How do I tell what level I belong in? Dealing with ego and adopting a new mindset.

by Damon Stone

A lot people ask me what level they belong in when it comes to taking classes. I do enjoy people respecting my opinion enough to ask me, but the answer I want to give is never what they want to hear, is not at all satisfying, and the only people who are willing to believe it are the people who don't matter...but more on that part later.

The answer I don't give is, it doesn't matter what level you take. There are two main reasons for this:

1. You are not good enough to get everything in class, no matter WHAT level it is.
2. Dancing with someone worse makes us better.

Lets look at number one, "every level has something to teach you." This may sound like some sort of populist, granola, "we're all equal" kind of BS answer, but the truth is when a teacher tells you this it isn't a platitude meant to soften the blow to your ego about not getting placed where you thought you would, it is because of the simple fact you aren't good enough to get all the stuff correctly in the beginner class. Soak that in, but while you do think about this, neither is the teacher telling you that, and neither am I. I've been doing these dances partnered and solo longer than 80% of the scene has been alive. Now I say this not to brag (how long you've been doing something is a poor indication of how good someone is at a thing) but to help you realize that after all of this time, My posture, connection, pulse, and lag all still need work. The day that everything is utterly perfect with a beginning dancer as well as a master dancer is the day I die from shock. A beginning class focuses on these four basic elements of the blues aesthetic and helps you practice them in the context of simple vocabulary and at best a small handful of blues idiom dances.

Beginning classes are specifically structured to give you time to work on the most fundamental, the hardest, and most important thing in blues idiom dance, the overarching aesthetic. Intermediate classes give you more variety in which to explore the aesthetic, introducing new dances, and some of the more difficult elements of the blues aesthetic like polyphonic movement and call and response, but it is still primarily focused (though frequently hidden) on the blues aesthetic elements of posture, relaxed connection, a maintained physical expression of the baseline rhythm of the music, and lag. Essentially Intermediate is beginners continued. Advanced classes get gritty breaking down the elements and getting you to focus on how the exceptions you think you've discovered are not exceptions, they simply require you to do the things correctly, which you thought you had been doing for years but are starting to suspect you are not even in the ballpark of correct (you aren't). Advanced classes are for those masochists who want to get beyond the "good enough" stage. That is to say, they understand that once you have achieved intermediate level you are good enough to generally dance to any given blues song and pretty much any given tempo with just about any partner and have fun. The dance will be recognizable as blues and you'll both walk away smiling and uninjured. Advanced dancers realize there is more to the dance than having fun, they want to find those transcendent moments where social dancing becomes a form of artistic expression. Seriously, don't take Advanced classes, the time it takes to absorb and apply what you get in a single class and the level of improvement it gives you is all out of whack. If you don't think repeatedly throwing yourself at a brick wall sounds like fun on the off chance you'll be the exception and somehow magically or through a twist of quantum physics pass through the wall, then Advanced classes aren't really for you. I'd say 75% of people in every advanced class I've taught or participated in were there for reasons of their ego, and as such missed most of what was being taught in the class. IF you walk out of class frustrated and tired more often than not, but can't wait to do it again, well congrats, you might be an advanced dancer. IF you find the material fun and not too difficult, you are probably deluding yourself and should give serious consideration to going back to beginner classes. No joke. This either means you are one of the most rare of dancers who absorbs information wholly and can put all the parts together in their head or you spent the entire class entirely focused on the wrong thing and missed all the important bits (oh, did you think that Advanced tricks class was about getting and performing the moves? Nope.).So what are Master classes for? The best Master classes are for people who understand they are weird dance nerds and geeks whose need to know and get it right far outstrips any ability to realize the stuff they are working on will go almost completely unrealized by their dance partners, people in the audience, and most judges. And they are okay with that. It is this consuming passion and need to GET IT ALL even if no one will ever know but them that has them practicing blues dancing at quarter time to improve their balance, with no arms or tied to their partner to remove the need for arms entirely and therefore focus purely on body lead/follow. These are people who are willing in an hour long class to sit and listen to fifteen minutes of theory and then spend five minutes practicing it before being told they are doing it all wrong, and want to spend the next 40 minutes trying to get it right.

