WhAt DoEs It TaKe To MaKe Me LoSe My InHiBiTiOnS aNd DANCE????

For as long as I can remember, my mom would remind me whenever I felt like I was walking through “the valley”, whenever I hit a low point in life, that a person “can’t just stay on the mountaintop forever. Think how boring life would be.” She would add a touch of light-heartedness and a big heaping of hope to encourage me to just keep walking. Move one foot in front of the other when life throws you a curve ball and you feel you’ve descended from the heights and the beautiful sights.

She would remind me that things simply don’t remain; the valley, the peek, sorrow, joy, boredom… Ever changing, ever flowing and sometimes quickly moving, sometimes slowly moving through life.

I was reminded awhile ago by a very great friend of mine that some of us have a hard time being patient. Waiting. If I find myself inside of a situation I don’t want to be in, I get restless. I push and shove and try to force myself onward and upward. And I forget to stop, take a deep breath, look around me. I’m finding out the lessons are sometimes screaming at me to be seen and heard, but I’m so busy trying to get back up the mountainside, I miss the most important and often the most beautiful parts of the experience.

I was thinking earlier how life has this way of whittling away at us. One thing happens that causes us to react a certain way or to go a certain direction. Then another thing. Another thing. Sometimes all those layers end up stripping us down or crushing us. Making us feel like there is nothing left to do but to completely surrender and simply “be”; maybe for a few minutes, or a day or months or years.

I have felt the pain of that chipping away. And I’ve felt as the last little pieces have unstuck themselves from my core being. And in the place of all the disappointments, all the struggles, the terrors and the pain, my inhibitions and the things that served as barriers against a world I don’t understand suddenly, momentarily disappear. And I know what it is to dance in a way that takes me back up the slope and into higher ground.

My Maui sisters recognize the process as “ebb and flow”. The coming in and going out of the tide. It can be breathtakingly beautiful, even though the movement might temporarily cause discomfort.

Losing inhibitions.

Dancing….

“Dance, when you're broken open. Dance, if you've torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you're perfectly free.”

― Rumi