On the eve of my 45th birthday, I went into the studio to tape the final piece for Move Through It. I booked only an hour and spent the first 30 to 40 minutes listening and moving to music without the camera recording. I had built up a sizable playlist of possible songs for this experiment, and I wasn’t sure what the final song would be.

I felt lithe and sure-footed as I moved, my body rising and falling, bending and turning with the diverse musical landscapes of each musical track. Then Claude Debussy's Suite Bergamusque, III: Clair de Lune began to play, and I knew this was the one.

A gorgeous composition, it begins quietly, cautiously, and then builds into something that feels liberated, limitless in its expression. As I moved to it, I felt myself going on a similar journey, starting with subtle gestures that became more emphatic and purposeful as the music built to a crescendo.

When the song ended, I was surprised to feel sweat running down the back of my neck. I was breathing hard. My heart pounded in my chest. I felt vibrant. Alive. Grounded. Present to the moment.

I decided it was time to make the final movement piece. I turned on the camera, started Debussy from the beginning and walked to the center of the room. However, about a minute into the taping, I heard a buzzing outside that grew louder and louder. I looked out the window to see a man with a leaf blower. The noise pollution completely overrode the classical music, and the guy was quite thorough in his work. There would be no movement recording as long as he was around. I paced in the studio, waiting several minutes, glancing outside intermittently and willing him to please move along already.

Finally, he was gone. but then so was my one hour in the studio. I had to pack up, and I didn't have a movement piece to show for it. I was crestfallen. What a waste, I thought.

But then, I had a second thought — and with that thought came a smile — because I recognized it as the Truth: The final movement piece did happen. It had happened off camera with only the studio mirrors as witness. The final movement piece was just for me.

***

POSTSCRIPT written February 1, 2016

After I left the studio on January 19, I went on to celebrate my 45th birthday the following day — and the celebrating sort of turned into a week-long (rest of the month?) observation. I spent a lot of time in the sun. I wrote for pages and pages in my journal. I wrote letters of gratitude to friends and family. I took myself to dinner at Jeffrey's and ordered without looking at the prices. I went for long walks with Martha Dog. I read in bed until well after midnight. I rarely set the alarm. I reflected on this past year and this experiment in movement.

I think Movement Piece No. 10 gave me the first inkling of what moving through this year would ultimately teach me. I couldn't fully articulate it yet, but I knew it had something to do with faith. Movement Piece No. 11 brought things closer to the surface, and, after recording Movement Piece No. 12, I could clearly see how the experiment's premise of "getting out of my head and into my body" had broader applications for me beyond getting through a milestone year in my life.

I now view Move Through It not as an experiment, but as a year-long practice in learning how to listen to my intuition, trust the process and get comfortable with not knowing. Each session in the studio allowed me an opportunity to quiet the rhetoric in my head and attune to what actually is through my felt sense. The practice kept me fully embodied in the present moment, feeling my way through the situation and trusting my intuition to show me the way.

I'm not saying that after a year of doing this, my mind has miraculously stopped analyzing and critiquing my every move. I've just become less interested in listening to it. I am getting better at distinguishing between what is fearful thinking and what is truth. This practice has given me a little more patience to sit with uncertainty and wait for the answers that feel right in my bones. I am learning the richness and value of the journey itself.

These aren't new ideas to me. I have understood them intellectually for many years — and even espoused them to the women I meet when I'm volunteer-facilitating classes in prison. But moving through this year has allowed these ideas to take root in my heart. It has awakened some faith deep down inside where previously there was very little.

This experiment also has reinforced for me the power of self-expression — especially when it is shared with others and used as a tool to make peace with things I find difficult or uncomfortable in life. Throughout this experiment, there were individuals who came forward and shared with me what witnessing Move Through It had evoked in them. Their stories and perspective brought awareness and healing to me I could not have found on my own.   

In ending Move Through It the experiment, I feel myself embarking on a life-long practice of listening for, and trusting in, this deeper knowing inside me — especially when my heart is hurting or life feels overwhelming or threatening. Because this is where I will find a more empowering truth that will support and sustain me as I move about life, exploring a path that was cleared just for me.