And this is where we come to number two, the better your partner is the better they can compensate for you. If you are a beginner and you dance with an intermediate dancer they will recognize your mistakes and mitigate them. When you dance with an advanced dancer they will compensate for them so you might not even know you made a mistake. When you dance with a master they turn your mistake into something brilliant making you think you are a much better dancer than you are. The truth is, if you cannot do it with someone who just stepped off the street, you aren't doing it right. I'll probably get some push back on this, but I believe this wholly and completely. IF you need a dancer as good or better than you to do a thing it is because on some fundamental level you are just not doing it well enough. Blues idiom dance is based on "natural" body movement and reactions, that is to say, it uses the way we move our bodies when we are healthy and moving with unguided purpose, and this means we all, those who take classes and those who do not, should be able to dance blues with someone who is relaxed and paying attention to the music. Now of course the better your partner the easier it is, but a beginner (not a novice) should be familiar with the basics of lead follow, and that is all they should need to be familiar with. IF you didn't make the level you want in an audition, or you are in a class with people you don't think are good enough to do the material and techniques you are working on, you are blaming the wrong person. You are the problem you need to fix. Sure they may be doing things to mess you up and make it harder, but someone significantly better than you would have no problems with it, so instead of worrying about them, concentrate on doing your own things better. So how does all of this have bearing in telling what level you should be in, how do you check your ego, and what is this mindset business? So glad you asked.

What is your purpose for taking classes? If you want to figure out what you are supposed to be doing and have more fun on the dance floor, take beginning classes. If you want your partner to have more fun on the dance floor take intermediate classes. If you want to be the best dancer you can be and your concept of a fun time is melting your brain and beating up your body then take advanced classes. If you must push yourself beyond the reasonable into the absurd where the teacher shows you a step two or three times and has you teach it to yourself because you understand the process and journey IS what is being taught and not the move, and you LOVE THIS then take Master classes. And this why ego holds us back. We put ourselves in classes based on who is in that level and where we think we compare, am I better or worse than those people? How important is it for me to have people know I'm in a higher level than them? If there is always something to learn, something to improve upon, and dancing with people worse than us actually better sharpens our skill and technique, why take classes that are not beginner other than ego? Because sometimes having a teacher who will check our ego for us is the kindest thing possible. Because the esoteric and exotic classes tend to be upper level. Because we have developed a rapport with one or two teachers and we want to take all of their classes regardless of the level. These are ego-less reasons to take things beyond beginning, and I hope you'll consider this shift of mindset.  Getting better is about learning more about yourself without the walls, without the masks, and sharing it with other people.


(source: https://www.facebook.com/notes/damon-stone/how-do-i-tell-what-level-i-belong-in-dealing-with-ego-and-adopting-a-new-mindset/10153016100634338)

It’s a Swing Thing
By Yuki Noguchi

Friday, January 17, 2003; Page WE30

You wanna play?

He pauses slightly, mid-spin, as if the hesitation of a half-twisted torso poses the question.

A shimmy shimmy of the shoulders is my answer:

You betcha!

A linger on a turn sets up a joke.

A wriggle of the hips interrupts with a response: Beat you to the punchline!

At its best, swing dancing feels like great conversation. It has playful spirit that's all wit. That razzmatazz, that blues in your shoes, that swing thing. Rhythmic chitchat goes by many names, but avid dancers call it "connection."

You can scan a roomful of dancers and spot good connection. The awkward pair won't have the telltale bounce. The flashy ones with exaggerated moves won't be in sync. It's the couple with the light feet moving in harmony that catch the eye.


Connection is a chemical measure of how much you get each other on the dance floor. It's spontaneous. It's goofy. It's magic.

And I'm addicted to the stuff.

