The problem is the belief that what you seek is outside you when it is actually inside you!

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I’ve been expounding a lot lately on letting go. It was an appropriate topic for the end of a long and challenging year. It’s also exceptionally relevant because I’m in the final stages of my dear mother’s life. It’s a topic I’ve been dancing consciously for the last 2.5 years since my mother’s cancer diagnosis, and perhaps unconsciously most of my life.

This occurred to me this morning after reading an email from one of my Vividly Woman Sisters, Marjorie, who I was with in tele- circle lastnight. In the circle I shared about the dance of letting go around my mother. Marjorie also happened to know that when my father died suddenly 31 years ago, I turned to dance to process and heal my grief. In her wisdom, she posed this question to me: “ I am wondering how your dance through the slower loss of your Mother is different than the (what I’m imagining) wilder, more desperate, and energetic dance you danced when your father so unexpectedly died.”

I think that this is a brilliant question and one that inspires much reflection and musing, not only about loss, or dance, but about the art of how we heal and instinctively self soothe.

Indeed, when my father died so very suddenly, my dance was furious and passionate. I danced hard and wild and needed to move my body as if exorcising feelings that I could not express verbally because I didn’t feel safe being vulnerable. I was 16 at the time and norather emotionally distant from my family. Dance was an outlet that allowed me to move the emotions and the spiritual awakenings that were overwhelming me at the time.

Now with this radically different journey, of sitting at my mothers bedside day after day, waiting for precious moments of lucidity, cherishing the opportunities to answer any need that she has whether it’s for food, water or a trip to the rest room, my dance is indeed a very different one.

My ability to express my loss, the awareness of the emotional, the psychological and spiritually distinctive layers, and the courage to share my pain mean that my dance is less of a purging and more of a soothing. Where I flung my pain after my father’s passing, I now flow more evenly with my mother’s journey. The texture of my dance is generally different, Yes. However, with the steady and more gradual letting go of mum, there is more time to ponder and grapple with the bigger questions of life. Instead of a past year review that I am usually doing at this time of the year, I am now doing a life review.

Coming home to Montreal where I was born and raised living until 19 years old, living in my mother’s apartment, and spending lots more time around family of origin than I have in many years while tending to the inescapable reality that I have little time left with mum on this physical plane, has naturally triggered lots of heart and soul reflection. To say that this is weaving its way into my dance is putting it mildly.

What I’m so grateful for in the dance is the chance to give my mind a rest and allow the cellular memory and felt sense truth that I embody (which my thinking mind cannot access), unwind, unravel, dissolve and release when and how it needs to.

Years of facilitating movement, dance and self-reflection for others has allowed me to deepen my understanding of how these modalities dig in and unearth truths that the mind simply cannot. Years of talk therapy can engage the mind and free withheld emotions, while dance and movement give expression at a primal, preverbal level to what is unseen yet very present.

When I don’t dance, I feel crazy. I think that captures it in a nut shell. While crazy is not bad or wrong necessarily, (lots of creative masterpieces were birthed out of its fertile riches) crazy can feel pretty scary and uncomfortable when it persists. I’m all for living out of the box, so crazy can be valuable in small doses, but I like to know that I have the tools to self soothe and the wisdom to use those tools.

The craziness I feel when I don’t dance is born of years and years of devotion to learning how to heal and consciously care for myself, and then not using those tools. That’s crazy!

Take a look around at all the tools you’ve acquired, dig them out, turn up the music, or reach out to a Sister, and use what you have so rightfully earned as the tools in your tools box. You invested yourself in learning them for exactly the moments when you most need them but forget to resource them. And don’t feel alone! We are all guilty of this very thing. When I don’t dance, I feel crazy! And now I also now that when I feel crazy, it’s time to dance!

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