Category Archives: video

Dance, ecstasy, Pina, play

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Today I had three dance experiences, which made it a wonderfully memorable day.

  1. I participated in Ecstatic Dance Austin this morning.
  2. I saw the film Pina by Wim Wenders, about the late German dancer/choreographer Pina Bausch, her work, and her dancers.
  3. My friend Peggy and I walked and played our way around Town Lake.

There is a shortcut to ecstasy. It’s called dance. ~ Gabrielle Roth

I am in love with Ecstatic Dance Austin, feeling so grateful that I have two hours every Sunday morning as an outlet for my energy, movement, physicality, playfulness, experimentation, and connection.

Today it occurred to me that if I didn’t have this, I’d curl up in a ball and die, or at least be really depressed. When I’m struggling over relationships, finances, work, decisions, politics, life, this is a place where I can give all that heaviness over to Spirit and just move, feel, connect, play, and be present. Life becomes a dance.

It is joy to walk into a big dance studio with a great sound system playing the kind of music that invites movement. I move out onto the floor. I begin moving.

Because there’s no talking, I connect with people using eye contact, smiles, and sometimes hugs. Sometimes I create my own space by closing my eyes and dancing.

I smile a lot because I feel so radiant and happy. There’s joy in the present moment, of course. My more personal joy is that I’ve worked on my health for years with bodywork, yoga, and a clean diet, and I feel great. My stamina is good — I stay moving, even through the burning fire of dancing all-out chaos. My creativity is good — there’s no end to discovering rewarding movements that morph into new grooves. My capacity for living and dancing from joy is good — although I have moments when heavy thoughts arise in my awareness during dance, I can move through them and return to joy.

I find ecstatic dance to be a great healing antidote. If I’m suffering relationship woes, I can dance with men who appreciate me, move with me, play with me, honor me. They don’t know my story, and I don’t know theirs. We just dance. A couple of dances can restore my sense of being valued as a woman by the other sex.

And for days when I’m fed up with male egos, I can have playful, fun dances with women.

And of course, I can have dances with men or women, or men and women, any time for no reason at all except that we’re together in the studio, there’s some great music playing, and we share the joy.

The physicality of it, the improvisational nature of ecstatic dance, the freedom and goodness I feel in my body, the wave of rhythms that peaks somewhere in the middle just clear me out until nothing is left but sweat, breath, and oneness.

Afterward we sit or lie spent in a big circle on the floor and give ourselves a couple of minutes of silence. We say names. We have announcements. We mingle and leave.

 

Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost. ~ Pina Bausch

Pina, the film written, directed, and produced by Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire, Buena Vista Social Club), is showing at the Violet Crown in downtown Austin. The film has been nominated for Best Documentary for the Academy Awards. (Click the link to view the awesome trailer.)

Pina Bausch worked with Tanztheater Wuppertal in Berlin from 1973 until her sudden death in 2009. Rather than being a biographical documentary, Pina shows her choreographic work and the dancers who danced her work speaking about her.

Here’s a clip (it’s in 3D, by the way — first dance film in 3D, that I know of — thanks, Wim Wenders!):

And here’s another:

And another:

She painted with dancers, movement, costumes. Her dances are not ecstatic dance — they are choreographed — but from what I could tell, she started with improvisation, asking for instance for a dancer to show her joy. Although some of the dance is highly structured, it retains its aliveness.

The film is a revelation — about life, love, pain, loneliness, longing. And creativity and playfulness.

WIM WENDERS ABOUT PINA BAUSCH
No, there was no hurricane that swept across the stage,
there were just … people performing
who moved differently then I knew
and who moved me as I had never been moved before.
After only a few moments I had a lump in my throat,
and after a few minutes of unbelieving amazement
I simply let go of my feelings
and cried unrestrainedly.
This had never happened to me before…
maybe in life, sometimes in the cinema,
but not when watching a rehearsed production,
let alone choreography.
This was not theatre, nor pantomime,
nor ballet and not at all opera.
Pina is, as you know,
the creator of a new art.
Dance theatre.

I loved seeing the dances, dancers, costumes, settings. This film inspires me. I want colorful, flowing, sexy evening gowns to dance in. I want to play with movement, to experiment, to have fun.