Luckily for me, Washington supplies the best swing dancing on the East Coast. This area sustains a retro-boom partly inspired by the Gap advertisements of circa 1998, which featured poorly executed, inauthentic swing-dance routines as part of their pitch for khaki pants. While venues in Boston have petered out over the years, and New York's scene has faded to give way to the next trend, Washington's swing subculture continues to provide plenty of venues, live music and good dancers to satisfy my near-daily cravings.

The number of venues during the week even exceeds that of San Francisco, a major hub of swing: Mondays at Chevy Chase Ballroom; Tuesdays at Clarendon Ballroom; Wednesdays are best at K2 in Beltsville, but Lulu's Mardi Gras Club on M Street is closer to downtown. It's Chevy Chase or Zoots and Dolls in Fairfax on Fridays; Glen Echo Park on Saturdays.

For the unindoctrinated, the scene might appear a bit cultish.

My mother, who lives nearby, feels she's lost her daughter to a hobby. I come home to her sober messages on my voice mail: I guess you're out dancing...again.

But Mom, there's joy in a swivel! I need a balboa turn! Jazz is playful, and swing is silly. It mesmerizes and intoxicates. It's as good for the soul as it is for the body.

Longtime dancer Larry MacDonald smiled like Buddha when I asked him what he likes most about dancing. "Harmony," he said. "Harmony I achieve with a woman. My whole life, I've been trying to get that off the dance floor."

My friend Erik Newton started dancing four years ago after seeing an elderly man kiss his wife sweetly on the forehead after a dance.

"I want that," he said.

Couples, though, are the anomaly in the swing scene. The style of dance is often cast in an oversexed role, as in "swinging lifestyle," but that's a misperception. It's mostly a single person's sport, and the norm is to go stag. Though you dance with a partner, you typically switch almost every song.

It's not uncommon to find yourself dancing with someone with whom the only thing you have in common is dance.

Age, in particular, is where swing shows its greatest diversity. I've danced with a high school student whose mother is also a regular. One of the most playful dancers I know is a man named Barry, whose college-age daughter often accompanies him to dances. Sometimes it's the parents who hook their kids on dancing, but more often parents are the ones who become hooked watching their children dance. (My mother took swing lessons for a while so she could see me.) A typical dance will get strong representation from twenty- and thirty-somethings like myself, and an almost equal number of men and women like Larry MacDonald and Bob Schmitt, my middle-aged bachelor pals. The retired reverend Arnold Taylor, an excellent dancer at 77, still vividly remembers learning to dance in grange halls during the Depression 72 years ago.

Swing dancing is light and funny, and in a buttoned-down city that often takes itself too seriously, that can be refreshing.

It's also almost laughably wholesome. The main thing about swing dancing is the dancing. There are those who come to scope out a date, but they usually fall into two categories: the uncommitted types who give up after a few dances yield them no dates, or the converts who discover that they'd rather be dancing than romancing, anyway.

There are some rules of engagement, of course. In no particular order, they are: Do nothing untoward; if someone asks you to dance and you're out of breath, politely decline, but seek them out for a dance later; remember that you, too, were once a beginner; don't eat raw onions before dancing; be nice; change shirts when you get too sweaty, and for heaven's sake throw away the ones that smell like mildew.

Those are really the things that matter when you're a swing dancer. Unlike many Washingtonians, dancers generally don't care what you do for a living.  I've danced with dozens of leads (leads are male dancers, female dancers "follow" the leads) who at best know my first name and how long I have been dancing, but don't seem to care one iota what I do during the day to support my dance habit.

As habits and vices go, this one is inexpensive. Admission typically costs $5, up to $15 at the most, for a famous 16-piece band event or fundraiser. I figure: That's the cost of one night of bar-hopping in Adams Morgan spread over a whole week.

I started dancing about two years ago, after watching one of my best friends from college hone her swing skills during a brief stint living in San Francisco.

