The Payoff

As far as the body is concerned, change happens excruciatingly slowly. The flexibility and strength you possess now are the product of the entirety of your physical history; the only efforts that bear fruit are sustained ones. In other words, commitment to training the body means integrating these processes, these exercises into a lifestyle. Sure, you may take weeks, sometimes even months off from dancing and stretching intensively, but it's almost impossible to stop your awareness of the alignment of shoulders, pelvis, and spine as you walk, to give up the sensation of warmed joints and tantalizingly extended muscles, distractedly plie-ing as you brush your teeth. Like any other process, it builds and develops over time - your mind creates an image of the body, your body enacts this image to the best of its ability, creating sensations of weight, rhythm, and space, along with unexpected physical surprises. You learn to pay close attention to these sensations, which you then use to revise and extend your mind's image of the body's potential. And it's exciting as you get an idea of exactly how much is possible, how much this vessel which takes us everywhere we go, which IS us, is a playground for the imagination and a tool for fulfilling, meditative, and creative focus. For me it all adds up to giving the body a voice, becoming aware of connections that exist between our immediate physical state and everything that passes through our heads. Kind of like a physical actualization of the mind, making present, in all its kinaesthetic glory, the daily drama of being alive.

And on that note, I must to bed. Can't be enacting dramas of sleepiness as I deepen my connection to my body.