 

I can trust my friends. These people force me to examine, encourage me to grow. ~ Cher

Peggy is a dancer and choreographer and a dear friend of mine for years. Having just seen the film and danced our way out of the theater, we walked around Town Lake incorporating playful movements — stepping stylishly between two trees, walking on benches, doing asana on bridges, mimicking the arm gestures we saw in the film, striking poses, waving arms, adding twirls and hops into our walk.

We made our walk into a dance, and you know I’m such a sucker for dancing in unlikely places. The hike and bike trail is as good a place as any, maybe better than most.

It was a beautiful cloudy cool winter afternoon, and people were out enjoying themselves on the trail, walking, running, biking. Our play gave them a little extra enjoyment. People can be so serious, it’s like an illness. We put smiles on their faces.

As we played, we talked about creating dances. We shared some hilarious, outrageous, fun, engaging ideas for dances.

I hope we do them. I’m moved!

Winter Alps, speed flying, dancing in beauty

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One of my astrological mandates for 2012 is to surround myself with physical beauty.

In that light, I am sharing this video.

Watch and surrender to grace.

The earth has disappeared beneath my feet,
Illusion fled from all my ecstasy.

Now like a radiant sky creature
God keeps opening.

God keeps opening
Inside of Me.

Hafiz

Six great things about making mistakes

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For most of my life, I have been afraid of making mistakes. Even the “MBTI Prayers” mentions my type as being perfectionistic:

INFJ: Lord, please help me not to be so perfectionistic! (Did I spell that correctly?)

Yes, I am a good speller, and I am also a fear-based Enneagram type, a Five, somewhat evolved but still a Five.

Fear! Fear! Fear! Boo!

I can poke fun at myself now, but used to, I couldn’t. I was a good child, didn’t make waves, did well in school, was serious and well-behaved, was friendly and funny with my peers — but was isolated, not close to anyone emotionally. I had a lot of fears and doubts and no one to talk to. My fears and doubts kept me from talking to anyone! I feared they wouldn’t understand me and would ridicule me, and I doubted anyone could do or say anything helpful to me. So I didn’t reach out very far. Adolescence was particularly lonely. I was afraid of making mistakes.

My fear of making mistakes meant being tense before I even started something!

Wow. When I think about that now, I can see how I made myself miserable. I robbed myself of the joy of failing, trying again, and doing better. I didn’t understand the learning curve.

By the way, here’s a great video about the learning curve. Watch this baby learn about her body and what she can do, and notice how complex rolling over is, and how she learns to do it:

 

I’m not sure exactly when this happened, but I recently realized some Very Important truths in life that changed my mind about making mistakes:

  • Mistakes are inevitable. Every single person is different from me in values, history, habits, expectations, thought processes, communication styles, emotional make-up, priorities, and so much more. I can’t read minds. Also, I filter things out that I should have paid attention to, had I only known or really understood. I forget, get distracted, am preoccupied, and so on. As the politicians say, mistakes are made.
  • You grow more from making mistakes than you do from perfection. When you do something or see something done perfectly, you and others can appreciate the beauty, elegance, and righteousness of it. Perfection lets us appreciate that someone has reached an ideal. You can reflect on what made it perfect, respect the luck or skill that went into it, and then you store that memory and move on to what’s next.

When you make a mistake, well, there are all kinds of opportunities to develop yourself and grow as a human being:

  1. You get to reflect on your behavior and remember what you were thinking/feeling and (with hindsight) what you were distorting/deleting/generalizing about that led to your mistake. So you know more about your subjective experience and your behavior, and you understand yourself better.
  2. By understanding yourself better, you have an opportunity to develop compassion for yourself. If you can understand how making the mistake really happened, moment by moment, you can have mercy on yourself, be tender toward yourself for your limitations, forgive yourself.
  3. If you can forgive yourself, you can extend that understanding and mercy to other humans who make mistakes (and of course to all sentient beings). Next time you realize you’ve made a mistake, after you’ve held yourself accountable and developed compassion for yourself, think of someone whom you hold a grudge against or judgment about because they made a mistake with you or someone you care about. You can now understand that they had limitations and were doing the best they could at the time. Just like you. You can extend your tenderness and compassion to them. We all live in the human condition.
  4. You have an opportunity to understand how you could have done it better. With hindsight, what could you have done differently that could have resulted in a better outcome? Of course, there’s no way of really knowing what the actual different outcome might be because there are always innumerable variables beyond our control, but you can at least imagine moving in a different and healthier direction, and it can still be soothing to your heart and mind to retroactively right your wrong in your imagination.
  5. You now hold the key to actually doing it better next time. Imagine a similar situation in the future, and see yourself not making that mistake.
  6. Depending on the severity of the mistake and the person you made it with, you may have an opportunity to make amends and reconnect in a healthier way. You may want to talk about what happened, listen, apologize, reset boundaries, and/or make a peace offering. Who knows? They may have something important to tell you. You invite them to understand you better and perhaps to understand themselves (or what they project) better through seeing how you misperceived them. And mostly, you get to spend time valuing each other’s humanity, and that’s a simply awesome way to spend time with people.

