What a Body Knows

My wife and I have been taking tango lessons for 2 years. We seem to be getting to the stage where we no longer have to think about the steps and movements, we just do them and do them in sync. At times we seem able to express ourselves with less regard, but still respect, for the teachings. It's an amazing feeling and I'm sure it has very positive spin-offs in our relationship. I can usually articulate what I think is going on but, with these things, words don't seem to be at all adequate. This post of yours gives a very interesting perspective and explains to me why it is that I can't find appropriate words and, more importantly, why I shouldn't even bother trying.
Many thanks for offering your thoughts.

Beautifully done. You have captured all the motivations I have to dance everyday. At age 40 I started taking all kinds of classes from tap, jazz, ballet, to african, post modern and contact improv.
Some days I just go to the studio, put on some music and move however this body of mine wants to. Every time I dance, I enter the wider universe of thoughts and feelings and visions previously unknown. Some friends kid me that I'm a dance addict, but can one be accused of being addicted to prayer, or song or self-expression? In every dance class, I meet people who, like me, are living in the workaday world and have discovered how the metaphors of dance make them better at what they do.
Contact Improvisation is one of the best examples of a healing dance. We are in contact with total strangers, male and female who we must balance with, share weight, support and physically listen to, often finding some new movement that only occurs together. At the end of a session of CI, one can't but be baffled at why there is so much conflict in the world when we are all could be dancing and celebrating our short time in the universe.
Dance classes are usually small versions of cooperative and creative human communities moving in the three planes of space but transcending space, time and old patterns to find a new direction.

Beautifully done. You have captured all the motivations I have to dance everyday. At age 40 I started taking all kinds of classes from tap, jazz, ballet, to african, post modern and contact improv.
Some days I just go to the studio, put on some music and move however this body of mine wants to. Every time I dance, I enter the wider universe of thoughts and feelings and visions previously unknown. Some friends kid me that I'm a dance addict, but can one be accused of being addicted to prayer, or song or self-expression? In every dance class, I meet people who, like me, are living in the workaday world and have discovered how the metaphors of dance make them better at what they do.
Contact Improvisation is one of the best examples of a healing dance. We are in contact with total strangers, male and female who we must balance with, share weight, support and physically listen to, often finding some new movement that only occurs together. At the end of a session of CI, one can't but be baffled at why there is so much conflict in the world when we are all could be dancing and celebrating our short time in the universe.
Dance classes are usually small versions of cooperative and creative human communities moving in the three planes of space but transcending space, time and old patterns to find a new direction.

It is important to remember that Dance and Movement came before writing, and see that writing is actually a very stylized form of Dance, which evolved because is easy to record on paper using a pen. More recently, we've learned to dance with our fingers on a keyboard to record our thoughts. Our vocal chords dance against the air we exhale to make voice. Our bodies' motion is the earliest and most primal form of communication, and as we bump up against the limitations of the intellect we can broaden our bodies spectrum of articulation by returning to old and finding new forms of movement, of languaging. The great news of this is that since we store so much in our bodies, by dancing this variety of forms we have an opportunity to release and become aware of deeper truths which are very much needed in this time of transition.

Kimerer, thanks so much for this column, and the intriguing notion of writing as a form of dancing, which as a writer has cuaght my imagination. Writing is "full contact" dancing with the imagination of another. Through glyphs on a page, the synapses in our brain fires in some kind of magical synchronicity with the author, and an image sparks to life - than an image in motion, then a person, a character, spoken dialogue, plot, scene, drama is created in the reader's mind. It's a miracle that we can share so much based on such a little simple thing, these squiggles on the page. Part of the miracle of being human. Thanks for this, Tim Ward.

Logon to You Tube channel jw21345. First you see our grandson dancing before he could walk. Sometimes; We, the People Fighting Parkinson cannot walk but the music moves us. We are dancing for our lives! You are soooooo right!

"We are bodies..." We are not human beings having a spiritual experience, but rather we are spiritual beings having a human experience.

Yes, dance is a radical act in our culture at this point in time, but in my experience with indigenous Native American and West African teachers, dance is prayer, healing and meditation for the dancer. These cultures recognize, as does quantum physics, that everything is composed of vibration, energy in motion, thus moving our bodies in rhythm realigns our vibration to create inner harmony. Dancing to live musicians and drummers serves as an ongoing non-verbal conversation and evolving relationship. Dance becomes a potent metaphor for how we move through our lives.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkreiRt8GEY