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On Purpose: Our Blog

Building a Relationship with Body

9/20/2018

 
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By Emily Freebairn

Before Nia, dancing made me uncomfortable. I was awkward and vulnerable on the dance floor, and sure that no matter what I was doing it looked wrong somehow. There didn’t seem a point to purposely displaying myself for other people to make fun of.

Fortunately for me, that’s not what dancing is. And Nia taught me that.


The first time I went to a Nia class, I was bewildered. I didn’t know what the different moves were, and the language was funny and seemed too woo-woo.  The floor was “ground”, and “earth”, and how on earth was I supposed to smell the moment? But even while my mind was picking holes and looking for reasons not to come back, my body was experiencing something new and treasured for the first time. I left that class feeling elated in a way I hadn’t in a long time - a buzz throughout my entire being that made me feel like I could do anything. I immediately knew I had to come back.

At the same time, I had no previous frame of reference for this wild joy that left me skipping out of class. I’d heard “endorphins make you happy”, but I’d exercised before and hated it. I’d danced before and at best I’d been relieved no one had outwardly laughed at me. How was Nia so different?

Before Nia, I thought of my body as a tool - something that did what I told it to do the same way every time. I didn’t listen to my body because exercising was painful. Nia’s concept of “Your Body’s Way” - the idea that my body was different from day to day - was a quiet revelation to me. It made me curious about my body. Instead of a tool, my body was fluid, changing moment to moment. A kick one day might feel fantastic; the next class my hip might be sore. Of course I needed to pay attention to my body - how else was I supposed to know what it could do?

In Nia, there’s a give and take. Every time the teacher says “sense your ____” is an opportunity to check in with my body and sense where it wants to move, what parts are stuck and need some extra love. I learn to get out of my head and trust that my body’s experiences are valid.  No judgement, no stories about how I’m getting older, my desk job is finally getting to me. Just acceptance, and a growing awareness of my body’s sensations. My body has a voice, and I need to listen to know what is needed. Nia helps remind me I’m not a floating brain case - living is a full body experience.

During my White Belt, my trainer Jill Pagano called the body sacred, where sacred is defined as “being entirely devoted to something”.

My body is sacred, because it exists solely for me.

It is the filter through which I experience everything. My body knows things in a way my mind can’t articulate, and when I listen, and dance, I learn. Nia has helped me deepen my relationship with my body and broadened my experiences of body, emotion, and imagination. My body is an integral part of my life. I cherish the times I get to explore it and understand it more fully.


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Emily Freebairn is a writer, programming engineer and a Nia White Belt.

Turning Into More: How Nia Crafts Living Into Art

9/13/2018

 
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By Melanie

One of the stories I love to tell people when they ask about Nia is that when I took my first class, I couldn’t turn.

This surprised me. In Nia, we move through a turn based on the energy of Aikido, inviting in ease and stability in the base and coaxing forth mobility from the hip joints. If one is experiencing tightness through the hips - which can be common among people going through emotional difficulty - turning can be difficult. For me, in that introduction to Nia, it was impossible.

It’s one of the reasons that, after class, I went home and had a cathartic ugly cry in my shower.

It’s not the only reason, let’s be clear. My life at that time – this is a decade ago – might as well have been a broken glass bowl.

Here’s what I mean by that: Imagine you’ve created this perfect vessel. It is symmetrical, elegant, shiny. You display it proudly in your hands. Onlookers admire it.

And then a random event/object/elemental burst/whatever, you name it, hits you and knocks you off balance. The vessel you worked so very hard to create, to perfect, tumbles out of your hands and shatters at your feet. The sonic burst of its destruction rips the air with a high-pitched and cruelly clumsy “clang!” that may sing in your memory for months, for years.

What do you do? Do you sweep it up and start over, as much as the loss may break your heart?

I did not do that. Nope! I tried to piece my beautiful life back together just the way it was. I tried to reconstruct the impossibly devastated with inadequate tools, tried to remake the vessel out of its splinters with child-friendly paste and gum and fraying recycled thread.

To borrow a line from one of my favorite TV series, I tried to make burnt toast bread again.

That is a recipe for disappointment and frustration and depression. And, yes, anger.

What does this have to do with Nia? Simple – that class provided the first tool in what became a growing box of them. I decided I wanted to turn, because I used to be able to dance.

I saw other people turning. Why couldn't I?  I signed up for more classes to find the answer which ultimately was, "Oh yeah - I can. I just needed to figure out how, again."

