Behaviour & Movement Part 2

My responses were typical. I would stumble, and I would fall. I ran out of things to do, but the time kept counting. I wasn’t allowed to stop and give up. I would lose coordination. Mentally, I got pissed. I was embarrassed. What a stupid assignment! Why am I doing this? I can fly through the air in any position and here I am doing something stupid with everyone watching. I questioned why I was even in school. I decided that I was wasting student loan money and my teacher was an idiot who obviously had a vendetta against me and that all of this was a big waste of time.

Then, just like that, the gibberish in my head silenced. Having gotten through all of the useless questions in my brain, the real question remained. So I hated moving backwards. So what. Why? What am I scared of? My mind flooded. Scared of not seeing where I’m going. Scared of falling. Scared of moving away from what’s in front of me. I have a need to go forward towards what I see or want. I’m scared to look stupid. I’m scared of losing control.

Now I had a task. I needed to teach myself something: how to fall, how to have faith in where I was going, and how to let the things in front of me GO. So I made an entire dance that moved backwards and fell. When I was finished, it made me sick to my stomach, but I felt like a different person. I created movement that I never could have concocted in my head. I let my body do the “talking” and ended up finding new ways to cope with gravity and unpredictability.

Now, I can’t even remember how to be afraid of falling (at times, to a fault!) and my faith in the universe at times appears naïve to traditional task-oriented folk. But on the other hand, I now know one of my “triggers:” - control. Whenever I face into a situation and feel inner resistance, I look at my own control issues. Quite often, they are in there messing with the balance of things. So what do I do? I modify my behavior and my verbiage. I also go into the studio, move backwards, fall, let my body give into gravity and sure enough, my mind opens, solutions present themselves, and I’m back feeling more balanced.

Habits and patterns are safe, but they can also be self-limiting. As we investigate the internal and external sources of our fears, let’s not forget the lessons of the body. Just as a single strand of DNA reflects the larger whole of a person, so do the tiny movement patterns we build for ourselves reflect, for instance, - where we hold tension, what we choose to see, and how we choose to occupy space in this lifetime. We all know the saying, “you can’t see the forest for the trees.” But I also will attest—especially when dealing with fear—that we often can’t see the trees because we’re busy looking at the forest.

- Laura Everling