Why We Dance: A Philosophy of Bodily Becoming (An Interview)

The following is an interview with Kimerer LaMothe, author of Why We Dance: A Philosophy of Bodily Becoming:

Why did you write this book?

Kimerer LaMothe: I love to dance, every day. It is vital for my well being. And when I scan the landscape of human life, I see dance everywhere—in the earliest human art, the oldest forms of culture, and in every culture around the world into the present. Yet in the maps of and for human life that comprise the philosophy, theology, and religious studies of the modern west, dance occupies a surprisingly small space. Rarely do authors consider dancing as vital to human life, especially to a human’s religious life. I wanted to change that.

How did you decide to approach this problem?

KLL: Before beginning this book, I spent years delving into written works of the western canon, trying to identify the intellectual moves that make it nearly impossible for a given philosopher or theologian to affirm dance as a medium of religious experience and expression. I looked for exceptions. I looked for thinkers who were willing to consider dance as more than just a metaphor, or more than just a crude alternative to the “finer” arts or “higher,” more cerebral forms of religion.

The problem went deeper than I thought. The bias against dance in the western tradition is not simply evidence of a mind/body problem, a fear of sexuality, or a patriarchal devaluing of the feminine per se. Rather, the challenge for dance is rooted in the fact that that the tradition’s dominant structures and patterns of thinking express and reinforce the lived experience of people who have spent years training themselves to read and write. Much of western thought is an apology for the life of a book-bound mind.

While this trajectory of cultural development has enabled tremendous advances in numerous realms, it is less helpful when it comes to making sense of why humans always have and continue to dance.

In order to show how dance is vital to our humanity, I realized that I would have to retell the story of what it means to be a human being from the lived experience of dancing. I would have to tell a story in which bodily movement appears as the source and telos of human life.

Fortunately, across disciplines, researchers and scientists are discovering what many dancers have known and practiced for years: that bodily movement is essential to the biological, emotional, spiritual, and ecological development of human persons. Thus, when I set out to write this book, I had a lot of material on which to draw in making my case.

So why do we dance?

KLL: The reasons are many, and each chapter of Why We Danceexplores one. We dance to matter, to evolve, to know, to be born, to connect, to heal, and to love. Yet as the text spirals through these different chapters, a common argument builds as the substratum of them all: namely, that humans evolved as creatures with a unique ability to notice, recreate, and become relational patterns of movement. Humans evolved to dance as an enabling condition of their best bodily becoming.

Key to this argument is this notion I develop of “bodily becoming.” It takes three moves to shift to this perspective. First, humans do not have bodies, they are bodies. Second, the bodies that humans are, are not objects, they are movement. Third, the movement that human bodily selves are is the movement of their own becoming. In a nutshell: I am the movement that is making me. Humans are nothing more or less that rhythms of bodily becoming, constantly moving themselves as well as being moved by forces larger and smaller than they can perceive.

In each chapter, I explore the implications of this way of thinking about our bodily selves for philosophical questions concerning the nature, evolution, development, and culture expression of human persons. I build the case that the ongoing practice of dancing is the primary action in which humans learn to participate–consciously or not—in the rhythms of bodily becoming.

You note in the opening to Why We Dance that you live on a farm, and that you could not have written this book anywhere else. Why is that?

KLL: If I was to write a book that expressed the lived experience of dancing, I knew that I needed to live in a place where my own impulse to dance was constantly quickened and brought to life in me—a place where I was moved to move by the movements of the natural world.

When the opportunity came for our family to move to the country, I jumped. Little did I know, that once my partner and I moved to this retired dairy farm, our children would decide that they wanted to be farmers. Supporting our children in fulfilling their dreams of raising horses, cows, cats, and chickens has opened my senses up in new ways to how the movements that we make in every moment of our lives make us who we are in relationship to the natural world.

Each chapter of Why We Dance sports an experiential frame drawn from life I live here on the farm. Each frame enacts ideas I develop within the chapter itself. These experiences are not “cases” that provide evidence of “theories.” Rather, they each describe the experiences that have enabled the ideas of the chapter to emerge in me at all. In this way, each chapter represents a coming-into-being of the ideas about dance that it also contains. Each chapter calls attention not only to the “embodiment” of ideas (as if ideas lived in bodies), but to the ways in which ideas express, engender and are themselves bodily movements.

