Postcards from Ulysses

    I recently facilitated a workshop which I enjoyed tremendously.  I was blessed by the presence of five fabulous belly dancers.  They inspired me.  They took every bit of straw I gave them and wove it into gold.  Some of the things I saw make splendid examples of the spirit of the Alexander Work.
    One of the things that has come up lately in discussions with two of my most important friends in the Work is what one might call the aesthetics of presence.  This has been an interest of mine ever since I noticed that people sometimes looked poignantly beautiful after getting good Work.  This phenomenon suggests quite clearly that we interfere with our natural beauty.  A reactive, habitual, doing way of being is just not as radiant as a responsive, awakened, non-doing way of being.  At one point I began working with a husband and wife, and we regularly took note that each one looked his or her best after getting good Work.
    One of the women who works with me has been giving me rather regular reports on her “afterglow” experiences.  Here are two of them:

    After our session, I was beaming out some sort of something [because] people kept staring at me in [the grocery store] . . .
    ______________

    So . . . the remnants of today's lesson made this man, who works at [the grocery store], feed me grapes.  And then a slice of mango.  Right in the middle of the produce section. Then, I kid you not, he asked if I was Argentine. . . . And then, to top it all off . . . asked me out.

 
I should point out that this person doesn't look even vaguely Latina.  Being asked if she is Argentine surprised her not only because of that fact, but also because we do Tango-infused Alexander Work, which the man in the produce section could not possibly have known.  This is either a synchronicity or a particularly strange coincidence.
    The other person who has discussed the aesthetics of presence with me recently pointed out something very significant: this glow goes both ways.  When you receive good Work, you are more open to seeing the natural beauty of others.  You find them more interesting.  You feel positive regard, you feel Peace and Love.  This too is significant for belly dancers.  A dancer offers her presence as an act of Love.  She has to like the audience enough, have enough Love and Compassion for them, to want to suffer the burden of being on fire for them.  One of the belly dancers confessed that when she really feels her presence filling the room, she sometimes has feelings of guilt for it, and this in turn contracts her presence.  Others nodded in recognition of this phenomenon.  A woman may feel unsure whether it’s “okay” for her to tap into such power.  In the case of a belly dancer, this energy can be very sensual, which only adds another layer of difficulty.  Yet this is her JOB.  She is to reveal the awesome mystery of feminine power.  She in fact can determine its sensual content by the simple choice of how much raw power to let through.  When she truly fills the space, the result can be more sublime than sexy.  As Joyce would put it, the viewer is held in a state of aesthetic arrest in which he or she is united with “the secret cause.”  This may seem somewhat paradoxical when there is an obvious sensual content, but only because we are habituated to experience fear and desire, not arrest, not the still point.  But there the dance is, and not just belly dance.         
    It was remarkable to witness the aesthetics of presence at work.  I noticed it in all five of the dancers.  With two, I was unfortunately standing behind them and was actively working with them.  I still noticed a difference, but it is harder to describe.  With the other three, there was a strong physical experience of the presence, and with the third in particular there was a strong visual experience.  These are loose distinctions.  One SAW something in all five, and one FELT something in all five.  I’ll take two examples then.
    Everyone started out more or less the same.  The environment challenged them, so different was it from the circumstances of performance to which they are accustomed.  We were six people in a small studio in the middle of the day, not a large, dimly lit performance space filled with people.  The music was also not their own.  This tended to provoke their doings.  And it gave a consistent result: presence retracted, the fires dimmed, the movements (even when they looked technically lovely) seemed just a bit lackluster.  Forgive me ladies if you’re reading this.  I say it plainly because, especially now, we all know what you’re CAPABLE of doing.  And let's understand: Alexander "teachers" are SUPPOSED to provoke.  We can't blame the results on the context.  My job is to help people see the doing way of being that is functioning ALL THE TIME, in dancing and in everyday life.  In a dancer, it is usually CONTROLLED.  The beauty of the dance emerges in spite of it.  However, if we can begin to shift from doing to being, then the dance becomes more expressive, more powerful, more beautiful, more profound.
    Fortunately, I did very little.  Which means a lot got done.  Through my non-doing, the dancers began to activate the four skills: Awareness, Acceptance, Connection, and Non-doing.  Calling them “skills” is misleading.  We just ARE these things.  What we are certainly transcends these concepts, but we use them as skillful means, as a way to begin to access what we are.  
