A Clear Heart

I just started taking dance lessons again. Since I first saw the movie “Shall we dance,” the Japanese original, I fell in love with dancing and I actually did take dancing lessons a few times before now but then I fell away from it.

One of the things I love about dance is that it is a chance to do something with someone else and to move beautifully together. Most of the physical arts that I practice are solo ones, Tai Ji, yoga and so the chance to move beautifully with someone else, well, that’s what I hope my marriage to be like and I often thought I would like to ask my wife-to-be not “Would you marry me?” but “Would you dance with me?”

As I said, I’ve taken dance lessons a few times and now I have a new teacher and I find myself really enjoying being a student again. It’s difficult, he pushes me a lot and I’m learning to move my body in new ways but it feels wonderful though my calves have been sore for days. And if any of you watch Entourage, my suggestion for bigger calves, take dancing lessons. Anyway, one of the first questions my teacher asked me, did I want to compete or dance for pleasure?

What the heck, I might as well compete, to see if I can be the best I can be with a partner, to see if we can be the best we can be. And even in my first lesson, learning how to do a Rhumba walk, my teacher asked me what I thought I was doing. I obviously wasn’t doing what he wanted me to. But then he said, “Have a clear heart; Know what you are doing and Do it.”

And so I did.

I lengthened myself up away from the earth, lifted my chin just a little, and held my shoulders square to the front as my legs and hips moved beneath me.

I still had a lot to learn but at least I was doing what I was doing with a clear heart, if you like with attitude and energy, all of my body and mind devoted to one task, walking to music. I was a dancer and I was dancing.

Watching dancers, trying to catch the details, the essence of their movement, sometimes it strikes me that they move like cats. Every part of their body is alive, even the parts that aren’t moving, like they are radiating out from the center of the earth and at the same time radiating outwards from their own center, and all of that radiance coming out at their fingers and toes so that their whole body is alive.
And that’s why as dancers we need a clear heart, to know what we are doing in our heart clearly so that the radiance from our heart can fill our entire body.
Less poetically, when we know what we are doing we can lead the rest of our body into doing it.