My introduction wasn't easy. I spent most of my time observing from the sidelines, hoping a good lead would take pity on my poor skills and dance with me anyway, all the while burning with envy as I watched the better dancers glide and turn in perfect synchronicity with their partners.

Breaking into the scene can be intimidating. All beginners become acutely aware of a caste system on the floor and feel it would be disorderly to ask a Brahmin to dance. I found that chatting with people on the sidelines, being friendly and mustering the guts to ask a better dancer paid off.

Initially, I made a host of beginner's mistakes, starting with my clothing. I wore black platform shoes that looked the part but didn't give me the cushion or the stability that swing dancing requires. I wore shirts and pants that weren't fitted enough, so the excess material trapped air and sweat and slowed my movement. I had long hair that reached almost to my waist and did violence to men's faces when I spun around.

On occasion, some dancers take pains to fashion their hair Rita Hayworth style and comb through vintage shops to find the right zoot suit or dress. But on any given night, the vast majority of dancers seem to prefer function to form. I am one of those people: I dance in my old running shoes and tape the underside with duct tape to slide better. I wear pants and skirts made of soft material that doesn't chafe, even after hours of bouncing around. I wear fitted shirts or tank tops that allow my skin to breathe but are tight enough that they don't flap around, trapping air as I move. I cut my hair to shoulder length and keep it tied close to my head.

Many things about swing are similar around the country. The etiquette, for example, or the way dancers dress up or dress down. Dancers on the whole are also consistently friendly, especially to dancers from other cities.

Yet every city has its own style. Sometimes it's so distinctive that you can identify a stranger's home town by the way he or she dances. This happened recently with someone named Ray, whose style reminded me of the smoother, slower blues style of my friends in St. Louis, where I grew up. Sure enough, Ray, who was in Washington for a few days on business, was from Cleveland -- a stylistic cousin of my Midwestern home town. The reverse happened to me when I was dancing in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco one Sunday a couple of months ago and met Rob Wooldridge, a likable English teacher who instantly identified me as an out-of-towner because I carried my upper body with more "tension" in my arms.

In that sense, dance styles are like regional dialects. It's not clear where they come from or who perpetuates them, but they betray your dance origins.

Insofar as Washington has a distinctive style, it is what my colleague at The Post and fellow dance lover Jen Balderama calls "Hollywood style with a Washington flavor."

Hollywood style is a subset of swing typified by a very taut connection in the arms, so that the follow is leaning back slightly, keeping an elastic but tight link with her partner. The effect is that the dancers look as if they are swinging around in elliptical shapes, gliding rapidly backward with the follow swiveling from her hips in a distinctly sexy way. As the name suggests, this is typical of a style found in Los Angeles; in Washington, it is combined with a speedy jitterbug flair.

What determines a city's style has a great deal to do with who teaches in those cities. In Washington, the most marketed, and therefore most accessible, pair of teachers is Tom Koerner and Debra Sternberg, which makes them the proverbial parents of the swing style here.

There are other teachers in the area as well. John "Psychoboy" McCalla teaches classes in Bethesda, Frederick and Baltimore. Donna Barker teaches swing and other kinds of dance, generally in Arlington. Zoots and Dolls in Fairfax hosts Friday night dance parties preceded by dance classes taught by various teachers.

Most people who learn to dance in Washington, however, start with the duo of Koerner and Sternberg, who usually host five or more dance parties a week. They teach five nights a week, including an hour-long beginners lesson followed by an intermediate class. Their sessions cost $96 and last eight weeks. Following the intermediate class, people start to file in for Koerner and Sternberg's open dance parties, which usually draw enough people to cause traffic congestion on the dance floor.

Koerner, who calls himself a "recovering" divorce lawyer and has a penchant for off-color jokes, said the classes are attracting more and more new students -- as many as 120 people in one of last season's classes. After years of practicing law, he is trying to make a full-time job of his passion.

The fact that he may be doing just that is a sign that a new generation of dancers is coming up through the ranks.