This leads me to another story I tell people who ask me about Nia, and specifically whether they can do it. “I’d love to dance, but I can’t, is that a problem?” That's a popular one. (And no, it's not a problem. Nia is, in fact, terrific for people who think they can't dance.)

Another is “I haven’t exercised in forever!”  I understand. Neither had I, when I first came to the practice, when I couldn't turn. I was out  of breath. I kept dancing. I felt better, stronger, more energetic. Positive, for once.

Then I decided to take the White Belt Training and, wow. That gave me a whole new set of tools.

I tell people, the fact that I teach Nia is evidence that anyone can do this.

Nia is a tool for discovering a new relationship with our bodies, and with wellness. Not only that, it provides lessons in living and communicating better and turning into the next step of newness, into more than what was.

I teach because I love sharing that joy and adventure, and I love being surprised and amazed and yes, at times befuddled and even frustrated, at the movement presented in new routines.

I teach Nia and take classes from other Nia teachers because it is a sustainable practice, one that I know I can and will play with and learn from for the rest of my life.

I can turn now. I love turning, which is one of the reasons I’m loving my return to the routine Birth this week. There’s a lot of turning in Birth, including turns in low plane that I couldn’t execute when I first taught it in a gym some years ago.

There are also strengthening opportunities in FloorPlay that I can enjoy now that I couldn’t do a few years ago – again, as a teacher. I lacked the strength and the coordination back then.

But I kept going. I persisted. Oh yes I did.

It brings me joy to say that I am physically stronger now thanks to the lessons within this practice.  Even more joyfully, I can say that I now know building upon that sensation is always possible.

There is always opportunity to turn into more.

In the process of connecting more deeply with Nia, I’ve constructed a new vessel that is my life.

The vessel is not unbreakable; the impermanence of existence makes that impossible.

But it is malleable. It leaves room for change, a constant. It can take on different shapes. It has the capacity to grow larger, hold countless new ideas, to float through explorations of the realms of mind, body, emotion and spirit.

We can all turn, in our own way. We all have these tools in our hands.

What beautiful vessels will you create for yourself and your life? I can’t wait to see.

Want to know more about Nia? Join us for our Intro to Nia class on Friday, September 21 at 6 p.m.

Ready for a deeper dive into the practice? Sign up for a White Belt Intensive with trainer Britta Von Tagen.

Anger, and The Yin & The Yang

9/6/2018

 
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By Christina Kemp

“Harmonizing opposites by going back to their source is the distinctive quality of the Zen Way: Embracing contradictions, making a synthesis of them, achieving balance.”   -- Taisen Deshimaru  

Awareness of our motion with universal forces has ancient roots.  Reflected in the world of form as much as the inner lives we lead, there is deep wisdom within the insight that light and dark co-exist more than oppose.  The symbolic interdependence is vast; just as night cannot exist without day upon an earthly plane, the solid, structural elements of our bodies interact with the fluidic to encompass the whole; all of which is reflected in an echoing of our interior, emotional worlds, the interplay between our conscious and unconscious lives.

Interdependence over opposition lends itself to the creation of something altogether greater and more encompassing than any one singular force could illuminate on its own.  One of the less fortunate aspects of the human mind is its temptation to settle into bifurcation, as is often the case when we find ourselves enduring spiritual and emotional fatigue.  Polarizing ideas about seemingly “opposing” forces, pitting themselves against the other, dim our capacity for greater growth. Overly simplistic definitions are more akin to the pursuit of disconnected forms of “knowledge” than the combinative grounding and openly curious that is held within more integrated, sometimes elusive, experiences of life.

Without the understanding of interdependence, elements that are meant to intermingle become split off and imbalanced.  Singularity at the expense of what is often a more complex whole is misleading.  We have perhaps become accustomed to an imbalance in this sense, reflected in our inner, interpersonal, and collective lives.

Yin and Yang are two interwoven elements meant to dance in harmony with one another; never really, in truth, existing one without the other.  Each are both distinctive and overlapping; interdependent in their connection to one another, creating something greater than mere the sum of their parts.  They are an embodied whole.

Their interplay is often reflected beautifully in the realm of emotionality, and our bodies.  While a single emotion or emotional state may emerge, it is the balancing forces of the interplay of the strength and softness that stems from Yin and Yang energies which stewards our process of engagement, and embodiment. The dynamic of these elements will have as much to do with how our emotional expression is played out, as with how we move; just as it does with whether those gestures motion toward healing or destruction.  

