The Elephant: Reflection for week 6

It's hard to come in quiet when you're about to do the talking, especially in the beginning when you don't know what's up w the student's body on this particular day, and quite possibly they don't either.

I'm having a hard time with the concept of holding an intention, especially one that may be unrelated to the person in front of me, waiting for guidance about how to be in their body, or where their bodies should be in space. If we are there for different reasons, how do I know where to begin the journey of that class and which arc will provide the questions they want to be asked?

As I come up against places where the student and I veer off in different directions or I'm moving forward and they seem left behind or stuck - I'm finding I need better questions I can ask to figure out what threads got lost and possibly a more accessible way of weaving our experience back together.

I did learn this past week that providing moments of physical resistance, or subtle selective pressure was really helpful to not only guide a student's attention inward when nothing was clear, but also in illuminating the pathways of movement they were taking. It was really interesting to see a kind of crystallization of the idea of agency into something they could feel and clearly delineate in their own bodies.

The shifting of tactics/stories I'm telling are kind of graceless and abrupt at the moment, but I feel like each shift is a broadening of both my awareness and the information I had received in the moments before it, as well as a letting go of preconceived plans to allow the needs of the moment to call the questions and knowledge out of me.

anyway my dear little phoenix, feel better soon and try not to have so many regrets

invaded. i feel deeply hostile and invaded that my tool for accessing the collective, my creative discussion with myself that i have used to define my writing style and direct a professional body to consider my writing as a skill set i have to offer has somehow been misunderstood for some tortured desperate plea for a hero, in the shape of a figure i exorcized years ago.

Awareness. it begins with self awareness, a most elusive creature. the fabric of the universe has fallen into a most compelling pattern, bringing the sewage to the surface, laid bare and unapologetic before all of us. these times are not for the fragile hearted, and i hope the country comes out scrubbed clean of delusions and more sure of our priorities. love is not enough to sustain us. it can fill us and invigorate us, give us purpose and passion and joy, but its very existence demands a glaring awareness that when it is gone we will be empty, bare, less than we were before we knew it. so we hoard it. we try to bottle it up for a rainy day, build a fortress of jealousy and questions to protect it from an atomic blast of reality, and in doing so, like a flame, we take away the very oxygen it thrives on - spontaneity, freedom, lightness of being.

i always knew my past would bubble up and threaten to eat away at my sense of wholeness. I have been stocking up for that time, building an elaborate defense against a villian and a vanity that i barely remember. similarly, in love, i found the minute i stumbled gracelessly and passionatley upon it, i began the terrified countdown for when it would eventually eradicate my sense of self, and with that , my existence.

i believe this is a love letter. the love letter of a cynic.

i don't believe in forever, words that made me cringe when they fell so easily from her perfect, unappreciated lips. i know forever is a joke, a ploy, a simplistic human creation to hopelessly define the smallness of our existence in the universe... but quixotically i fathom the intensity of my passion in that same term; something i feel i could never find a match in, the depth and breadth of my emotional commitment. part of me can see the dance of our souls and see her for what she truly is: my soulmate in so complete a form that lifetimes and human lovers and simple words will never have the capacity to define. that part of myself knows no fear, and has unending faith in the truth of that fact... but some deep unapproachable, illogical part of myself that i have refused to acknowledge reacts to the reality of my humanity in so sharp and fast and painful a voice, i am helpless to the tidal wave of my hideously human emotions like a thing possessed. jekyll and hyde must have been written by a similar soul.

i've been caught in a psychological mirror for the first time in my life, presented with the reality of who and what the world was seeing... what the love i had so vehemently protected... i finally saw the fortress of my love for the cage it had become. i exstinguished the flame by which i was trying so desperately to see by, and the voice of an equally strong and powerful woman fell deaf on my ears. i didn't know i lost the light, because i was blind.

so maybe the mirror was there the entire time... but what good is a mirror to the visually impaired? what good is words of love or hate to a person who cannot hear?

that elaborate fortress has served me no purpose. i sit here broken and empty not from a lack of love, since i had long since lost it, but broken from what i finally saw when i opened my eyes and gaped in horror at the reality of my fears manifested. like an alcoholic in a 12 step program, i want to reach out and ask forgiveness to those who were swept up in the deluge of my obsessive, controlling destructive love, more powerful as its own entity than i could ever have guessed. i have somehow missed that this romantic misanthropic beast had filled my form and consumed all of my relationships, its hunger and greed deeper than an uncharted ocean, fathomless. it seems everything i touch crumbles away, receding like a nightmare, like light from the day, turning into night horrors as the words fell from my lips.

i have met the beast finally. the doppleganger that robbed me of my joy, and consumed the love that filled me like oxygen. for fear of unleashing the monstrosity of my fear and jealousy, all i can do is walk away. walk slow and steady, ignoring the ache in my soul that i left with her. i can't look back or i'll lose my nerve.

all i can say is that i did it out of love. for love.

still love.

forever.

a throne fit for a tyrant, a lost soul, a woman-child.

i feel a little like alice almost everywhere i go, but at this stage of the game i feel like i'm looking into a slightly warped mirror, where all the aspects of my schooling that were so rigorous and seriously approached, are still earnestly being sought, but by people with a slightly skewed aesthetic. i can't tell if it's comical or scary, but along with the shock of my personal life enfolding viciously on itself, i find this skewed viewpoint wherever i turn, whatever mirror i happen to glance in, warped in so subtle a way it feels like i have no control of any of the elements around me. falling, as it were, tumbling head over heels into my own rabbit hole, my personal version of hell, where i have been given responsibility like a poorly beaded necklace, and have merely tangled and broken the string that held the pieces of myself, and the aspects of my world around me in some vaguely organized capacity.

this is my life now.

on the floor of my soul, scrambling around trying to scrape all these lost aspects of myself into some cohesive place of organization and prioritizing.

somewhere there's my fancy new degree, trying so hard to feed my body and mind, to be a light in this stupid, blinding darkness. but that is not all of me. that is not even half of me. my creative expression isn't simply bound by the context of my fancy art education, and my skills are much broader than that curriculum implies. i open the windows and sing like a fucking disney princess as a way of calming my soul, i model cause my body has a rough strong grace and fluidity that always craved the freedom and control of dance. i write with a fierce coyness, and make sharp stinging points, but where do i go to entertain those atrophied parts of myself?

after four years of college, i have to find them all, express them all. and like any body part that falls asleep and is slapped back to life, it hurts. i am more than just my degree. i am me with or without it. i am more than my looks, i am more than my fears. i am not just part of a human being. somewhere, at sometime, i was a whole one.