My dearest friend and a dozen or so of her friends from across Western Canada have welcomed me into their Saturday morning 5Rhythms group. Early every Saturday morning, via an online video call platform, we get together to move to music. My friend comes up with a 20-25 minute playlist of 5 songs of different types -- Flowing, Staccato, Chaos, Lyrical, and Stillness, and we enjoy embodying the songs by moving to them in different ways. The rhythms themselves form a wave that peaks with high activity in the middle (chaos) and comes back to stillness, a quiet and contemplative state. We conclude with silent meditation for ten minutes. Moving and meditating with the ladies never fails to touch me deeply.
The dancing part of our time together reminds me of when I was small, and my mom would play music in our living room. We had a really colourful rug, and I remember pretending it was magical, and that it gave me the power to be a great interpretive dancer, graceful and strong, and I would perform for adoring crowds in my mind, often with my sisters. For some reason, the songs that come to mind are Puppet on a String (chaos?) by Paul Mauriat and his orchestra (see below), followed by their version of Love is Blue (lyrical?). I suspect we asked Mom to play that record over and over and one song just followed the other.
The meditative part of our 5Rhythms time together is powerful too... just having a sense that we are all joined together in silence -- opening ourselves to quiet and peace -- somehow bonds us together even though many of us are strangers to each other.
As a practitioner of centering prayer most days, I have regular opportunities for quiet and peace -- it's the dance that I find I really need. In moving to music, I hear it in a different way because it is embellished with my own physicality. Dancing enriches the music experience, even though I'm not trained as a dancer and often feel a bit awkward in my movement. If a song has lyrics, those words find a deeper meaning somehow. If it is instrumental, the beauty of a certain instrument or the piece as a whole may resonate more deeply within me. Movement becomes a different form of active meditation as my body and mind work together to create a physical representation of something almost intangible. And that physical representation fills me with endorphins and probably other healthy neurological things I don't know about that combat stress and anxiety and are good for me, body and soul.
So the next time a piece of music catches your attention and you're able to move, why not dance? And invite those around you to dance with you! Life is too short to worry about how awkward we look or who might be laughing... and in my experience, often those who laugh wish they could lose their inhibitions long enough to join in.
If you find you're taking life too seriously, dance is one way to lighten things up! Here's the light-hearted Puppet on a String. If you don't want to get up and dance right now, just let your hands be the puppeteer... and have a happy day!
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