Dancing, Toddlers and Natural Movement

This text, as the title may indicate, goes hand in hand with two other texts, namely 'Let the Thunder Rumble: Natural Movement with Thoreau and Chuang Tzu' and 'Mountain Presence with Nietzsche, Lin-Chi and Conan the Barbarian'. These texts explored the idea of realizing that nature and with that ourselves as part of it are subject to constant change. Resisting this change is futile, regardless how horrible it may be. If you're in a bad spot this may help you, knowing that it will most likely pass. If you're in a great spot however, you may start to get anxious about it being taken away from you (which is going to happen inevitably) and try to cling to it (which again, is futile). Living with this knowledge of impermanence though, can and will shape your character in a certain way, as it requires a quite big amount of both strength and flexibility which are mutually dependent on one another. Only possessing strength may leave you rigid, stiff and hard-nosed as someone who has lived through too many hard times and had to put up a front for protection. Because the body and the mind are one, putting up a front like that will happen both in the body and the mind, leaving one cold (emotionally) and rigid (physically).

Yet being rigid will not only leave you more incapable of dealing with an ever-changing and fluid environment, it will also deprive you of aliveness. Being stiff and cold, as dead bodies are, are attributes associated with death, whereas pliability and with it warmth, are associated with aliveness. If you look at the way a healthy toddler gets up from the ground you will most likely see perfect bodily alignment and relaxed and fluid movements. Uninhibited by past trauma, the child is able to be relaxed and therefore able to "let the body and the muscles extend to their full capability [...]" as a ballet instructor once put it. Trauma in this case can again be both physical and mental. Old injuries may hinder us just as much as the instilled beliefs that "this is the way this should be done" or "one ought to do it this way" whatever it may be. In order to be able to deal with constant change flexibility and strength are crucial. Mental attitudes flow into the body just as much as the bodily shape flows into mental attitudes; it is all you. Figuratively speaking,

if you adopt the mental attitude of a bodybuilder, strong yet rigid, you may be able to carry quite some weight or leave a certain impression, but you will be unable to evade any of the strikes life throws at you.

picture by jeff via wikimedia commons

Hence, what I'm looking for is not a bodybuilder, not a strongman and also not a dusty, doughy scholar. But someone flexible, yet strong. The metaphorical character to carry these features will be the dancer.* The idea is not to fight the change and the ways of the world, for that is futile and exhausting, but to go along with it, sometimes being hard, sometimes being tender. To dance and not to crush. You take on whatever life throws at you and deal with it accordingly. In the same way a dancer moves accordingly to his partner, or the rhythm. Always fluid, never rigid, for being rigid is being stuck. Based on this principle, the 'dance' of Judo was born:


*It goes without saying, yet please keep in mind that this is a metaphor and that it does not entail that any particular real person who happens to be a dancer must have these attributes nor that anybody who doesn't happen to be one lacks these attributes.

video by TheCombatSystem.com 

As Alan Watts has once mentioned in one of his talks, a zen-master was once asked what the mind of a child, or the Buddha mind, is like. His answer: A ball in a mountain stream. Thought after thought after thought, with no block. In the same way, the judo master is only able to deal with these attacks, because he is constantly adapting his center of gravity and reacts accordingly, with no block or hesitation. One moment of hesitation, of tensing up would cost him the fight. Again similarly, the dancer moves fluidly in accordance with the rhythm of life, while never losing the ability to proceed powerfully, when it's called for.