Names changed to protect the human
I'm transforming again.
Once I saw so clearly that I need to be exploring dance-as-energy-transfer, last night's milonga was a bitch. The men I danced with, whom I had previously thought of as respectable choices, were *not* dancing with their energy at all, they were just moving their physical bodies around in space, and touching their fronts felt like smacking a table with my hand. Wham! I can't send my energy into you because you haven't made a space for me to put it in!
I need to stick a Post-It note to my forehead that says "I'm sorry I can't dance with you today. I am discovering the energy of dance and since it's new I need partners who are good at handling their energy clearly and in a focused and intentional way."
Between last night and now I've been doing a lot of thinking. Now it's my job to be INSIDE the man, and the scary other side of that is: it's my job to have the man be INSIDE me. I make space for him to be inside me by sending myself into him, and he makes space for me to be in him by sending himself into me. Gah....
Where it gets gender-specific is I think there is a difference in who does what. I think both halves of the couple project their energy and suck in the other person's, but the men do more projecting and the women do more sucking (as it were), and the quality of what they do is different. When a man sends his energy into me, it feels yang: bright, powerful, thrusting forward, etc. When Mauro talked about energy, he only talked about sending your energy *into* and through the other person. It reminded me of a remark Francisco made a year and a half ago about the embrace—you project your energy through the embrace and into and through the other person. (Do I hear an echo?) But the two awesome female energy workers to whom I've been exposed described the equation from the other side. As I was thinking about how the man needs to be inside me for me to dance, I remembered la Badass saying, "one man, four legs." So that's it. And the moment when she embraced me, but I felt a small furry creature crawling into my heart, and at the same time, I felt this huge electric pull saying, "COME HERE NOW" to *all* of me. ....And as I was thinking, "but wait, there needs to be somewhere to PUT all that energy that someone is sending into someone else," I remembered la Bruja taking me into her earth-shattering embrace, and how I felt my whole body and heart and soul was being sucked into this vortex, WHAM, and then I found myself curled up inside her heart, happily saying to myself, "I am home now, and I will stay here forever and ever." And her posture lecture: "just stand normal, is enough! Don't stick yourself out! Open up a space inside yourself and invite the man in. Don't come to him. Let him come into you." Which quickly led to my second favourite (and oft-repeated) dance lesson of all time: "you want him to feel like, come here, just one more step, mmm.....?"
Even my first-favourite dance lesson of all time suggests the sucking-in nature of women's dance energy. Everybodysfavouritedancer's "bitches, move with your cunts!" Until now, thinking about that on a physical level, it seemed an assertive, masculine, independent way of dancing, and it is, but now that I'm thinking about energy, it's different. If your dance really does come from...that...it would act *like* that acts. It would draw the man in. And once there—well, I have no dick and don't know what it's like to be inside a woman, but I would *assume* that for him an ideal situation would combine a balance of feelings of independence and security. If it could be both thrilling and comforting, exciting and relaxing, dangerous and safe, and any other contradiction you can think of, that would probably be a good recipe. I assume.
The energy of the men last night, who didn't know anything about energy and had never thought how to use it, felt the way a tight muscle feels. Constricted, bound, closed off. "No, that's wrong," I thought. "It's not like that. It's more like this." Someone has to touch you just right, and then your energy does the same thing a muscle does. Which is what a cunt does (provided it is dealt with properly). Everything softens up, opens, deepens, pulls the guest energy in, and gets...er...wet. Very yin. It's always a surprising magic trick, just how much space can open up inside something that initially presents itself as a closed door. A person, for instance, doesn't have any immediately visible openings at all, and is presumably a solid mass, but once their energy opens up, they can fit a whole 'nother person inside themselves! Crazy!
This morning I had a long and serious walk with myself. I was afraid, and did not have any answers for my fears, other than to dance through them. But there they were: I was horribly afraid that if I danced with someone they would leave me in the middle of my ocho. Dance therapy time! Yes, I am terrified of being abandoned in the middle of a step "because" my biological father abandoned my mother and me when I was a few months old and then my dad who raised me left my mother for another woman and then she didn't like me so he sent me away and paid a family to take care of me, and then the mother of that family didn't like raising someone else's child and hated me so I was sent away again, this time to boarding school. And I'm afraid "because" of all the men who left just when I trusted them. Yes, I do not ocho freely because I am afraid to trust the other person to still be there by the time the ocho is finished, because so many people have left in the middle of my ochos, and because that hurts.
Hooray! Let's dance!
Then today Chaim told me that was it, I couldn't keep stalling with the divorce paperwork, it has to be in before December ends. Ack! I was in the middle of a stable-situation two-home-family ocho here!
....Another way I'm changing is that, now that the energy IS the dance, the embrace IS the dance. Did you know that the embrace is not just me sticking my hand on your scapula? Did you know it is a living, breathing thing? WHO KNEW? And now that's all I want to do.
And now I have to reassess. Because I love Sebastián, I do, we are tight peeps, and he's a wonderful teacher (and he's MY wonderful teacher, and I am very faithful). And he was just right for this time in my dance which I think suddenly came to a drastic end in the past couple of days: the time where I needed to learn the "ON YOUR OWN" part of "with me but on your own." I had to learn how to be by myself first. Absolutely! And learning that will take me the rest of my life. But suddenly it's time to learn the "WITH ME" part, as surely as if I had seen it on a clock. I've started to get a handle on how to be with myself, and now something...not my mind, maybe it's my body or my dance...is telling me, "*it is time to learn how to be with someone else now.*"
Sebastián has never talked about energy. We have never once talked about embrace. Ever. And open embrace is great for learning physical technique but right now I'm not sharp enough with my energy feelers to sense or send energy clearly in open embrace. And when we dance at milongas (so, close embrace), this is what I feel coming out of him: "I have so much going on inside me! I have lots and lots of great big feelings! And they're all packed waaaaaay down there, far away from the surface!"
Sebastián dances like a musician dances. And that is *wonderful.* Hooray for that. But it's self-contained. And right now I need to learn about sharing.
....I don't know what I'm going to do. It's a non-issue, because as you know he's going to be in your 'hood for the next two months. But I don't know if I will study with him when he gets back or not, and that makes me feel funny. And WHO can teach me about this energy and embrace stuff? Everybody's out of town, no visitors are coming, and even if folks were in town, the only teacher I know of (other than Sebastián) who is The Goods is Adán, with whom I've never studied or danced, so I don't know what his focus is, and he's never here.
El Sabio, claro, could teach more about energy and embrace in a single hour than many people could in a year. But he isn't here. You would be *ideal*. But you're not here. Hoping for a once-every-few-months tanda with Amadeo is too slow. Francisco is awesome for internal, self-contained energy work, but has never talked about the WITH ME kind, and he's not here. And sure, there's a zillion guys who could teach me about energy and embrace if only I lived in Argentina, or Europe! But I don't! So now I don't know what to do.