"We don't have a Britney Spears or a Run-DMC to, you know, promote Lindy," said Sternberg, who at 49 is a superbly perky woman who performs death-defying over-the-head aerial moves to frighten and inspire her students. So Koerner and Sternberg promote like crazy. "We always see new generations coming through; you have to rely on people who are going to start dancing" to keep the scene alive. She has been dancing for 15 years, and together with Koerner spends most weekday and weekend events teaching two, hour-long classes.

Critics of Koerner and Sternberg say they don't teach much about posture, body frame, stance and other fundamental skills that enable a person to communicate well with a partner. They go over that in the first class but then quickly proceed to teaching steps and routines of progressive difficulty, so that often by the end of the class some students are kicking around haphazardly off the beat.

I took one class from Koerner and Sternberg -- the only class to date I've taken in swing. I found that I learned most from the charity of leads who could teach me the fundamentals.

What makes good dancers is not how many moves they know but how they carry themselves. The most advanced dancers will spend hours on the most basic steps to improve their dance style. It makes sense, because swing is just a bunch of variations on a handful of basic step sequences: the triple step, the eight-count Lindy circle, and what are called Charleston, balboa and shag. If those aren't etched deeply and cleanly in your muscle memory, there is not much point to building your repertoire.

The person most responsible for my dance education is probably Jason Aldrich. He and I make fun of each others' politics, but he loves dance as much as I do, and he's a supremely patient teacher.

Jason has a smooth style that is clear yet gentle. He doesn't -- as some beginner leads do -- jerk my arms out of their sockets to get me to move quickly. If I keep my arms with the proper amount of tension, I effortlessly end up where he intends me to be. Keeping my balance when spinning or turning with him is also easy, because he counterbalances my weight with his. Mainly, it's the combination of these two things that makes us have a good connection, so that when he decides to do a complicated move, I can generally follow, because my body naturally responds to his lead.

I have kept up my commitment of dancing at least three nights a week for the last two years, except when I was running a strict regimen of 40 miles a week to train for the Marine Corps Marathon. During that time, I disappeared from the dance scene for about six months, but I returned to it at an even more feverish pace three months before the marathon because I injured my knee.

Dancing became my de facto training. I danced six or sometimes seven days a week -- an average of probably 12 hours altogether. That unorthodox regimen kept me in sufficient shape that I ran for the first time in three months on marathon day and was able to complete the race in about five hours -- within 30 minutes of my original desired time.

Dance feels like a more balanced exercise than running, and getting a workout happens to be a byproduct of the fun.

Doug Won, a wonderful dancer in the St. Louis scene and an orthopedic surgeon, told me the arm movements -- even simple pushes and turns -- get the heart pumping faster. Most of the songs fall in medium to fast tempo range, but the exercise is low-impact, so the heart works at that ideal range that helps the body burn fat, rather than sugars, he said.

Swing dancing has another health virtue that probably contributes to its appeal to older people: It spares the joints. Contrary to popular perception, swing dancing is not a set of gymnastic flips in which the woman lands with a jarring thud; few people perform those moves except for purposes of performance. So the knee injury that I sustained doesn't bother me at all, even when I twist, turn, bend and bounce.

Longevity is on dance's side.

Washington's swing scene shows no sign of fading, and those who are nourished by it show no sign of aging.

It stays because it draws you in, sticks to you and lingers. When Ella Fitzgerald's voice caramelizes a dance floor, who can resist partaking of that sweet joy?

Yuki Noguchi covers telecommunications for The Washington Post.

© 2003 The Washington Post Company

 

 

 

 

To Dance Is a Radical Act

The practice of dancing is vital to our survival as humans on earth.

Published on November 29, 2011 by Kimerer LaMothe, Ph.D. in What a Body Knows


To dance is a radical act. To think about dance, to study dance, or to practice dance in this 21st century is a radical act. 

Why?

Because if dancing matters—if dancing makes a difference to how we humans think and feel and act-then dancing challenges the values that fund modern western cultures.

How so?