I am not a dancer. I don’t dance. Why should I read this book?

KLL: Part of what I do in this book is to redefine “dance.” I offer a visionary definition of what dance can be based both on what dancing has been across a range of contexts, as well as on what we now know about the importance of bodily movement to our humanity. Dance, I offer, is something that every human can and must do to some extent in order to survive their births as hopelessly dependent infants. Dance, in this sense, refers to a process of participating as consciously as we are able in the rhythm of creating and becoming relational patterns of sensation and response.

While elastic, this definition offers rich conceptual resources for identifying and acknowledging the wide range of meanings, experiences, beliefs, and knowledge that the practice of certain dance styles and techniques makes possible, especially when occurring in religious contexts. This visionary definition also offers resources for understanding how and why the practice of dancing remains a potent guide for people today in the work of nurturing mutually life-enabling relationships with the natural world.

This book is as much an adventure as an argument. It is a call to think and a call to act. It is written for people who can dance or want to dance as well as for those who are sure they can’t and don’t. It is written for people who love to move and want to know why. It is written for people who don’t want to move and want to know why. It is written for people who yearn for a better understanding of how the movements they make are, in every moment, making them. People who want to know: what am I creating?

"You Do!" - Article From a Devoted Student of Yoga

I have been coming across so many words lately, written by others, that I am enjoying immensely.  Not to mention, words that are to large degrees pertinent to elements within my own personal teaching and learning journey ... and so, I feel great beauty within the sharing.  I have taught yoga now for many years, and it is always an intriguing mystery surrounding the teacher/student relationship and dynamic.  

Keeping in mind, I believe we are all our own teachers, and every single person carries their own individuated and potent form of Medicine.  Healing logistics aside, and speaking simply from the practical "one room, one teacher, multiple students" arrangement, I found this article itself to be great medicine, because it is truth.  In nearly every class I have taught in a registered setting, there is a sort of 'archetypal' line up that comes into form, which to this day leaves me somewhat quizzical about it.  Not to mention, I am very sensitive. 

Not in the overly-emotional sense of the word ... but as in, I very easily pick up on what others are feeling and experiencing.  It is a big job, this teaching gig.  It is a big job, and a huge passion.  That is what, despite the 'doubters and comparers', the sometimes judgments, the anxieties and uncertainties that mix up into one breathy room ... that is what keeps we impassioned instructors showing up at the mat. 

Sometimes I have felt like standing at the front of the room, demonstrating a posture, and then calling out to the class "You do!" as the author describes below!  This is not my process however, but admittedly it sounds like a fun one!  Yet I will continue with my methods.  Because there are also the supporters, the cheerleaders, and the pure lovers of the process.  And it is precisely this process, and the trust we know we must hold within it, that will keep us coming back for more.

Ten Tips from a Yoga Student

By Russell Shields 

 I am not a yoga teacher. I am one of those people who bring a mat to class and do the asanas with everyone else. I have been a yoga student for many years. The experience has taught me how to be a better yoga student. I now offer 10 tips on how to get more out of the student/teacher relationship.

1. BE A STUDENT. If you are a student, it is important to be a good student. This means adopting the attitude of a diligent student for the class period, especially with a new teacher. For many of us, especially if one has a regular practice, there is a tendency to compare teachers and think we know of a better way for the class to be taught. The mind likes to think, “My other teacher did not do it that way. This feels weird.” When I first took ashtanga yoga, it seemed that some of the set sequence of poses would make more sense if done in a slightly different order. After years of practice, I have come to realize there is wisdom in the sequence just as taught.

2. BE OPEN. Thoughts that the teacher is teaching incorrectly is a wrong attitude that puts up a barrier to learning what the teacher has to offer. The truth is, we can learn something from every teacher, if we can BE OPEN to what they have to teach. I have had teachers whose asana practice was less developed than mine. However, I learned much from them. The more advanced student must be especially aware of this pitfall, as there is a tendency to use existing knowledge and experience as a sort of bias against new teachings and experiences.

3. OVERLOOK. Yoga teachers, like all of us, are works in progress. It is not unusual to hear them mispronounce the names of asanas, embarrass students, criticize other teachers, arrive late, start the class late, run the class past the scheduled end time, display anger, direct you into a sequence of poses and then forget to do the “other side,” leaving you feeling lopsided. Most yoga teachers are not masters and teach at least some mistakes. It is important to remember that they are people in different stages of development, just like the students. My wife once asked an East Indian lady the secret to a long, happy marriage. She responded, “Overlook.” The fact is, people come mixed. They are not all good or all bad. It is up to us to overlook the flaws so that we can enjoy the real yoga teachings, which are pristine and eternal.

