Sometimes poking at the thing that's bugging you is the best way to make it change. But sometimes leaving it alone and changing everything else around it instead works even better.
I've been magically cleaning my apartment lately, with an intensity seldom seen by man and a laser eye for things in the wrong place. We live in our homes as they are and often don't realize that we are not living them, they are living us. And then one day we wake up and think, hey—why does that thing I haven't worn in three years get pride of place in the closet? Why does someone who hasn't lived here in two years still get a whole closet and two prime cabinets to themselves? How come the books I read now are overflowing around the edges and the books I read ten years ago are right at eye level? Does this huge binder from a school I don't go to any more have to keep sitting under my desk? Just because the window-sill is covered with soot, does it have to permanently be covered with soot, or can I change it? How about the dill encrusted into the bottom of the fridge? Do I have the power to make my physical environment accommodate my needs and desires?
Instead of living around the edges of my home, why not change it so that it fits how I really live?
A while ago I changed the main room of my home from “a dining room that I move the table out of in order to practice” to “a practice space that I put the table in if someone else wants to eat.” It felt great and I kept expecting the interior decór police to come after me but they never did.
But some things turned out to be so ingrained I couldn't even see them. Stuff had been in the same places for so long that I simply could not imagine them any other way. I was blind to the possibility of using physical space in new ways that would let me move more freely, efficiently, and authentically...Until One Day.
The wall cracked. Which led to the bathroom being repainted. One thing led to another, and suddenly I was seeing space in a wholly new way, and I've been running around like a Crazed Jack-Rabbit turning the place I live in into the home of my soul as it is today.
And I noticed that after the bathroom was repainted, I suddenly started noticing my pericardial sac (cf “Lingerie for the Heart”). Then I moved some stuff into storage and rearranged a few things and suddenly I could voluntarily relax the upper part of my psoas. Then I threw out some things and vacuumed and did a ton of laundry and redecorated the boy's room, and the next time I was dancing, suddenly I had an orgasm in my right arm, which spread all through my shoulder, down my right side, and eventually ended up in my toes.
Then I forced someone who hasn't lived here in a long time to take some of their stuff OUT of the apartment. I dusted. I scoured. I scrubbed. I waved salt around.
And then the next time I was practicing, I felt it.
The low-grade orgasm I'd had in my right arm was suddenly all inside my chest cavity, all through, my whole upper torso bloomed, warm and pink and giggly inside, buoyant yet grounded, light yet solid, completely relaxed but alive like never before. I had to laugh because it felt so good. I was free. Free free free. My steps couldn't stop smiling.
And that was how I created the self-perpetuating orgasm, ladies and gentlemen. Total release created impulses forward, which in turn created more total release...and there you have it. A feeling that wouldn't go away.
“I should bottle this s---,” I thought. “I get it now. I don't have to practice technique! I have to practice doing whatever I can to learn how to consistently reproduce this feeling at will! Because if I do, that is good technique!”
The people we dance with feel what we practice. If we practice steps, they feel steps. If we practice in our heads, they feel in our heads. So we might as well practice learning how to make ourselves stay stuck in an ecstatic trance for as long as possible.
Our bodies are our homes. How can we live in so that they're serving our dance, instead of us living our dance edgewise around old stuck patterns that don't have to be there any more? They're beautiful homes and they love being used right. They feel better. We feel better. When we keep them cramped up in patterns from the past, they interfere with the dance we need to dance. When we allow them to fluidly keep abreast of the times, they free us and we have ten-minute long orgasms in places that no one knew we could. Now all we have to do is figure out how to do it again....
I'm only thinking of the greater public good.