If there must be a god in the house, […]
Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor,
Or moonlight, silently […]. He must dwell quietly.He must be incapable of speaking, closed,
As those are: as light, for all its motion, is;As color, even the closest to us, is;
As shapes, though they portend us, are.“Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit,” Wallace Stevens
Without thinking, I felt my spine elongate a bit more, my legs rotate a bit more, my fingers at the end of my hand articulate a bit more. My body felt my teacher approaching before I even noticed her in the mirror. She paused by my side while I continued to plié nervously, wondering what correction she’d give me about my feet or knees or shoulders. Instead, she looked at me and said, “I can see you’re working hard on your technique. Your inner thighs—they make a flat plane when you’re turned out.” She nodded and, with her tiny signature smirk, continued walking through the rows of barres and picked up on her counting without missing a beat. For the rest of the class, I tried to catch a glimpse in the mirror of what she saw. I hadn’t even known that “flattening the plane of my inner thighs” was possible, let alone a sign of progress in ballet training. I’d been so focused on keeping up with all the steps and their French names, and not exhausting myself by the time we got to grand battements, that I barely noticed how the work was working on me.
Though I started dancing at three, I was a late bloomer when it came to ballet. By reputation, it was made for petite girls, which I was not, so I chose other styles that seemed to be more forgiving in terms of technique and body size. But one year during our recital dress rehearsal, I found myself transfixed by watching the older girls’ ballet piece—an excerpt from Swan Lake. Our studio was more focused on competition styles, so there were few ballet classes on the schedule, and even I could tell that it wasn’t nearly as polished as the jazz and tap numbers. Still, the music, the costumes, and the overall elegance of those three minutes were enough to pull me away from the book I’d been reading for the rest of the rehearsal. “You look like you’re watching a love story,” my friend’s mom said at the end, pulling me out of my trance. That’s exactly what had happened, and I knew right then I had to make room in my schedule (and convince my parents) to let me add another dance class to my schedule.
Starting ballet at thirteen, in a more or less adult body, did not make for a great meet-cute. I had musicality and could remember the steps, but the essence of ballet hadn’t been imprinted onto my tissues while they were developing, as was the case for the dancers I aspired to emulate. Still, I was one of the few students in the class who was committed and engaged and didn’t treat ballet like an obligation—the proverbial honors math class you need to get into a good college, or the broccoli you know you should eat to be “healthy.” I started my stint en pointe by having my long feet mocked by the saleswoman at the shoe store. Sensing this maybe wasn’t my calling, I stuck to more familiar styles of dance in college. And when I moved to NYC, with the famous Lincoln Center just blocks away from where I lived, I found it hard to immerse in the artform that once transfixed me. During the first performance I attended, I started crying within minutes, and spent the whole show trying not to disturb my neighbors with stifled sobs. I was still in my love story, but I’d moved into the heartbreak phase of the narrative. Watching the dancers move, and feeling it—almost—in my own body, was torture. I wondered at what point in my life had I made the wrong move that put me in the audience instead of on the stage. Was there a universe in which I could have been a dancer?
*
Dance may not be my career, but movement has never left me. Literally, I’ve spent the last ten years teaching movement classes, and more years before that learning how to teach; but also more metaphorically, my sense of work/career/dharma has always been about dynamism, change, adaptability, and building an ample toolkit and bank of experience from which I can draw when I need to respond to something in the moment. Nothing about what I do is scripted or predictable (and believe me, I’ve tried to make it so!). Having read hundreds of books, I can shape a manuscript-in-progress with the echoes of all those words in my mind; having seen hundreds of bodies, I can make recommendations to movement technique, diet, and lifestyle with the gestures of those many bodies in my memory. As such, my ballet teacher’s comment about my legs has become a useful and motivational signpost for assessing how a life of movement shapes my body, and vice versa. After dancing, I took up yoga and had to unlearn all my turnout; tadasana taught my legs how to stand in neutral rotation. When an injury put yoga on pause, I found Pilates, and toe-taps and side-leg series taught me to engage my core without bracing my whole trunk or leaning into my pattern of posterior tilt. When more injuries and health conditions made strength training a requirement, deadlifts stiffened my over-flexible hamstrings and added the requisite load to my system to grow new bones where they had weakened.
During each of these seasons of movement, my body changed in ways I expected—and ways I didn’t. As my tissues adapted to these new challenges, though, the even more profound change was to my sense of self. What I thought of as “me” wasn’t at all fixed. The love story of my life wasn’t about moving a certain way or having a certain-shaped leg; it was about recognizing what I needed to be me, and following it without hesitation.
*
There are notions in our culture about how actions and choices shape our identity: I think, therefore I am; you are what you eat. But rarely do we think about how influential the movements that make up our lives (or the lack of movement) contribute to our bodies’ shape. Thoughts are conscious; food, tangible. But movement, as an expression of the air element, is a subtle hand that provides resistance, direction, and propulsion in ways we don’t always realize until we’re somewhere else entirely. The energetic and relational “shape” of our bodies in response to this influence of movement is a form of body language that speaks beyond the matter of our tissues and into what matters in our hearts. Someone walking down the street in full turnout and a perfectly upright spine might signal “ballet dancer,” but also discipline and grace; someone sinewy and slightly hunched, grinding up the hill in the park at 6 AM in December might signal “runner,” but also tenacity and endurance; someone whose hands are gnarled and calloused and full of dirt might signal “farmer” or “gardener,” but also steward and provider. The movement reflects the life—and the life force, or prāṇa, flowing through it, longing to know and experience itself in material form. I move, therefore I am.