Although yoga teachers may be flawed, it is also true that you would be hard pressed to find a more heart-centered, God-loving group of people. They do not teach for the “big bucks.” Most yoga teachers are not striving to reach early retirement. However, it is fair to say that most are working on piling up sizeable spiritual bank accounts -- a quality that is both admirable and endearing.

4. EXPECT ODD SITUATIONS. Yoga teachers sometimes do things that seem very odd. There is an implicit trust relationship between the teacher and student. It is the teacher's duty to find a way to get the student to learn and the student's duty is to be obedient and open. Since yoga deals with mind, body and spirit, the forms of teaching can be quite odd indeed.

One of my yoga teachers, Dawn S., would often choose one person per class session to receive special help with supta kurmasana, the turtle pose. This is a pretzel pose to end them all. Dawn was not happy until someone was completely scrunched into a tiny ball, feet crossed, head in crotch, arms between and under the legs and bent behind the back. When she “helped” me into it, my breathing became about 1/100th of what it was up to then. Tim M. could somehow put me into twisting poses like marichyasana D, where my hands barely clasped, and then he would help other people for what seemed like FOREVER, or until my sweaty hands got so weak they slipped apart and the pose collapsed. Tim was also fond of saying, urdhva dhanurasana, or backbend/wheel, “is like pancakes--the first two are no good.” To me, that meant we were going to be holding the pose FOREVER, or until the body shook and collapsed down, over and over again. At the end of the wheel poses, he would sometimes say, “OK now, second set!”

The yoga literature is full of stories of teachers doing even more strange things to make a point to the student. For example, the great teacher, Kabir, was chastised by some Muslims for pointing his feet in the direction of Mecca. Kabir responded by asking his critics to kindly point his feet in the direction that did not face God. Mulana Rum, or Rumi, is reported to have said, “If the teacher says soak your prayer mat in wine, soak it in wine.” In so many ways, the teacher and the yoga challenge our parameters and break down limitations to growth. So if the teacher places you in an odd situation, try to use it as an opportunity to learn.

5. HANG IN THERE. I have found that the solution to the odd situations is to hang in there, even if you don't like it. Sooner or later, the wisdom comes out. For example, after a while, I learned from Dawn that the turtle pose can be very peaceful, sort of like your own personal sadhu cave. I learned from Tim that twisting poses can really help me to open UP and expand. I even learned that backbends get easier. The key was always just hanging in there. When one of my teachers, Steve, saw the class straining in a difficult pose, he would encourage us to hang in there by saying, “Don't leave before the miracle. It is just coming.” There is truth to that statement. I am grateful to my teachers, including Dawn, Tim and Steve , for their encouragements and patience.

Avoid comparing yourself to others. Negative thoughts can block all progress. Thoughts like “I will never be that good” will suck away your energy and put you into a mode of struggle in the practice. Expect that some days you will feel better than others. Ultimately , it is what is going on internally, not externally, that counts. If you hang in there, you will get great satisfaction from the yoga. Just keep doing the yoga. Do it during the ordinary turmoil of life. Do it despite days of lesser strength and flexibility. Do it without comparing yourself to what others are doing on the mat next to you.

6. DO IT THEIR WAY. Teachers have different styles. Some are young, very flexible, strong, and vigorous. Their classes are often a faster paced, more intense workout. Older or more experienced teachers often place less emphasis on external form and more emphasis on breath and concentration during the practice. There is no bad choice. What is important is to do the practice their way so that you can get the benefit from their style of teaching.