One of the more damaged emotional states we as a collective have been struggling with surrounds our relationship with anger.  Our interaction with this element of our lives has been on a course that continually misuses, misunderstands, and expresses itself in more perverted forms.  It has been heavily involved in the motion of our collective imbalance; mirrored in our intrapsychic and interpersonal lives, and our bodies.    

Everything we experience is meant for engagement and expressivity.  When we have lost touch with genuine engagement, our expressions exemplify more woundedness -- and wounding -- than actual healing.  Perhaps this stems from the perpetual dismissiveness that results from the polarization and splitting of “good” and “bad” feelings, for which we have collectively become so accustomed.  It has led to incredible damage; avoidance, repression, eruption, pathology, illness.  Our understanding of what it means to interact with our state with balancing interconnectivity has become veiled, and separated.  

When we think of the impact Yin and Yang have with our emotional states, we can see the balance that will result when these two elements inherently interact, and that their ongoing interconnectivity is perhaps deeply crucial to whether our expression is healing or wounding.  Their symbolism is illuminating. Where we require gentleness, softness, and fluidity, the “femininity” of Yin nurtures the boundless waters within us.  Where we require boundarying of our minds, spirits and bodies, strength and structure, Yang supports us in its outwardly expressive, “masculine” nature.


Yin is inward, deepening, the moon, unconscious.  Yang is precise, agile, conscious, the sun.

It is worth considering whether our collective misuse of anger has to do with the offsetting interactions of the imbalances we experience with regard to these interdependent energies.   While anger is often a response to a varying themes -- a hovering above and avoidance of rawness of feeling, grief, sadness, violations of our boundaries, lack of perpetual and ongoing maturation over the life course -- the feeling itself is not the problem.  We have become so accustomed to its perverted forms of expression, and imbalances, that we have in fact dismissed and invalidated the experience altogether.

People need to feel safe in order to express their tenderness.   We require grounding and centeredness in order to express our anger well.

Anger in the hands of imbalanced properties of Yin and Yang will express itself differently.  Lack of boundaries in fact exists on both ends of the spectrum, but the origin of the imbalance will lend itself toward different forms of this expression.   On one end, a lack of boundaries will ensue through passivity, repression, lacking connection to feeling.  This is an overuse of Yin.  On the other, it is perhaps more a lack of containment that constitutes the over-mechanization of Yang -- strength becomes aggression, overpowerment, a lashing out.  Both are wounded in their disconnection to one another.

Whether we embody it or not, we are constantly seeking balance; whether we attempt to split elements off from one another or integrate them, the elements themselves are always in dance with each other.  It is how this dance plays out that illuminates the underlying interaction.  So where there is an overuse of Yin, there will eventually be an inevitable over-activation of Yang.  

At some time or another, our emotions and bodies find a way to compensate.  Hyper-reactivity, heightened aggression, violence, and harm will often attempt to re-balance what was previously a passivity that lent itself to a lack of strength and expression, because the interplay between gentleness and strength within the expression of ourselves is always in motion.   It’s interesting to note that some of the most seemingly “gentle” individuals are often, on some plane, the most violent, and enraged. Similarly, some of the most violent are in fact the most sensitive. Both of these variations of expression exist intrapsychically, as much as relationally. 
Tenderness without the accompaniment of strength results in too much openness and passivity, and the violation of boundaries tends to increase anger, and rage.  Compensatory balancing ensues...

Yin and Yang are different petals of the same flower, and they both share the qualities of strength and softness.  In fact, it takes great grounding strength to be soft and fluid in our movement, and we cannot blend power and precision together without an inherent understanding of where to let go.

Whatever we experience -- joy, grief, anger, or any other emotion -- it is not meant for dismissal or stagnation, but motioning and movement, safe containment, and honest engagement.  Yin and Yang manifest in our spiritual and emotional lives, our bodies, and our relationships with ourselves, each other, and the greater whole, as they ebb and flow -- oscillating from balance to imbalance, over time.   It is easily forgotten, but important to remember: remaining in balance requires us to motion out of it for a time, in order to form a newness of ground, and the rebirthing of new integration, growth and creativity.  We step out of balance, and find our way back again; over, and over, and over…

   

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About the author: Christina Kemp has a deep heart for embodied movement, healing, dancing and writing, and enjoys integrating these within her own personal work and various teaching platforms.  She holds a Master of Arts in Psychology.

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  • Move2Center
    • Our Classes
    • On Purpose: Our Blog
    • About Move2Center >
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      • What Is Nia?
  • Purchase a Pass
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