journey to visit his birthplace in Kerala. The last part of the article was about his experience of having a therapeutic oil massage by a kalari masseur.  Verghese is a physician and a novelist.  His reflections on his body after the massage were wonderful to me:

I have been a physician since I was 24 and taught taught medical students the catechism of the body for over two decades, just as it was handed down to me by my teachers. Yet suddenly I was filled with uncertainty about the validity of everything I had been teaching. The kalari way of “seeing” the body was as foreign to me as Chinese meridians or a shaman’s way of seeing spirits or auras. And though the Western method in which I was trained is the anatomical way, the scientific way, it seemed to me that our way of “knowing” the body leaves the patient feeling that the visit is not about his body but instead is about the images and other surrogate markers of function that stand in for the body. At the level of doctor and patient, at the level of the handling of the body, and at the level of what transpires when we put our hands on patients to examine them, I wondered if we often fail our patients.

Standing there in my loincloth, it was as if I were a Talmudic scholar, or an exegete whose life was given to understanding “Finnegan’s Wake,” only to wake up decades later to find I had no deeper knowledge of God or of James Joyce. My text is the body, and at that moment I felt as if I knew so little about the body and even less about my own body, the specific collection of skin, bone and organs from which, by some alchemy of cognition, emotion, a beating heart and a functional larynx, my words, my text and these fears emerge.

But this was the surprise: the one thing I had felt fairly certain about, the Western craft of medicine, now seemed lacking and superficial. I had done some exploring of the soul, but the study of the body would have to begin again with new purpose and vigor. God give me mastery of the body, is what I prayed on the flight back. Give me body and soul. I took a vow.

My text is also the body.  I have taught dancers the catechism of the body, the holy book of movement for most of my life.  Looking back on the years of teaching, I also feel that at times I have failed my students.  In the beginning, what I transmitted to them was how to achieve a perfection of form, a physical ideal.  Ultimately, that did not work well for me.  I could not achieve that perfection myself.  What I am teaching now is how to push into the mystery, how to listen, how to wait, how to allow the body to reveal its delicate truths.  So Verghese’s revelations were precious to me – like meeting a fellow traveler on the path.

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I love this photograph of my daughter.  She was modelling an exercise for a chapter in my book.  It feels this from “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver:

You do not have to be good

You do not have to walk on your knees

For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. 

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

I wrote about the attic, the basement the other day as a metaphor for the body, and the way we experience those unconscious spaces in our bodies.  My friend, the poet Nicole Rushin shared it on Google+ and there was a pretty rich discussion thread.

She said, “There are days when I feel like I deny my physical self, my body. I wonder what I am doing here? I am spirit – why do I have these bones and this flesh? My body is like a carrier for me some days, unfamiliar and strange. And having said all that I suppose I am most at ease in the attic discovering new things and un-burying old treasure.”

We don’t live in the attic, though.  So I wondered about the body’s living spaces – where we are spending most of our time.  For me, I think it is in my hips, my spine.  That is where I feel the dancing and the riding the most.

Where are you living?

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