For example, I have noticed Iyengar teachers talk a lot during class. They explain every tiny detail of the asana until I feel mentally exhausted from the input. Also, I know several Iyengar teachers who can be very picky about the way you fold blankets. However, I am deeply indebted to them for teaching yoga etiquette and the great body of physical / mechanical info rmation they provided. I would not have gotten that benefit if I left the class because the teachers never shut up

7. YOU DO! In contrast, I have noticed that ashtanga teachers give very little instruction. The class moves from pose to pose and you are left to figure out precisely how each pose should be done. One teacher would sometimes silently show a pose and then only say, “You do!” I learned a lot from those two words. To my surprise, what I did not know the doing often taught me. If I had not experienced the asana flow without the teaching interruptions, I would not have developed the slow , rhythmic breathing in movement that leads to a deeper practice. In the end , it is not doing asanas but learning to repose--to achieve a deep sense of the eternal within -- that is the real yoga practice. The understanding and internal experience that eventually come from the yoga are the best teacher. If you open your heart and just do the practice, then the timeless and pristine gifts of yoga will be discovered.

8. ETIQUETTE. The newer student may be surprised to know there is an unofficial yoga etiquette that is widely accepted. First on my unofficial list is to come with fairly clean body and mat. I am not all that finicky about odor. Even so, being on a yoga mat next to malodorous feet or mat has ruined the whole experience for me many times. Be on time. If you are late, just stand near the door and wait for the teacher to acknowledge you and direct you to a spot. Most teachers will arrange a spot for you, when the time is right.

9. RELAX/DON'T TENSE UP. As a result of being the equivalent of human pretzel dough to many teachers over the years, I have learned that the best way to take an adjustment is to RELAX. Let it happen. Try to get the feel of what the pose is like after you are in the adjusted pose. Try to get the “body memory” of the adjusted pose. Does it feel better than before? How is it different from what you were doing? Good things happen when you relax. You go much deeper into the pose. You may learn that mentally surrendering is a huge key to spiritual growth. DON'T TENSE UP. The converse is also true. Tense up and bad things happen. When you resist, the deep steady breathing is lost, tension comes in, the mind gets defensive and becomes unreceptive. The selfish mantra of “what will happen to me” is soon to surface. One of the challenges in backbends is to relax in what is at first perceived as a stressful situation. This lesson carries over into daily life. As my practice has become established, I notice that when my daily work gets intense, my deep , slow yoga with ujjai breathing get going and automatically the situation becomes more even.

10. HONOR AND ENCOURAGE. We should honor and encourage our yoga teachers. I notice that when a yoga instructor just walks by me, or adjusts me, my practice immediately perks up, and I try a little harder for awhile. Teachers also benefit from recognition and feedback. When I think of the great line of yoga teachers stretching back into antiquity who brought these great teachings to us, it is natural to feel humility and gratitude to all yoga teachers. For these reasons, it is good to honor and respect yoga teachers. I try to bring flowers to class once in a while. I like to remember them at Christmas with small gifts like nuts, incense or a yoga type calendar. Sometimes just a few words about how I sincerely enjoyed a class or how I improved from an adjustment in the class bring a smile to their face.

Russell Shields was last in Chicago in 1968.  He came as one of many Students for a Democratic Society who engaged in anti-war protests at the Democratic Convention.  Soon after, he began studying hatha yoga with Yogi Sharma in Long Beach, California.  In 1972 he was initiated into surat shabd (meditational) yoga by G uru Charan Singh.  Russell has traveled to India between 15 and 20 times, mostly to see his guru at an ashram in Punjab, India.  He has traveled the Himalayas, studied medi t ation with the Brama Kumaris in Rajasthan, performed Shivaite practices in Varanasi. Russell is a partner in the law firm of Shields & Kowalski located in Tustin, California.  He is a longtime , familiar student at many yoga studios. Since writing this story, Russell has started to teach a yoga class at Bally's Gym in Southern California.

Soul Tree (by Robert Moss)

 This is absolutely one of the most beautiful things I have ever read.  So naturally, I couldn't help but share it with you.  Robert Moss is incredible with his work on the power of Dreaming.



Soul Tree 
From Dreaming the Soul Back Home
© Robert Moss, used with permission from New World Library

"Tree at my window, window tree, My sash is lowered when night comes on; But let there never be curtain drawn Between you and me."
— Robert Frost, "Tree at My Window”

We can't lose our way if we go to the root of things, to the roots of a tree. By finding the right tree — a tree you know that also knows you — you can reconnect with the soul of nature. You can find grounding for soul in this world, and a shaman’s ladder to travel between the worlds.