1. Mind over body. A first and fundamental value of western cultures is the one that privileges our mental capacity, in particular our ability to reason, over and against our feeling, sensing, moving bodily selves. I think therefore I am. We believe that "we," as thinking minds, can exert control over our bodily actions, and that we should. We believe that achieving such mind over body mastery is good, and even our ticket to success in any realm of endeavor.

This idea that reason is our definitively human part was greeted with much hope and fanfare by early modern philosophers and politicians, economists and poets. If only all humans can learn to exercise their reason, it was thought, then many minds will be able to arrive at the same answer-at true and certain knowledge, at a common good, at world peace.

However, we humans are not rational minds dwelling in bodily containers. We are bodies. We are bodily selves whose movements are making us able to think and feel and act at all. And if we are to achieve a just and sustainable world, then we must make sure that our processes of getting there honor the wisdom and agency present in the movement of our bodily selves.

To dance is a radical act because dancing reminds us that the bodily movements we make make us who we are.

2. Individuals first. Second only to the value we accord mind over body control is the value we grant to a sense of ourselves as individuals first. We aim and claim to be independent and self-sufficient, generating our own resources and meeting our own needs. We enter into relationships, ready to stay or go based on the benefits of that relationship to us.

Yet, we humans are not individuals first. Before we can ever think or say "I," we have already been formed and enabled by others. We are who we are by virtue of the relationships we create with those who support our lives, from the day we are born to the day we die. And if we want to create healthy and life enabling relationships with others, then we must acknowledge that we are interdependent bodily selves.

To dance is a radical act because it reminds us that we, as bodily selves, exist only as an expression of the matrix of relationships with ourselves, others, and the natural world that enables us to be.

3. Write it down. A third value we hold dear is that of writing as a medium of knowledge. We grant an authority to words over and above any other medium as the one most able to document, preserve, and transmit truth and knowledge of any kind. This valuing of the written word flourished with the invention of the printing press and its first use: printing Bibles. People of any class or race or gender could access for their own individual selves the greatest mysteries of God. All they needed to do was learn to read.

However, as we now know, not everything that is written down is important, and not everything important can be written down. There are forms of knowledge that exist in media other than verbal ones. Reading and writing themselves are bodily activities demanding the precise articulation of muscle movement. Words cannot grant themselves authority. That authority comes from the lived experiences they express, and the lived experiences they enable.

To dance is a radical act because doing so implies that there are forms of knowing that cannot be mediated to us in words, which give words their meaning.

4. Sit whenever possible. A fourth value derives from the other three. We privilege the kind of work that we can do sitting down, while thinking, reading, writing. We spend years of our lives learning to sit still so that we can master these tasks. When we succeed, we are rewarded by forms of employment that allow us to sit some more. When we are tired at the end of the day, we sit to be entertained, to be fed, to be cared for. We want someone else to do the heavy lifting. We work hard, so we can sit.

Yet, as bodily selves, we are born to move. We are born moving as the medium in which we learn, adapt, invent, and nurture the relationships that support us in becoming who we have the potential to be. Moving our bodily selves in such ways gives us pleasure—even our greatest pleasure.

To dance is a radical act, because when we do it, we remember the primal joy of moving our bodily selves.

In sum, if we dance, and if we claim that dancing matters, then we are also affirming that we are not simply rational individuals whose best health is served by sitting and writing. We are bodily selves, sensing, feeling, stretching-and reaching for the knowledge, justice, and peace we desire.

So what are we to do?

We need to find the dancer in each of us, and the dance in what we do. We need to breathe to move and move to breathe, and so cultivate a sensory awareness of our bodily selves as movement. When we do, we will have what we need to be able to think and feel and act in ways that remain faithful to the body of earth and our bodies of earth.

1. Dance for the span of the universe that you are. All we are, as humans, is a span of flesh and consciousness. We each are a tiny swath of the universe where whatever energy it is that composes the universe is alive in us, as us, coming to life through us. The movement of life expresses itself in every movement we make. Every movement we make shapes that energy, gives it form, and sends it along.

