As 2025 turned, I was running my New Year workshop. It is a fairly rugged event, in a yurt in the woods, in Scotland in the middle of winter. It’s a bit out of my comfort zone, but in some ways I think it is the place I feel most at home in my Movement Medicine teaching. I am utterly grateful to the dancers who sign up. Such deep dancing. So much commitment. A powerful dancing dreaming prayer for ourselves and all our relations.
Afterwards, one of the (fantastic) assistants shared with me that she wondered what my younger selves… my twenty-year-old… thirty-year-old… even forty-year-old self would think if they were to see me now.
I began to wonder that too. And what I realised was that my younger self would have been utterly blown away. She had no idea that such work as this was possible… at all… ever… taught by anyone. If someone had said “That will be you in your later years!” I would have been bewildered. Talk about Dare to Dream!! Not only dream what is possible… but, while you are at it, why not dream the impossible and even the inconceivable!!
It left me wondering about my Dancer’s Story. How did I get from there to here?
I think of myself as one of the dancers who has been in on Movement Medicine right from the beginning. Before the beginning! I first danced with Susannah and Ya’Acov more than 25 years ago and they are still such important teachers for me. I love Movement Medicine and it has become my spiritual ‘home’.
I mused about how it all began.
It began with what I think of as my strong capacity for joining in! When I was a teenager, it was called being “easily led” and was not viewed as a particularly great thing. In truth it wasn’t always. It led to some quite unwise choices. I guess I was fortunate in that the most serious consequence of my ‘unwise choices’ was finding myself, aged 18, (somewhat unexpectedly) expecting a baby. That baby… 53 years on… is one of the delights of my life. Oddly enough, I am writing this on his birthday. And I am flooded with memories of that threshold. He was and is an incredible joy.
This is a digression, but I can’t resist. I was sitting in my hospital bed, trying to learn how to breastfeed. I had a lovely young student nurse helping me. I said to her in some frustration: I wish I was one of those Indian Goddesses with six arms. Two arms don’t seem to be enough. She said softly “You don’t know what to do. But he does. Look how beautifully he is latching on.” He came into the world with his own deep wisdom.
It IS a digression. And yet…. It is a reminder. I want to tell this dancer’s story in a way that doesn’t make my younger selves lacking or useless. I want to honour the innate wisdom of the baby and of the young mother. We are unbroken. We always were.
But truth to tell, that young woman was a bit lost. There were some desperate moments. I didn’t know where to turn to bring more light and awareness into the dark labyrinth. I believed I had made a terrible mess of my life. The ‘brand’ of spirituality that I had grown up with convinced me that I was a thoroughly bad lot. Selfish, lazy, self-indulgent, over-sexed… etc. My loneliness felt a bit like punishment. “Spirituality” had become difficult for me. The “spiritual leaders” I turned to for guidance seemed cruel and cold.
I think the first thing that saved my life (maybe literally) was The Open University. One of the wonderful creations of Harold Wilson’s Labour Government, The Open University opened its doors to students in 1971. In 1974, for the cost of almost nothing, (£20 per module in those days!) a gravely adrift young mother could find her way back into study. There I fell in love with Philosophy; and I found friends. Phew! I loved those endless conversations about Life the Universe and Everything. I hung around the academic world for long enough to acquire a B.A, an M.A and a Ph.D. But… looking back… I think it was a bit of a distraction. I was still deeply unhappy with who I was. I was (deliberately) inhabiting a spiritual desert. I had walked away from the conventional spiritual path that I was brought up with, relieved to be a good clean-living atheist. But the hungry ghosts still haunted me.
Still a good clean-living atheist, I turned to therapy. And I set foot on the (rather long) journey to learn to love myself. By the time I was in my late 30’s I had completed training in Gestalt Therapy and I had made some wonderful friends. What I like to think of as the more wholesome joining in began. The ‘firewall’ I had erected to protect myself from all things “spiritual” began to be breached.
As luck would have it… was it ‘luck’? or was it innate wisdom? I was drawn over and over to friends and teachers who were on a spiritual path. My Gestalt trainer, my therapist, my friends… they made it safe for me to begin to play with ritual, to play with metaphor, to soften into a ‘beyond’ that was not only safe, but the place of freedom and creativity and joy and belonging.
Two of my closest friends were 5 Rhythms dancers. They talked about it in ways I found deeply appealing. In truth, I was not a natural on the dance floor. I felt lumpen and ungainly. I didn’t know ‘how to’ dance. I didn’t entirely feel that I belonged. But somehow I wanted to. Was it just joining in? Or was there a deep intuitive knowing? Who knows? What I do know is that I persevered. Martin Julich (a beautiful, gentle, graceful man) was my first teacher. His teaching was wonderfully creative. Writing, drawing, bonfires, poetry, sweat lodges were somehow all part of this “dance” practice. I went to weekly drop-in classes… then an ongoing group… and then (in 1998) I found my way to dancing with Susannah and Ya’Acov. Around the Millennium, I did a year-long on-going group. It gave my year a shape, a spine, a deeply nourishing practice to return to again and again.