There’s still a part of me that doesn’t want to make mistakes, because there’s pain involved. I don’t want to cause anyone pain or suffering. But I can’t let that paralyze me. Intent counts, and it’s more complex than that. This is where the Serenity Prayer comes in:

Mistakes are perhaps the best education available for the heart and the mind when it comes to gaining skill with life. They teach you how to be heart-full and mind-full.

With the attitude that mistakes are inevitable and there for me to learn from, and the recognition that I have learned from them and will continue learning from them, life feels more playful, free, promising, and joyful. I’m moving in the direction of Big Mind and Big Heart. And how much better can it get than that?

Leslie Kaminoff reviews “The Science of Yoga: The Risks and the Rewards”

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This book, The Science of Yoga, written by a New York Times science writer, was at the heart of the recent controversy about yoga injuring people as posited in a New York Times article.

Leslie Kaminoff has posted two video responses to the article. (See my previous post to view them.)

This third video is his response to the book, which he recommends that all yogis read — and then gives a mixed review.

Correlation is not causation, as Kaminoff says. If you cite how many people are injured doing yoga, but fail to compare it to injuries from any other physical activity, there’s no perspective — and that’s a journalistic failure. Broad apparently does not come across as a credible science writer because of this in Kaminoff’s eyes, which is disillusioning considering the NY Times’ “gray lady” status among newspapers, but putting forth questionable data supports his agenda — and sells books.

Of course, journalism has been in the fire for years. Maybe Fox News is the equivalent of Bikram.

Watch the video to find out what Broad’s agenda is. You might be surprised that he picks on individuals (especially one whose Ph.D. came from an institution that ironically Broad finds not credible, and a small organization, the International Association of Yoga Therapists).

Yoga helps by magnitudes more people than it injures. Just make sure you get a good teacher who knows anatomy, and keep in mind that it’s your responsibility to be aware of your body and to set your limits to protect yourself.

Yogadork’s guide to yoga community response to NY Times article

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From the great Yogadork, here’s the complete and exhaustive guide to the yoga community’s response to the New York Times article about how yoga can wreck your body.

Thanks, Yogadork, for compiling this and for promising to add more as new responses surface.

I’m glad the conversation is happening. The original article seemed to deliberately fan some flames in order to promote a book by New York Times science reporter William J. Broad. A lot of egos are on the line — yoga in America has become an industry, a far cry from one of six schools of Indian philosophy.

The guide includes Part 2 of Leslie Kaminoff’s response to the controversy. He said in his workshop that he was about halfway through reading The Science of Yoga: The Risks and the Rewards (available for preorder, publication date is Feb. 7) and thinks it’s worth the read (even if possibly not entirely fair or accurate, still, good enough).

And with that, I’m bowing out of continuing to post about this controversy. After I read the book (and it’s not at the top of my reading list — gotta study for the massage licensing exam first), I’ll post a review.

Yoga (asana) has been part of my life since 1982. I feel fortunate to have discovered and made this practice part of my life. It’s transformed my being in all its koshas, brought me good health and spiritual gifts, and there’s still learning to be done. It’s blessed me.

My advice for preventing injuries is to work with good teachers who understand anatomy far beyond what’s required to become an RYT-200, teachers who teach small enough classes that they can really keep an eye on each student and keep them out of trouble.

Also, pay a lot of attention to what you’re doing. Use and cultivate your awareness.

Now that’s yoga.

Sadie Nardini Responds to “How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body”

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Sadie Nardini Responds to “How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body”. | elephant journal.

Here’s yet another response from a well-known yoga teacher to the controversial recent New York Times article. Sadie Nardini recommends that students concerned about the possibility of injuries choose instructors based on how much anatomy training they’ve had. Very little is required for the RYT-200 credential. I think it’s about 20 hours.

