high priestess deborah hay

As I share in the podcast episode for this week, I felt called to speak with and about some of our dancestors. I felt that their wisdom and bodyfulness had something to speak to about this moment.

Although, it was Pina Bausch who was stuck in my head. (“dance, dance otherwise we are lost”). My bibliomancy led me back to Deborah Hay and her book My Body, The Buddhist.

The following are some of her prompts and musings that jumped out at me 10 years ago and also here and now.

“Where I am is what I need, cellularly”

The most frustrating of spiritual answers. As I recovered recently from my phone notes, there are no fancy spiritual answers. Our mind wants fancy to distract, to get lost in. To have a puzzle to figure out. But...

The key is in the door that we think is a blockade.
The answer is in the prayer - “a dialogue with all that is” which is the breath.

“Alignment is everywhere”

Just because something is hard doesn’t mean you are doing it wrong. Where you are is correct. How you feel is correct. Alignment is everywhere. 

“The whole body is at once the teacher.”

When was the last time you asked your body what it needed? Where is it? What do you know with your body? What does it want (which may (or may not) be what you think it needs)? Can we acknowledge that our mind lives in our body and not the other way around?

“It doesn’t matter if it is true or not. Just notice the feedback when you play it.”

This has long been my approach to my simultaneously lofty, mythical and also pragmatic spirituality. Does it work? Do it. Does it not? Try something else. And this is very much rooted in my artistic practice. This ability to experiment. This faith in the process that something always emerges out of showing up, trying things, failing at things, asking questions. And so, I view life as one big art project, my over-arching creative venture, what will be my retrospective  - my life. I practice looking at the entire body of my work, not just this one moment, aspect, feeling or project. What tools do I have to work with? Who do I want in the room with me? How does it feel to be working on this? When I tried that, it was terrible; let me try something else.

“Your practice informs my practice.”

No one else can really give you your practice. No one else is in your body with your longings, your purpose, your cells. And, yet, we are all affected, all a part of the biome that is the fabric of nature and everything including each other. We have an invitation to be affected, informed by one another, but not overtaken - still true and entirely unto ourselves. 

“What if Now is Here is Harmony?”

this proposal stops me from moving.
so i can take in the harmony
challenge my idea of harmony
and now
and here.
if i ask different questions
if i remember that who i am is malleable and time is malleable and beauty is perception…
can i ask the question “what if now is here is harmony?”

“I am movement without looking for it.”

Everything changes. Everything in you moves without you knowing it. We can’t even keep ourselves alive by ourselves. Our heart beats. We breathe. And it is happening without my supervision.  Can you bring awareness to the movement that you already are, already do? Bringing your awareness to it breathes it dance. Can you close the door to your room and move exactly how you want to move right now? Can you listen so that you know how you want to move? Practice.

“I accept the fact that I cannot attain a perfect practice and instead use my energy to remember to engage the practice. In this way, I create futures I cannot achieve and then practice being here as the means for completing a day’s work.”

That our lives are a bridge (a very Libra thought as I write this in the Libra moon). That our hopes, desires and dreams aspire towards the future that we want. And acknowledging that we do not have 100% control over this future. So what do we do? We practice being here the way we aspire to the future that we want. Often, I am aspiring more than I am being here. Remembering that the victory is engagement and not attainment. I create the future now when I engage the practice…. of being here.

“My body finds energy in surrender.”

And then we surrender. Because our aspirations, and the work of aspiring, are in the stretch of the bow, the drawing back of the arrow, our focused aim and vision. We may not hit the target, or the bull’s eye. But, if we don’t release (surrender) the arrow, we absolutely have no chance of hitting the target. What happens between the surrender and the landing is out of our control. But we can’t hold, aim, stretch, flex forever. In the surrender is power, the power of collaboration with what we can’t see.

“What if there is no space between where I am and what I need?”

a proposal. an exploration. a question. a practice.
faith.

“My body equates patience with renewal”

When I remember to give myself permission to not-accomplish - to NOT. To be a non-doer. Like Shiva, consciousness, the eternal non-doer. Like Odin, waiting for the Runes to be revealed. Tapping into the ultimate wisdom by not doing. By being, or hanging upside down - being willing to give up one eyeball, one way of seeing for another.

I listened to Zach Bush recently explain that the body is so quick to heal itself if the cells can get unfettered access to what they need. He said it was like there was an innate grace to how our system worked. By “grace” he meant that healing happened so much faster than the sickness happened.

I am deeply tender-hearted about the planet. I love being here. I love the earth from the bottom of my heart. Every time I talk about it, I cry. Even writing this, I tear up. When I was little I would go outside and talk to the trees, sit with them, make sure they didn’t need anything. I called myself a “tree doctor.” More likely, the trees were humoring me and watching over me. And when I get broken-hearted, pessimistic, disappointed, enraged about the travesties happening every day in our relationship to the planet, I watch YouTube videos on regenerative agriculture or ecology. It helps me remember how quickly healing happens if we just stop injuring - how healing is built into the system. How nature already knew violence would happen, destruction would happen. So it built up a superpower of resilience, of latent possibility. Like it keeps “flourishing” in the container to open when the war is over, pandemic is over. And, not even then. She opens the flourishing container of magic anyways, all the time, anyways. Just look outside.

Safety is not required for survival. Nothing is safe, really. Life is not safe. The ocean is equally beautiful, therapeutic, as it is dangerous, lethal. It just depends on where you are… with what you need.