I spend a lot of time listening to other people’s stories and holding space for what they have buried deep in their hearts. I feel a tremendous amount of gratitude for this work because it has given my life purpose and meaning beyond what I could have imagined only years ago. However, I’m beginning to see with increasing clarity that if I am to do this work effectively for many years to come — behind and beyond prison walls — I need to start holding that same space for what’s going on inside my heart. If I’m not grounded in my own story and aware of what imprisons me, then who am I to help others “seek the depth of things,” as the poet Rilke once wrote?

I’m not sure when it happened, but somewhere along the way, I started feeling disconnected from my story. I stopped doing the work alongside the women in the prison and shifted into a leadership role, focusing entirely on the quality of their experiences in the classroom. I think that’s where the breakdown started. I can be full of empathy when I’m listening to others, but I struggle when it’s my turn to talk about my life. The things I write about and share in class feel flat, unexamined, like old script versus truth. Of course, it’s not always this way, but it happens more often than I want it to.

I have all the compassion, all the faith, all the patience, all the encouragement for the women who show up, semester after semester, at the prison. But I don’t offer those things to myself. Or, more truthfully, I do, but they are parceled out in limited quantity and run out quickly when I feel threatened or stressed. My internal critic is quick to point out where I fall short or am sure to fail. She resists stillness, silence and solitude; there’s no time for that. She speaks from a place of fear and scarcity. To my credit, I don’t let her drive my life. I push through the fear, for the most part. But I spend a lot of time listening to her, and I’m feeling really tired.

When I began this experiment in authentic movement, I did it on the premise that I needed to “get out of my head and into my body” to process a milestone year in my life. I’m now realizing that my instinct to shift to a more grounded place to deal with a tough reality has set me up perfectly for a lesson I’ve been needing to learn in general. This year-long experiment in authentic movement has turned into a practice of silencing that internal critic and listening more to my intuition. What do I feel inside? What wants to move? And I give myself permission to do so, because it’s what I need to take care of me.

It is helping me connect to a deeper sense of self, and it feels like I’m holding space for my own heart when I do this. I am worth all the compassion, all the faith, all the patience, all the encouragement. I will figure it out one chord, one note, one beat at a time. And next thing you know, I will be dancing.

Recorded November 17
Track: The Curse
Artist: Agnes Obel

I sat at her kitchen table and admitted that I had become obsessed with Movement Piece 10. For a few weeks there, I watched it daily, sometimes more than a few times a day.

“I just wanted to be back there, in that moment, in that environment.”

“What were you feeling in that moment, and how did it feel in your body?” she asked.

In my mind, I replayed the morning — not the video of it, but the experience itself.

I felt free, liberated — but, at the same time, very grounded. I felt connected, connected to something … I don’t know … something I couldn’t see or really understand? It’s like the sky was watching me. I felt an Observer, and what I was doing mattered to it.

And how did it feel in my body? That's harder to articulate. I guess I felt my vitality, like a tingling on my cheeks and in my fingers and toes. I felt the oxygen in my nostrils and lungs. I felt rooted to the earth, which is strange because I struggled on the gravel-strewn incline. But that’s how I would describe it.

Looking back on it, I think what I was feeling was faith. Faith in myself. Faith in my life. And it was coming from a place within and without simultaneously.

I think that’s what I was searching for as I replayed the video countless times. I was trying to remember: How does it feel to have faith in myself, complete and utter faith?

I embodied it for a moment alongside a desert road. And now that I know what it feels like, I will recognize it when it happens again.

And it will happen again, as long as I keep moving through it.

It was early morning on a scenic overlook along Pinto Canyon Road, about 33 miles southwest of Marfa, Texas. The sun had yet to peek over the bluff on the facing eastern horizon. The wind, still chilly with night, stung in my throat and made my ears ache. The ground beneath me was at an incline and covered with gravel and loose rocks, making every movement a compromise between what I wanted to happen and what was possible.

For several songs, without the witness of the camera, I moved. I marveled at how quickly the elevation stole my breath. I paused to take delicious inhales and exhales, wanting my insides to match the stillness around me. I waited patiently to feel grounded. Then I turned on the camera.