She mentions Leslie Kaminoff as being an expert on anatomy. I took a workshop with him today. Nearly half the class of 70 were yoga teachers. He showed us some of the Anatomy Trains cadaver video and a couple of Gil Hedley’s cadaver videos (I posted his video on “fuzz” previously).

Leslie and Amy Matthews have updated their book, Yoga Anatomy, which Sadie recommends.

She makes some good points, especially noting the contradictions in what Glenn Black said to the New York Times and what he said to the Huffington Post about his own yoga injuries and whether yogis should do headstand.

It’s your body–don’t trust it to just anyone. Ask any prospective yoga teacher what, if any yoga injuries they’ve had, and if, for example, they’re about to go into spinal surgery from years of severely over-expressing themselves in yoga posture, then move on.

In addition, each student has a responsibility to check themselves before they wreck themselves in class. You might not know everything about yoga poses or anatomy, but you do know the feeling when you’re pushing too hard.  So when the urge to go all agro on a pose arises, whether it’s to strain toward strength or flexibility, it’s ultimately up to you to resist the ego’s siren song–something that leads even more experienced yogis to push their limits, then act mystified at the fact that this supposedly ‘healing’ practice hurt them instead.

Leslie Kaminoff responds to NYTimes article about yoga wrecking your body

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My 2 Cents about “How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body” | Leslie Kaminoff’s Yoga Anatomy.

Leslie Kaminoff, author of Yoga Anatomy, responds to the recent New York Times article via video.

To equate yoga with asana practice, is a very deep and false connection.

There’s a lot more. The video is 10 minutes and the best response I’ve seen so far. I’m happy to say I will be doing a workshop with him next month.

The dark side of yoga

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This article should be required reading for all yogis: How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body – NYTimes.com.

I have been lucky in that I’ve never been injured from doing yoga since I started practicing in 1982. I’ve only had muscle soreness, but never severe or lasting more than a day. Doing yoga from a book was risky, but it taught me to pay attention to my own experience.

I’ve been lucky to have had good teachers. Eleanor Harris would never have students do shoulder stand with the neck bent ninety degrees to the torso, as described in this article.

Instead, we would fold blankets and our mat to create an elevated cushioned ledge for the shoulders to rest on with the head resting on the floor a couple of inches below. Afterwards, we would rest on our backs with support under our necks. We also did prep poses before attempting sarvangasana.

Let your awareness of your body’s limits be your primary guide, and beware of any teacher who would override you.

Some people naturally have very flexible bodies. It seems that a lot of these people, to whom yoga comes easily, become yoga teachers and end up setting the bar for the rest of us.

I am fairly flexible but am unable to do lotus pose, arm balances, and several other advanced poses. I’m okay with that. I don’t feel like I have to prove anything by doing advanced poses. Still, after working toward it for an hour (or a lifetime), it is a thrill to finally do hanumanasana. I understand the desire to deepen one’s yoga practice.

I’m happy with the yoga I can do, happy to make small  increments of progress, which these days has as much to do with my own body awareness as it does with achieving an external form.

Most of my yoga studies for the past few years have been with Iyengar-certified and Anusara-inspired teachers, who tend to focus on anatomy and form.

I like how yoga keeps me flexible enough, how the poses open up my meridians so that my energy flows with more ease. I simply feel better during my off-mat life because of yoga, and if the day ever comes that I don’t, that’s the day I stop doing it.

Besides reading this article, I also recommend that yoga students and teachers watch the video Anatomy for Yoga with Paul Grilley, which clearly shows the range of flexibility in the bodies of yogis. It will make you feel better if you can’t get your arms straight in wheel pose.

An excerpt is available on YouTube:

Cadaver video showing the importance of stretching, massage, and yoga

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Warning: This video may be gruesome to some viewers. It features a cadaver. If you think that it will upset you, then don’t watch it.

Why am I featuring it here? It shows why you need to move your body to your full range of movement to maintain your freedom of movement as you grow older, and why you may need yoga and/or bodywork to restore freedom of movement after periods of inactivity.

Freedom of movement is something that I intuitively believe is related to having healthy energetic meridians. If you can move freely, then the energy in your body is flowing well.

I’m sure there’s a lot more to it than that, but you can feel it, can’t you?

Here’s to the crazy ones: video of original ad and poster

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View the original video with Steve Jobs’ narration below.

You can get this great quote as a poster here. They’re accepting orders through December 17. Your purchase benefits the Acumen Fund, a charity fighting poverty. Read more here.