Month: November 2019
A Teaching of Water
My elemental home is water, which means my spirit aligns more with the element of water. This easily shows when I am dancing. I flow from one movement to the next, and allow my bones and muscles to be like water until it feels like I AM the water.
Water holds the shape of whatever container it’s in. If it’s in a round bowl, the water will effortlessly flow to fill the round bowl. If it’s in a tall glass, it will easily take the shape of that glass. In a way, Water mimics the shape of whatever container that it’s in, and I found this to fill me with gratitude for the boundary of containers. I emulate this in the dance by standing next to, or in front of other dancers and mimic their movements. It’s something that allows me to feel connected to their movements, their heart, by honoring their movements as sacred and joining with them, just as water effortlessly takes up shape after shape as it flows downstream.
This weekend during the dance, I noticed how sludgy I felt as I was beginning. Then after the dance picked up momentum, even though I was feeling sludgy, I started mimicking other people during the dance. I was surprised, because I still found joy in being like water, mimicking others. But I also noticed that I emulated another property of water, which was its cleansing property. I noticed that as I mimicked the other dancers, my water inside got a bit murkier. I still felt joy because I was embodying the true nature of water.
Then I asked myself, “Well… if cleansing is a gift of water, how does water clean itself?”
The answer came so abruptly that it startled me. “It doesn’t…”
I got images in my minds eye of the sand on the riverbank, and how when the water flows from underneath the earth, it gets cleansed by the sand. The water doesn’t clean itself, the element of Earth acts as a filter. I was being water to the point of disconnection, feeling the swirling of water with no boundaries. A river cannot be a river without the banks of the river to hold it. As soon as i remembered the “earth” of my body, I felt myself getting filtered and being cleansed. Water is the blood that flows in our veins, but earth is our flesh, our muscles, our tissue. 
Where was I allowing the flow of my own emotions to get stuck because I had the expectation that my emotions cleansed themselves? Where was I not allowing the wisdom of the body to come in and filter out my emotions? The trick is to feel and allow it to move. Once an emotion is truly felt, it becomes water, changes shape, and flows. But it has to be felt in the body, not held onto – or else it gets stuck, there to surface another day.
Water taught me about emBODYment, what it meant to have a body, and to work with both my emotions and physical body. May you find the wisdom of the ground beneath your feet today. May you feel the flow once you rise from your feet. Blessings to you on this day!