More often than not, though, we find ourselves feeling caught up in a current of movement not of our choosing, that might even seem antithetical to who we think we are (or who we want to be). Autumn, a season defined by obligations and unpredictability, is a prime time for us to feel moved out of ourselves, rather than into a familiar and enlivening identity. A simplistic understanding of how to work with this energy using Āyurveda says to use opposite qualities to find balance; specifically, opposing mobility with stability; air with earth. When our movements become reactive and defensive, we indeed long for any kind of stillness that would convey trust, ceasing to the chaotic swirl of thoughts or erratic events of our digestion, immunity, respiration, or heartbeats. Sometimes, the body even forces such a stillness through illness: we come down with something just when vacation starts, when your body knows it can, and must, finally rest.
Being grounded and earthy is a fantastic way to be (especially by choice!), generally speaking but especially in autumn. But when we consider how readily the body is shaped by movement, the necessity of prāṇa to flow and express itself, the stillness often associated with these qualities doesn’t really track. In fact, the fastest way to further aggravate the swirling chaos of autumn, governed by vāta doṣa, is to try to stop it. Like trying to bag the wind, vāta will only build up as pressure and start moving in another direction if contained too forcefully and for too long. Not only does this create discomfort in the body—bloating, gas, crepitous, an invisible itch you can’t scratch—but it turns prāṇa’s love story into heartbreak. It puts a fence with an iron gate around the field of awareness, the longing for manifestation, that is at the heart of our universe—that willed us into these bodies.
And so as we settle into this late-autumn season, and our second go-around with the sense of touch (which governs movement), we won’t stop moving. Because we can’t, really—life keeps pushing forward and all the to-dos will arrive whether we like it or not. In practice, we won’t meet that propulsion with utter stillness, but rather with a quality of movement that will encourage our bodies to be shaped into feeling grounded and earthy. As I’ve done in autumns paste, we’ll be putting a single yoga sequence on repeat for six weeks, from November through the Winter Solstice. The simplicity and repetition are medicine for the complexity and overwhelm in our lives right now; it’s also an opportunity to actually be present with the movement inside the movement, the creative force silently, invisibly shaping your form through its desire to live.
Learning any new movement—ballet or yoga asana or parenthood—is always clumsy and intense at first. So much attention goes into the “steps,” how to do them (and how not to do them), and remembering what comes next. But at a certain point, with repetition and practice, those technicalities are mastered by the intelligence of the body, leaving the conscious mind to occupy another territory. The body moves without being told to do so by the brain. I’ve been in plenty of classes where my body, somehow, performed the steps while my mind spiraled out into any number of worries and distractions. This dual-tasking is a gift—it helps us get through hard times, and execute necessary tasks while we attend to bigger matters. And, when we have the chance, that same relationship between our body-mind and our thinking-mind can take us into a much deeper state of being than our mere movements portray. This is what we see in a great dancer on stage—not only their technique, but the dance moving through their steps; the dance that is their art but also something much more. It’s also what we see in someone who is moving through life in a way that makes their spirit radiate; there’s a poise, a confidence, a refusal to rush because they know where they are is right, and where they’re going will wait. You don’t need training or expertise to see this in others. It’s the love story we’re all living; it’s what we recognize in ourselves because we’ve been similarly moved, or because we know its absence and feel the stillness like grief.
Putting ourselves in situations where we can be moved as such by prāṇa, and live as instruments of a greater power, is the direction in which we should all be heading. If you trust that feeling, you can’t make a wrong move. On this path, the identity expressed in movement isn’t our small-s self—our job title or preferred exercise routine or posture; it’s the big-S Self that has movement as its birthright, its calling. I am, therefore I move.
*
Sometime last spring, the part of my Self that fell in love with ballet couldn’t be held back anymore. I dug out my shoes and tights and started taking a beginner class. After the first one, my inner thighs never felt so sore, and I worried I’d made a huge mistake by reintroducing patterns that I’d spent over ten years undoing; that I’d stumbled back onto the wrong path. But even as I muddled through the steps, I felt that my body knew more than my brain. We hadn’t forgotten the dance that moves us into life.
I don’t expect to ever be proficient at ballet, or perform on stage as I once dreamed; what I have is much better. It’s a relationship that ignites a spark in all my other movements—the sun salutations that feel more like barre work; the tendus I do while waiting for the train; the eight-counts that steady my mind like a mantra; the decisions I make for work or socializing so I can go to class as often as I can (and afford to). It’s a form of movement in which I undoubtedly recognize, through feeling and through consciousness, my Self.
At this cross-quarter festival of Samhain, which begins at the seam between October and November, we mark both “summer’s end” and the “thinning of the veils”—a time when the gross, juicy, pungent fruits and blooms of summer have fallen away, and what’s left is an open portal into subtlety. Along with the other festivals that come around this time of year, Samhain has an association with death; the spirits we expect to access are those of the deceased, our ancestors. Communing with these stabilizing forces in our lives, the anchors that have our back as the winds of vāta threaten to knock us over, is essential; this season in which they’re perhaps more accessible, rare.
And, I invite us all to incorporate into Samhain, and the rest of the season, an engagement with the subtlety that is alive in us now. We—our breathing, moving, longing Selves—are our ancestors’ legacy; not a static memory or a decaying artifact. We do not need to leave our bodies to become spirit. We have an obligation to live as spirit, with every step.
I like to hope this is what my teacher saw in my inner thighs that day at the barre. Not a body being sculpted into an ideal. But a spirit being moved into its expansiveness.