On the dance floor, and in my very own body, I began to find tools and maps that could lead me towards peace of mind. You know that lovely thing that Gabrielle Roth used to say? “Put the body in motion, and the psyche heals itself.” After a while I found it was simply the truth. I would take my troubled self to the dance floor, and find the dance of it… and magically, through the dance, I found freedom, self-knowledge and self-love.
For me, the wordlessness of the practice was absolutely central.
For each dancer the journey is entirely private.
Not only do you not have to put a story round it, actually the experience was (and still is) beyond words.
I think that dance transformed my relationship with myself, with my husband, with my children… and with Life. It became (even more than therapy) the place to find my way through things. I fell in love with Dance. But even that 50-year-old dancing self would still have been blown away to see me teaching. It hadn’t seriously begun to cross my mind that I might teach.
I want to fast forward to my Apprenticeship. The very first Long Dance. There we were, in a yurt in a farmer’s field in Somerset, dancing for hours. As I remember it, it was an incredibly grueling journey for me. In those long hours of dancing, not so much physically as psychologically and spiritually. I went to dark places. It deeply challenged me to be dancing in a ritual space. NOW, that journey is so familiar to me. The Mandala is a map that holds me so generously. But then, it was new, and I had a lot of resistance to surrendering to any kind of “spiritual” map that was mapped out for me. But I kept dancing. It was quite an act of faith, to be meeting those gnarly feelings, and still dancing, over and over, round after round. And then, fairly near the end, I danced once more with my Ancestors. And somehow they all showed up. All those ancient religious ancestors witnessed me. And they “got” it. They were impressed. They were impressed with the discipline. The thing that ‘landed’ for me was that the dancer’s sovereignty is absolutely at the heart of the practice. Each dancer chooses to commit to the practice. And each dancer decides what that means. There are no doctrines and dogmas. There is nothing that you must believe. And no-one tells you what is good and what is bad. Whatever wisdom and illumination you find comes from yourself or from beyond.
I feel I want to put in a small biographical confession, as a kind of ‘example’. When I ‘fell in love with the dance’, I did that thing where I thought that everyone should dance… and (in particular) I really wished my husband danced. I would feel envious of ‘dancing couples’. I would come home from long dancing workshops trying to recruit him to the dance floor. On one occasion, as I packed my bags, he looked at me and said, sadly “You usually coming home from these long dancing things feeling dissatisfied with me!” Ouch. Quite a wake up. What kind of spiritual practice makes you LESS tolerant of the people you love?! I took that to the dance too. In the opening circle I declared it to be my intention that it be otherwise. And I danced with it. As Susannah and Ya’Acov say: "Intention gives direction to our psyche and creates an energy field that opens the path to its realization". I came home from that workshop FULL of appreciation for my beloved. The dance gives us a place to let the healing happen. No-one told me what to do. I danced my own way to my own truth.
Oddly enough, it took me quite a long time to simply ENJOY! Dancing. I found it ‘interesting’ and ‘useful’ and ‘illuminating’. But it was not at first simply enjoyable. I was quite a long way into my commitment to dancing before I would just love to dance. Looking back, that baffles me rather. I honestly wonder how on earth such a dancer managed to stick with it! As a teacher I wonder if I could cope with a dance floor filled with dancers like me! That’s a joke. I think. Old habits die hard. I’m probably being hard on that earnest dancer.
I want to end with two poems. The first was written by Hafiz, in the 14th century, and was read to us by Susannah on my first ongoing group. It landed very deeply in my soul. The second was written last week by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer and read by me to my class last week. It reminds me of that workshop where I remembered to fall in love with my own beloved husband.
Venus Just Asked Me
Perhaps
For just one minute out of the day
It may be of value to torture yourself
With thoughts like,
“I should be doing
A hell of a lot more with my life than I am
Cause I’m so damn talented”
But remember
For just one minute out of the day.
With all the rest of your time,
It would be best to try
Looking upon your self more as God does
For He knows
Your true royal nature
God is never confused
And can see only Himself in you.
My dear
Venus just leaned down and asked me
To tell you a secret, to confess
She’s just a mirror who has been stealing
Your light and music for centuries.
She knows as does Hafiz
You are the sole heir to
The King
Hafiz
Carpe Diem
Knowing today brings the day of my death
one day closer, I decide to love you more.
By which I mean, I decide
to practice letting myself be
exactly who I am and letting you be
exactly who you are and noticing how
love grows in that most rich soil -
not the thick clay of longing for things
to be different, but the good loam
of reality. Our time here is too precious
to be spent with fruitless wishing.
In this generous earth of allowing,
what might grow? Real love.
The kind that requires nothing
but our laughter and tears,
our anger and forgiveness, our frustration
and tenderness. I feel love root anew
in this ground where soon enough
I, too, will belong. Do you feel it too,
the blooming between us, this love
that asks only for us
to be faithfully ourselves?
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