Each movement turned my attention further away from the discerning eye perched upon the tripod. The yuccas, with their floral pom-poms rustling in the wind, became my audience. I felt a lightness and freedom in my body, born from the choices I am making in my life.

As I moved upon the earth, I felt a connection to something beyond my understanding, as certain as the sun that now peered from over the bluff, brilliant in its warmth like a mother's love.

The Difference

Head takes me by the shoulders
and shakes me.
Heart patiently waits for the silence
and whispers.

Night Shift

Sometime after midnight,
I spread a comforter in the grass, take a pillow from my bed,
stare at the stars so long they split into reds and blues.

I go back to the couch where we talked.
I stand again at the bed where we cried.

Then the wind blows and the branches dance overhead.

“And now you are here,” they remind me.

I inhale the warm summer night, like a swimmer coming up for air.
The stars come back into focus. A neighbor’s dog barks in the distance.
The blinking lights of a plane fly into and out of view.

What intrigues me about this song is how it starts out in this dreamy flow state and then disintegrates into a cacophony that, at first, sounds exhilarating, but then (to me, at least) becomes chaotic and disturbing. I wanted to replicate those sensations in my body somehow, moving from light to dark. 

It wasn't until I was watching the video afterwards that I really took notice of my reaction to "the dark," those moments just after I stopped spinning:

First, I exert great force to fight against it. I give myself little time to recoup before testing my balance and attempting to move on. I try to look graceful. I press on even though I'm nauseous. I go to the floor and roll around. Still trying. To what? For whom?

And then I finally listen to my body. It says: JUST STOP. BE STILL.

And so I do, and I feel a distinct return to light.

Side note: In the beginning of this video, I'm doing a moving meditation created by Peggy Hackney (c) 1996 and taught to me very recently by my lovely friend Lucy Dubose. I changed sequence of the movements a bit. It's called "The Ritual," and the words go like this:

The Ritual

I ground myself in the Earth.

I gather energy from the Earth and bring it through myself to the Heavens.

I receive from the Heavens.

I open myself to recognize that I am in community.

I return to myself.

I enclose to take time to be with myself.

I gather from my heritage what is useful to me.

I value my present qualities.

I take all of me into my embodied future.

I added this song to my "Move Through It possibilities" playlist many weeks ago, but it quickly rose to the top after I returned from the Aspen Ideas Festival. My head and heart are still processing the statistics, conversations, presentations and stories I heard concerning social justice issues in America — namely, our country's history of structural racism and the inequities of our criminal justice system. It is one thing to witness blatant brokenness in the privately run prison where I volunteer. It is quite another to hear thought leaders at a national conference confirm my worst fear — that what I've seen isn't special, but a sliver of a larger, systemic problem with repercussions that will play out for generations to come. 

The Reunion

“Step into the circle if you’ve lost a parent.”

Lori steps into the circle. I notice she is crying, this woman who keeps a straight face and chooses her words cautiously and uses them sparingly. I step into the circle too, as do a handful of other women in the prison classroom.

“Say your name, which parent passed away and how long ago.”

I state the facts, devoid of memory or feeling.

“Katie. My mom. 25 years ago.”

I watch Lori's hands, which keep leaving her sides, like a nervous tick, to swipe at the tears running down her cheeks. 

The other women in the circle share of their losses, and then it is Lori's turn.

"Lori. My dad. Tuesday." 

It is Thursday. 

Her words hang in the air and, for a moment, we are all like statues. Then the woman to Lori's right places a hand on Lori's back and rubs a slow circle. It undoes something inside, and a sob escapes Lori before her hands can cover her mouth.

In this moment, I remember my own grief. I can feel the weight of it in my chest. I can feel it catching in my throat. But I do not fear of drowning in it. Instead, I welcome it like an old friend, grateful to be reconnecting after all these years. 

En route to the studio, I received a text message from Carol at Truth Be Told: "I'm going to be seeing Andrea in five minutes."

