I'm spending at least one year in The Bay Area. I've been to five jams in the first ten days of my being here. Delicious.
Last night's jam was a whirl of fabulousness.
Here's what comes up for me:
Both technique and trust are necessary for growth. You can trust all you want, but if your body hasn't practiced falling, for instance, either it won't as readily put itself in situations where falling is a high possibility, or it will, and grace will hopefully save your ass. You are limited or you are in danger. Likewise, the time you've spent accumulating technical vocabulary will be in vain if you can't Trust. It's trust that allows you to get out of the way of your body, which is very smart.
Last night at the Thursday jam in Berkeley, I embodied this understanding by spontaneously receiving body work from my partner. Her hands lay on me and rocked me and dug into my musculature for some good, long moments until I felt Trust. If the hands that catalyzed the Trust spoke, they might say something like, "You're okay. Release into me. Trust me. Trust you. Don't disturb your deep stillness until moving is what happens and don't judge the nature or the length of your movement -- find stillness when it's already happening. None of these other people are important. They have no authority and no power to validate or invalidate. "Good" doesn't exist. You can stay. You can move. You can trust The Dance."
So that's what happened. I don't know how long I lay there and I found myself moving without having decided to move. It was a beautiful, powerful, delicious and funny warm-up dance in which the roles were very fluid and changing.
Many moments in following dances had me in fits of laughter because I was amazed at what I was watching my body and other bodies do. It was like The Dance was telling jokes. At one point in an extremely raucous but aware trio, I was smacked against a wall. Even though my hands caught the blow perfectly, it shocked my mind and for a second there I judged it as "bad" and "out of control" -- luckily a witness let out a big laugh which somehow proved that my body had been totally in control -- enough for it to be a comedic rather than a tragic moment.
The jam that followed sprung from this deep trust and my body was therefore able to use its vocabulary. It knew where it was in space. It knew when to let the eyes and head release back into space, it knew when to slough off too much weight. I knew when to roll when to fall when to throw my core into another body's surface. I knew when to hold em, fold em, and I knew when to run.
I look forward to accumulating more Technique and releasing more and more into Trust. Luckily there is an abundance of teachers and scientists of this form.
- Meg Anderson
