Sometimes you have a story in you.  Your experience sits in you, pulling words around it, gluing them together with emotion.  Stretching them apart with dialog, reordering them with reason and then muddling the reason with whatever it is beating through your heart, making the story chaotic and gray and lively and beautiful and painful.  You live the story every day, but you can’t find the right words for it or figure out what the next chapter should be.

I know, because I had such a story in me.  I wrote and wrote.  I shared some of what I wrote with everyone, some with just with a few people. Some I couldn’t share (yet), because as open as I am, there’s this carefully built wall, precisely positioned to protect that soft beating muscle in my chest.  But I kept writing, hoping to see the story, to understand it, be strong with it; hoping to discover how to write it and how to live it.

But, the writing didn’t work.

There were too many dimensions to capture, at least for my novice fluency with words.  I couldn’t do justice to what I was feeling –not the power, the pain, the love, the courage, the confusion, the tears, the smiles, the clarity. I was exhausted as I purged the best words I could out of me; but, exhausted, I still had this story in my heart.

So what exactly do you do when you have a story to tell but words can’t tell the story? What do you do when you know you need strength and grace to forge forward, but you don’t know where it will come from? Because all your strength and all your grace has been drained away as you lay your heart naked with vulnerability.

I decided I needed to dance.

I love to dance, but have never danced before. Not really. I’ve never taken a lesson beyond the age of 7, I’ve never danced in a structured way. (I can’t overstate this – I Am Not A Trained Dancer, even if in my head I was in a different life.)  I’ve certainly never put my emotions to movement, which sounds simple and soft and subtle, but isn’t.  But, with this story inside me, I found myself wanting to learn to dance as well as wrap myself around the story.  Not just move left when a teacher moves left, move right when they move right.  But have my soul Speak through my body.  So, I asked this Magician I know – this Magic Storyteller, this Soul Interpreter, this Spirit Animal, this Emotional Fuse – to help me.  Together, we listened to a song that made me cry every time I heard it. She heard all the layers of the song and, more importantly, she watched me listen.  She saw the lyrics that touched me even when I thought I was hiding pain and love behind my eyes.  She saw when I closed my eyes, when I took a breath, when my face surrendered. She took this and gave my story movements.

Of course, first, patiently, she needed to give me some foundation, because this song I chose isn’t an easy one to dance to. (Note, that I would have needed foundation even with an easy song. But, foolishly, I always like to dive deep.)  She taught me movement and grooves and let me wrap my body around it in my own time …. and it took me quite a bit of time sometimes! (Countless late nights in front of my mirror at home.) It took me two classes to just learn to walk forward gracefully (oddly, I was a natural at walking backwards); I’d conquer two quick moves and she’d throw a third slow one in and my body would forget everything. I had to learn to point my toes and soften my hands; my hips always did the opposite of what she and I both expected them to do.  Her work was cut out for her. Laughter and determination filled the early moments.  Beautifully, however, she also absorbed the emotion that came out during the lessons and wove it into the choreography that would bring the song I chose to life. As she built my Body’s Story, I cried many times.  The moves she constructed said more than my words ever could, vibrating deep in my heart where I felt most exposed.

But the goal wasn’t just for her to create choreography for me; it was for me to do it.  To conquer it physically and emotionally; to own it, even with other’s eyes on me.  To tell this story and take this step, I had to learn details and contradictions.  I had to learn how to fall, how to collapse.  To let my chest cave in at the weight of love; to be heavy. To step forward from the heaviness, right away, and look up and still shine bright.  I had to look away, to walk away, but be willing to turn back around, to look my story directly in the eye.  I learned that small steps can be powerful. Sadness and happiness can be just two beats apart.  I learned angles are critical, the ones we have and the ones we create.  I learned that small details can store beauty, even if only for a long breath. I learned I can settle into a feeling without sinking into it.  I can experience a rhythm without staying in it. I can dance to a lyric when it feels right and move to the backbeat whenever it pulls me.  I can keep moving, keep going.  I can conquer, sometimes, by surrendering.  The surrender is a sacrifice and a gift.  The surrender comes from my eyes and fingertips and the point of a toe.  I can curl my fingers one at a time around pain, and I can still open my palms up to the sun.  I can be vulnerable and confident, strong and soft.  I learned that timing is everything. I learned that I can be in the moment. I learned that you can love and still walk away; you can acknowledge magic, and still walk away.  Walking away, sometimes, honors the love and magic and beauty of it all. I learned that if you acknowledge vulnerability and step into it, you can own your movement and your story. I learned that energy carries on even when the song is over.

This Soul Curator thinks she is simply teaching me to dance, slightly (leaps and bounds) more gracefully and uninhibited than I was able to before.  This Movement Goddess knows she is giving my heart another dimension to express itself. But she does not realize (until I tell her) that the details of my fingertips, the point of my toe, the bend of my knee, the surrender of my chest, the gaze of my eyes, the sinking of my hips, the rhythm of the backbeat, the safety I feel in her presence as I spin and glide and step and, even, cry – this empowers me.  The owning of this story with my whole body, every day, as I surrendered my power and claim my vulnerability is a gift.  It is strength that does not disappear when the song is over, the dance is done, the video faded out, and the stage exited.  It, thankfully, lives on.

How immensely grateful I am to have found, with the help of this Beautiful Magic Soul, the truest part of myself and danced with it.

#KarmaRainesChoreo