I pulled over and made a quick video on my phone for Carol to share with Andrea. I told Andrea that I was bummed to miss out on this fortuitous visit and that I wished her strength, joy and peace from Austin. 

Andrea, who was released from prison about 130 days, had been in Carol's "Let's Get Real" class and in my "Talk to Me Circle" class while she was incarcerated at GEO Lockhart. She had managed to make quite an impression on both of us.

For me, Andrea represents one of my biggest learning curves to date as a volunteer class facilitator behind bars. About three weeks into my semester with Andrea, I came very close to kicking her out of my class — something I had never done before (and have not since). I lost so much sleep over that woman, wondering if it was right or wrong to ask her to leave, wondering whether I'd have the courage to confront her, wondering whether I'd find the right words to get at the heart of the matter and understand what's really going on with her.

In the end, the confrontation did happen — outside in the hallway and away from her peers — and I believe the words I found, while definitely not perfect, were effective enough. Her response allowed me to see, for the first time, the sincere woman hiding behind that caustic exterior. Standing there in the hallway, I made a gut-level decision: Don't kick her out. Let her stay.

So I did, and she ended up being one of the best students I've had in terms of the transformation I saw in her and the growth she evoked in me.

As I entered the studio, Carol texted me again. On my phone was a picture of her and Andrea, smiling back at me from a Dairy Queen somewhere in Northeast Texas. Their peaceful faces stayed with me as I danced, and I felt a profound sense of freedom — to move, to believe, to love, to be. 

I've been sick all week, so my energy this morning was pretty low — an unfortunate thing because this song makes me want to twirl and spin a lot. I also was feeling really critical of myself during the session, so I ended up recording this piece three times. I just wasn't satisfied with how it felt.

That sucked. Do it again.

By the third take, I felt I had hit upon something that felt relatively solid, so I called it a morning, packed up my gear and left the studio. This post originally featured the third take — the most polished version, so to speak. But, after sitting with this for a while, I started feeling like … a fraud? Is this experiment about presenting something polished for the viewer, or is it for me?

I knew the answer right away. I took down the third take and posted the original.

Despite the internal conflict around this movement piece, I still felt grateful to be in the studio and moving around. A handful of nights ago, I had a dream and it came back to me as I danced. 

Back in Carrollton house, but I'm an adult — me in present day. I haven't been there in a long time and I've come to visit. Mom still lives there. She has redecorated with modern furniture. A woman — a neighbor, I assume — is there. She is Mexican-American and speaks with a heavy accent. It's hard for me to understand her, but she has notes from Mom in her hand and she's trying to install a new telephone system. Mom is not there. My assumption is that she is at work. I leave the neighbor in the kitchen and go to the front door. I notice it's ajar. I open the door and old fliers stuffed in the door handle fall to the ground. There's also mail — personal mail — stacked on the porch, because the mailbox is overflowing. I notice boxes and shelves of items down by the curb in the grass, free for the taking. I get closer and see that they are my things, things I need. Files and paperwork from my office, keepsakes I care about. In particular, I see a music box from Luxembourg that I inherited from my grandmother.

"What is she doing?" I ask myself. I don't understand why my things are on the lawn. I go inside the house and I see my sister. I tell her what I have seen, and as I'm speaking to her it occurs to me that this is the behavior of a woman who knows she is dying. Things are just things. None of this matters.

But, I wonder why my things were on the lawn in the dream. Perhaps my subconscious mind, like a good portion of my waking thoughts, is wondering what it would feel like to be Mom.        

No journaling with this one. Just went in and danced around and then took myself out for breakfast. The End.

Excerpt from journal before taping: I don't know exactly how I'm going to do this. I feel self-conscious, not nervous, but just this incredible desire to do it right, to make it meaningful. I'm looking around this studio with incense burning and sunlight coming through the windows and feeling kind of giddy that I made this happen. I just need to relax, turn my attention inward and embrace this experiment, this practice that I am creating.

Excerpt from journal after taping: I feel relieved, a lightness in the knowledge that I did this and can do this. This morning I felt mostly anxious — like, what have I gotten myself into?? — but right now I feel more like I have given myself a gift, and it's going to take a whole year to open it.