| My Philosophy |
| In honor of all inspiring teachers whose presence is before us. |
 |  |  |
 |  |  |
| My life as a dancer has taught me to understand how our living, breathing, moving bodies engender experience, knowledge and awareness. Our bodies are inspirational tools and complex vessels baring insight for all those who choose to listen to the intuitive wisdom their musings offer. As a child I recall living my life ever present to enchanting hours of carefree movement my heart and soul joyfully embraced. I spent most of my days after school running with great delight even rapture over hill and dale as my body and spirit, free to roam, guided me through stretches of field and forest slowing down just long enough to catch a breath or moment’s rest under the shade of a nearby tree or on occasion to hang upside down whimsically contemplating the outside world from another perspective ensconced within the tree's branches. As a freshman in college I first discovered dance and fell in love with the physical and creative challenges presented by the art along with the intuited sense of embodied purpose that dancers share when working together on a dance work. Despite obvious competitive aspects of performance I was fortunate to find in my own subjective explorations of dance, improvising, choreographing, teaching, and creating expressive movement structures, a strong spiritual bond within a community of individual participants and a renewed sense of continuity within the matrix of our communal lives that is enhanced through shared experiential learning. What I have come to know personally and experientially as a dancer and teacher of movement I am very excited to share with my students. Today my approach toward dance and all movement experiences is spontaneous and reflexive. I personally enjoy active participation, improvising and structuring movement forms, fully with my physicality and spirituality, memory and imagination, and seek to engage others as fully in the process as much as I am. Engaging fully in the process is important to me because moving and breathing meditatively, attending to streams of sensations, images, emotions and ideas with spiraling currents of oxygen cycling comfortably through my body is rejuvenating to my whole being, body, mind, heart and soul. Spiraling streams of energy, oxygen and life force through the body, mind, heart and soul, can be very empowering offering healing and rejuvenation to anyone who chooses to inspire the experience with an open minded sense of wonder, a lightness of judgement, and a positive loving intention. In essence, performing movement with a sense of gratitude and grace is fun. We move and dance around; we stretch and curl, swing, sweep, leap and fall, we stimulate sensations, memories and imaginary captivations in our bodies, we sweat a little; we breathe deeply; we release tension and endorphins and we feel good. |
| Today I balance dance practice with other somatic forms of movement prominently yoga and pilates. Returning to yoga with a more meditative purpose I have retrieved a new found appreciation and respect for this discipline. In Living Yoga, Georg Feuerstein describes yoga as “unitive discipline, the discipline that leads to inner and outer union, harmony and joy.” Yoga for me is a disciplined practice of uniting the many dynamic energies of the body through movement and meditation, cultivating a deep seated sense of stillness and an internal calm underlying a readiness to move. Embracing a beginner’s mind I have discovered a new love of yoga complimentary to dance. The dynamic power of peace found within a kinesthetic reserve can also be an inspiring aesthetic sanctuary in which new physical sensations and insights are born. These too offer rejuvenation and healing. All forms of movement and kinetic stillness embody metaphors of experience and living imagery that release healing energy relating our physicality to a spirituality, unifying body, mind, heart, and soul. My greatest challenge as a movement facilitator is to develop methods of enhancing that feel good experience whether through the increased respiration of oxygen and contemplation of the breath, challenging kinesthetic patterns, or insightful meditative practices. I believe such practices are inviting even to the staunchest of disbelievers simply because such symbolic rituals of holistic experience reach down deep into the very core and grounding of our living nature, making contact with the most intimate aspects of our primordial selves. I believe that we cannot help but come to know the body of power, light, and energy when we aspire to kinesthetic experiences of authentic metaphorical and archetypal expression. In my personal movement practice it is a sense of grounding and an illusive being of lightness that I embrace most, inspiring my endeavors moving outward from a presence deep within my whispering soul. I believe a metaphorical and archetypal sense of being grounded in the earth and born of eternal light is cultivated in myriad movement classes such as dance, pilates, yoga, tai chi, myriad marshal arts, and any intentionally designed and actively contemplated somatic experience. For me it is that intuitive moment when we sense everything is as it should be and we feel good about it. As I continue to teach I continue to learn. Learning I continue to find new avenues of inspiring practical, healthy choices and engendering experiences of authentic awareness that are empowering to me and others. My most cherished aspiration and long term goal is to integrate my personal experience and the subjective knowledge I have gained through practicing myriad movement forms into a creative pedagogical theory of embodied spirituality. Such a meta-theory is philosophically inspired through a dynamic awareness of the body’s activity and stillness, subjectively sensed within manifestations of our deepest soul being and spiritual awareness. |
