My Dance Meditation practice is a diary. It isn't written on paper or in bytes but in marks noted daily in my flesh.

I go into my dance room in the morning. It is an ordinary room without furniture. A pile of cushions leans against one wall and a Persian carpet, rich with soft reds and blues, sprawls in the center. I look briefly at the clock. Most of the time I don't even register what it says consciously because it is early morning and I'm still half asleep and running on habit. Then I begin and something different happens every time.

This morning I lie still on a soft mat. No music. Just cool air leaking under the barely opened sash. With closed eyes I watch myself from inside. My hip sockets, pelvis and thigh bones look like a skewed metal contraption. I breathe. There is little internal motion but I wait as a pointer waits, nose to the scent. I try not to expect or want anything. I see my breath slowing. After a while the metal softens into a warm shade, not earthy or woody but no longer steel gray. And the bones shift into a less compressed alignment. I feel a faint release in the sacrum. Then vermillions, indigos and lapis seep in like water and my lungs unfurl into a sigh. Viewed from outside, I am still still. My inner gaze glides to my neck and skull. The cranial bones ease themselves slightly, crucially. A barely noticeable pressure gives way. All at once a dragon of a stretch roars from feet up to head and subsides, despositing me unwound on the floor. My colors sink into the colors of the carpet, bleeding together like damp Indian print dresses.

Yesterday I passed over the dune path to the beach. Down by the lapping waves my arms began to move in swirling motions, hips rotating, my face and torso eating huge space, swallowing westerly wind. My toes burrowed into the sand. I remembered Isak Dinesen's saying, "The cure for anything is salt water - sweat, tears or the sea." Pain, peace and joy flashed through me - waves of feeling I have always understood to be me. In between the known sensations were unknown sensations, touching down like space aliens - sensations I didn't know were me. And then there was no me, only a slice of conscious experience.

Tomorrow something else will happen.

Of course it wasn't like this at first. At first I went to ballet class every day for twenty years or so. And we did approximately the same thing each day. I didn't have to think of what music to play or what to do next because the teacher did it all. I just focused on the task being doled out. Then I went to sufi workshops for fifteen years or so and had, in appearance, a similar experience. The regularity was the same. The instructional structure was the same but with wildly different content and result. Both experiences have taught me to go into my dance room every day. Ballet taught me to direct my actions. Sufism taught me to surrender and be moved by that which is all-pervasively subtle. Through them I see that a personal practice is partly about perseverance and consistency, and partly about content. Now my practice reveals an infinite array of impulses between the poles of directed movement and surrendered movement. I incorporate an ever-widening diversity into my arsenal of moving self-connections. This development would remain undiscovered, however, if I did not enter the room and begin.

A small frame

Each morning practice is a small picture frame placed at about eye level, or third eye level, or some days at belly button level. I look into an empty frame. I step in - Alice through the looking glass - and the stream of me unfolds, curls, explodes.

These frames placed side by side, day by day, form a movie of embodiment. In the continuum I murmur, "I am changing again..." Thoughts become very loose and light because I see, over and over, again that they come and go. They are nothing much - zephyrs, whispers. My thought-delineated identity has the feel of a flowered cotton curtain that's been hanging in the sun so long it is faded and threadbare. Now passing flies knock holes in it. Obstacles dwindle and there's the beauty. The wide pleasure.