Inner Healing through Belly Dance

It’s been a lovely day. I started with – if not reconnecting with some people – at least getting a few more of those names into my ACT! contact management database, AND my MS Outlook contact cards, so that – when the time comes – I CAN connect with them. Lovely feeling.

I’ve done a lot of preps for the very technical course I’ll be teaching at one of the local universities this fall.

And, because my mind needed something “real” – not just the latest techno-story, but something with a bit of meat – I did some physics. At least identified some articles that were VERY interesting, and did the quickest of little write-ups on a few of them – more just annotating bookmarks than anything else.

And then I went for a walk.

Lovely, almost cool early summer evening. The birds had started singing before 5AM (I was up well before then), and here it was well after eight – and the sky was still light. How I love this season! And just a few days now until solstice – the maximal energy point of the year. I can feel it, and love this time.

But during the walk, something started happening. Actually, it had begun before I left the house.

I was beginning to feel things — lots of emotional “churn” was coming up. Feelings of sadness, of loneliness, of needing to connect, and of loss. Of remembering people who had died, and with whom I could no longer connect – or not so easily. And feeling the “pain” factor that is the flip side of being highly creative, and needing intensely focused time in order to create. That is the loneliness of these moments.

And it just so happened that there was no one of “like mind” to whom I could turn.

And so, during the walk, it started to happen. Some music came into me — I was “dancing” in my mind as I walked down the street. I came home, put the music on, and started some improv. Yes, there were some choreography fragments that I’d learned in a workshop – about a year ago at this time. But the music had a lot of “heart-swelling” types of movements embedded in it.

In fact, the music was very “heart-oriented,” with a subdued “dub-dub,” “dub-dub.”

And it was that feeling that I started connecting with during dance.

I used the dance to open my diaphragm, to open my shoulders and pecs (which had become very constricted during all the computer work of the day), and to feel.

And tomorrow, I hope to again do the same.