    Helping these women access their power had an astonishing impact.  One woman actually GLOWED.  I know: it sounds crazy.  You don’t have to dive into metaphysical waters to accept this.  If you’ve seen a pregnant woman, or seen a woman in love, then you’ve seen something like what I saw.  And I was not the only one.  Everyone else saw it too.  It was stunning.  Moreover, we also saw it vanish.  I wanted to check on this, so I didn’t say anything about the glow.  After recovering my wits, I simply asked her what she thought.  She said that after I worked with her a little the dancing felt much better than on her first attempt.  She said she tried to just “go with it.”  “Okay,” I said, “but at some point did the neurosis creep back in?”  She admitted that it had.  I told her we all had seen it.  This is not easy to bear when you’re first learning to let yourself shine.  It can add pressure to know the audience can sense every flicker of neurosis.  It’s almost like we’d rather not be seen.  But we are.  Always.  Even if that which perceives us is more-than-human.
    Another woman spoke of feeling self-conscious.  Of course, this is common for many performers.  What I find so fascinating is that what we feel in these cases is just energy, and the slightest shift of the glance transforms that energy in a radiant way.  As the glance of the performer goes from within to without, she goes from self-conscious to simply CONSCIOUS.  That’s something the audience doesn’t always get to see: a conscious, powerful woman revealing the mystery of the divine feminine through dance.  In their daily lives, they don’t see many conscious people at all.  So this is an act of profound significance.  Here again the Belly Dancer is willing to burn for the audience.  She is willing to suffer her self-consciousness and be brave enough to fully accept it so she can make that necessary shift in her gaze.  And when she does, the experience can be overwhelming for some.  Have you ever had a conscious Dancer LOOK at you during a performance?  It’s not easy to bear if she really lets that divine feminine energy manifest.  When she truly lets the mystery of Life come through her, and if we are brave enough to genuinely LOOK, how can we call this anything else but darshan?  I won't say that we got this particular dancer to go quite that far, but the results were again powerful and palpable for everyone watching.  The aesthetics of presence works by degrees.  More presence means more aesthetic impact.  But look at what we're really saying here: the dancer becomes more and more aesthetically significant as she becomes more and more metaphysically signficant.
    If you think reference to darshan and metaphysical significance marks an entrance into questionable territory, you can perhaps still understand and accept the psychodynamic importance of what’s going on here.  Because of the condition of aesthetic arrest, the viewer, and let’s focus on the male viewer for a moment, has a chance to allow his anima to mature.  If you immediately leap out of the vessel, no alchemical transformation will occur.  Because of the aesthetic arrest, you can begin to transform.  Even if your experience has a sensual or erotic content, the dancer who can make that energy beautiful and sublime still creates a condition of aesthetic arrest, so desire ceases to function.  You aren’t desiring, you are beholding, connecting.  The grasping ego vanishes in the face of something too big to grasp.  At this moment the belly dancer is helping the viewer, all viewers, to reconcile the problem of opposites.
    I’m not sure how many belly dancers understand the importance of what they do, for themselves and for the viewer.  Belly dance can be a big part of spiritual and psychological development.  The context of the dance can be a vessel for both dancer and viewer.  If the viewer remains still within this vessel, his or her lead can begin to turn to gold.  The same holds for the dancers.  Dance is a profound art, and attaining its highest potentials requires profound Work.  It takes a lot of discipline and dedication.  Dancers who are willing to surrender to it bestow heavenly gifts on us all.  I encourage every lover of dance to seek out belly dancers and receive their gifts with deep gratitude, and I encourage all dancers to keep pushing themselves, compassionately yet with vigor.
    I just want to say one last thing: psychodynamics, metaphysics, and all other "ics" aside, the phenomena described here are concrete and practical.  All of us can cultivate more presence, which means we can bring a little more Beauty and Love into the world.  When you are present, people see it and sense it without any need to refer to "ics."  It WORKS on them, and it works on the more-than-human world.  This is because you become more connected to the world and all the beings in it.  Your awareness opens, and you enter a state of non-doing in which more of what actually needs to get done finds itself getting done.  Every single person has access to this.  It just IS you.  All you have to do is begin to allow it to enter your life.