From Nothing to No-thing

By the time I got there, the music was blasting and room was like a beehive, everyone moving, moving, moving in Flo Aliviado's class at the Masonic Lodge in Culver City.  The music plays, people move as they want, no one cares what you do or don't do.  Some people show up every week.  Some drop in.  It's a community that holds space for moving or not, without judgment.  It's glorious.  After Flo, Jo Cobbett holds another class for open movement.  For me, it's been deeply healing.

As soon as I entered, Jo came up to me and said, "you're back!"  I was shocked. Did she know? What tells me that I am not noticed?  Leading to the evil step-sister, "I don't matter"?  As I moved to the music, I had a deepening sense of how much I identify as 'a nothing'.  Robbie Bosnak writes about a training moment in Embodied Imagination.  As trainees, we learn to ask the dreamer questions about what they're seeing, hearing, tasting, feeling vs. what they're thinking. We (individually or as a group) move through their experience with them, guiding them closer and closer to safely re-living the sensation of dream.  In one group, after a series of questions, this particular dreamer got to feeling "nothing".  The group was stymied as to what to do. Then someone had the genius to ask, "What does 'nothing' feel like?" 

I began to move with 'no-thing'.  The no-thing space.  The no-thing sensation.  It's hard to describe because it doesn't have the bells and whistles that go along with 'some-thing'.  It's not the same thing as depression, which feels bad and has chest-caving sensations or holding breaths, or aches.  It has an openness to it. A non-boundary.  I danced with it, alternating between trying to define it and letting it sense itself.  At one point, I got a mindflash that I'd spent decades fearing this place, building structures over it to keep myself from feeling like "nothing".  The heavier, the more immutable the structure, the more I felt the paradox of security along with the feeling that they could cave in at any moment.  Indeed, five years ago, those structures I had built did cave in and took the feeling of security along with them.  Over the past five years, it's been a grabbing and releasing identities, solutions, and cures to ease the pain and build the new.  It's a natural human movement to want predictability, answers, and security. Let's remember, though, that the embryo, the 'no-thing', is the ultimate in potential.  If we can access, even for a moment, movement towards a 'no-thing', then we might be able to loosen the jaws of needing to be one thing or the other in order to feel worthy, in order to feel good about ourselves.  Bless you, Flo and Jo, bless all Beings Visible and Invisible that create potential.  Bless you, Reader, for coming with me on this journey.