Thinking About Body Image, Form and Movement

Halfway through Tuesday, I'm still riding the dizzying high of this past weekend's adventures with PURE, at the gorgeous Dragon's Egg in Connecticut. (I highly recommend this space, by the way, for workshops, performances, and all around meditative-feeling-goodness.)

We remounted PURE Reflections: Beauty Reimagined, and conducted a workshop in Body Love, leading participants through exercises exploring both positive and negative voices that affect body image -- and inspiring laughter, tears and lots of joyful, unselfconscious dancing.

Towards the end of the workshop, one of the New England dancers remarked that it took a few years of bellydancing -- of seeing women in all shapes, ages and sizes moving beautifully and joyfully -- for her to "get it":

Beauty is not about form, it's about feeling. It's the joy we feel as we dance, or as we watch a dancer embodying and expressing music through movement.

Archetypally, the feminine IS movement.

Think of the waxing and waning moon, never the same from day to day, but still recognized as itself in spite of (or perhaps because of) its mutability.

The feminine knows that the truest image never appears discretely in any static moment; rather the unseen whole emerges over time. If we do not have a developed feminine sensibility, we tend to focus on the moment-to-moment expression of ourselves or others, judging it against a static image of "what should be."

During those moments when we seem to match our ideal image, we may inflate with rapture; but during those moments when we fail, we can just as easily collapse in despair.

If, on the other hand, we can perceive the varying and often contradictory expressions of ourselves and others as parts of a larger whole which we have gleaned over time, then we are less likely to condemn or inflate severely, allowing us to feel whole, healthy and stable as varying images of ourselves are reflected back to us.

But true to its nature, this elusive sensibility can't be taught directly. Words can point the way, and dance classes workshops can provide the forum, but it can only be experienced and developed over days, months and years.