To dance is to play with the movement that is making us. It is to cultivate a sensory awareness of how this movement is making us, and of how our own movements, as we shape and transmit the energy of life, are making us. To dance is to play with this movement in ways that allow us to discover and exercise our capacity to make our own movements—movements that align with our health and well-being. Dancing, we create ourselves. We become who we are. We are what we think and feel and do.

When we dance, then, we don't do it for our "self," per se. We don't do it in order to win a response (preferably praise) from others. We do it to participate consciously in the ongoing creation of what is as that creation is happening in us. We do it to let the universe that is us live through us.

When we do, we find in our bodily selves the ideas and motivation we need to move creatively and constructively in response to the social, psychological and environmental issues that concern us. We can, because we care. We care, because we feel what it is to be a bodily self. And with that knowledge, we have the surest moral compass there is.

2. Practice dance narrowly, understand dance broadly. Often, when we begin to study dance, we start with one technique or one teacher, and quickly identify ourselves as students of a given technique. We perfect particular patterns of movement, and then build on what we have learned. In time, our movements gain strength and grace, and the timbre of a signature style.

At the same time, we always need to remember that no one form or technique of dance is itself dance. A form is a catalyst to dance. The exercises of a given technique are helpful because they draw our attention to certain ranges of movement, quicken our awareness of these possibilities, and guide us to release our own energy through them.

Dance, however, is infinite. There are infinite possible patterns of sensing and responding, even within one relational bodily self. To dance is to exercise our capacity and willingness to play with the movements that we are and discover what we can do. This play can involve making new movements or animating movements of a given technique so fully that they become our own. In either case, however, the form is not the measure of the dance, only a tool for helping us find the dancers we are, and the dance in everything we do.

3. Welcome every obstacle to movement as an opportunity to become a better dancer. When I talk about dance, one of the questions I am asked most frequently concerns those with limited movement. How can someone who is ill or paralyzed or physically compromised dance?

I reply: dance is creative movement. Any human who can move at all—who can breathe or blink or wiggle a pinky finger—and has the desire to do so, can learn to play with the range of sensory possibility that that movement opens up. He can create and become new patterns of sensing and responding. She can invite the neural network of her bodily self to create new connections. When we move in such ways, we align with the forces of creativity—of healing—at work in us. We dance.

The same logic holds for dancers who are sidelined with an injury. In so many cases, an injury happens because one part of the body—a strong part—is carrying more weight than it should. The injury is thus an opportunity to slow down, and find more sensation, more freedom, more play, so that we are able to animate larger and more dynamic patterns of stretch and strength.

When we understand dance broadly, we know that anything that happens to us in our life, pleasing or not, offers us an opportunity to deepen our experience of dancing and enrich our ability to dance.

4. Keep the love alive. After spending time learning a new form, the novelty may wear off and our enthusiasm pale. Suddenly the movements that seemed so life-giving are routine. They don't produce the same sensory excitement. Inevitably the four-fold values named above creep in; we begin to try harder by exerting the power of our minds over our bodies, or we long simply to sit.

We humans are so good at creating habits. We are so good at getting caught in our habits, and forgetting that we were the ones who created them—even when we dance. Yet dancing remains our most potent resource for stirring to life the sensory awareness that reconnects us to our own creativity. As we play with movement possibilities, we open to the life-enabling currents in us that are always looking for places to break out in new forms.

So when we dance, it is up to us to keep the love alive—to return to the pulse of our breathing, to reconnect with the movements that are making us, and so open to receive the energies of the universe coursing through us.

There is a dancer in each of us, and a dance in everything we do. Once we find that dancing energy, we have the most powerful resource there is for evaluating the impact of the movements we are making in all realms of our lives; for comprehending and empathizing with the pain we are creating in ourselves and others, and for sensing how to move in ways that will better enrich our lives as bodily humans in community on this planet. If we are to survive the 21st century, we must.