I once moved to a place in the country because of a tree, an old white oak behind the house that had survived the lightning. I knew it for a guardian of the land and a wise ancient. Sitting with that tree, I would have impressions of all the seasons it had lived. When I walked the farm road toward it, I would sometimes feel its silent greeting. Sometimes I watched the moon rise over the hills from up in its branches. The oak became a tree of my dreaming and a portal to the ancestors. Rooted deep in American earth, the oak also joined me to the ways of oak-seers of my bloodlines in the Old World, to the druids “grey, wood-nurtured, quiet-eyed” (as Yeats sang), to the sacred oak at Dodona where the Greeks listened for the voice of a god in the creak and rustle of the branches. After the first snows, when the cold stung my eyes, I saw that the oak still hung on to its leaves, longer than any other shedding trees on that land. Oaks hang on.

When I was leading a workshop by the Bay of Riga, in Latvia, we had a wonderful singer and folklorist in our circle who knew many dainas, traditional folk songs that celebrate sun and sea, earth and stone. I asked her to help open our circle with a song of the oak tree:

I found in a field
a tall oak tree of spirit his feet go into the earth his head touches the sky

Oak tree, oak tree
how wide you are
the bee flies for three days and can’t get around you

The big storm boasted
“I’ll break the oak”
Oak tree, stand strong
but let the wind shake your branches.

In the last stanza, this song of oak teaches us to give a little in a strong wind, to avoid being broken. This is one of the lessons of the trees.

Spending good time with a tree that welcomes us is a great way to repair and renew our connection with the soul of nature. Trees have personalities, as individuals and as types, and sometimes we find they have a second personality that was not originally arboreal, a spirit from a different kinship group. In front of the farmhouse that I purchased because of the white oak was a great sugar maple. The patterns of the bark around the place where its broad trunk divided made the vivid likeness of an ancient Native shaman with a storm of gray hair and a long, twisted body. I learned later that there are legends in the Native traditions of Northeast America of shamans who have, in one of their soul bodies, taken up residence in trees after physical death.

South of the farmhouse was an elderly apple tree that no longer gave fruit but still put out a few leaves in the springtime and let a few branches fall, which I burned in the hearth of the family room. The sweetness of apple, through pine and spruce and hickory, provided a kind of olfactory portal, and I would slip into conscious dreaming of ancestors for whom the apple branch was the passport between the worlds. North of the house was another great old tree, a shagbark hickory, that shed limbs as well as leaves profusely, as the deer sheds its antlers. I would often find antlers in the hickory hollow, dropped by bucks in the great herds of white-tailed deer that made their home in our woods, from which hunters were banned.

What trees call to you on country walks or from memory or dream? Any tree may be your soul tree, and it may also be your sole tree, the One Tree through which the three worlds of the shaman’s cosmos are joined, and which may become your ladder between them.

At the start of most of my depth workshops, I lead a standing meditation, in which each person in the circle finds the image of a special tree and then lets the body take the form of that tree, rooted in earth, rising between earth and sky, feeding on sun fire. We let our bodies sway as we stand, as a tree will sway in a strong wind, giving a little in order not to be snapped. We see the seasons chang- ing around us. We feel what it’s like to have a squirrel run up our trunk or to have birds nesting in our hair. As the meditation deep- ens, we feel ourselves reaching deep into the earth, through the root system, going deep and spreading wide. We feel, with our inner senses, how we can travel this way to connect with the animal powers, and with ancestral spirits, and to receive healing and blessing in the realm of the Great Earth Mother.

Then we let our awareness ascend to the high branches. We picture ourselves perched up there like a bird, or a happy child in a tree house, able to look out in all directions from this excellent place of vision. We imagine that we can fly now to a person or place at a distance and look in on them, and sometimes, quick as thought, we are there. We discover that, from our place in the high branches, we can not only see across any distance in space but also scout across time and travel into the possible future to see what lies on the roads ahead for ourselves and others. This is something that tree-seers have al- ways been good at.

Now we go higher, into the world of the tree. We feel ourselves rise up into the canopy, up to the green crown, and then feel our- selves rising up higher and higher until the sky opens and we are in the first of the many levels of the Upper World. We are on our way now to make or renew our connections with our authentic spiritual teachers. They may take many forms and may be using “contact pictures” adjusted to our level of understanding. Beyond all the other forms of the guide on these levels, there is one that will never fail us and that is always waiting for us to resume contact: the soul of the soul (as the Sufis say beautifully), the captain of the heart, the Higher, or Greater, Self.

Your soul tree can be your portal to all these realms of adventure, discovery, and connection.

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