February 2018.

“Letting go of the known and receiving the unknown, we can sense new possibilities. When we expect change, life rarely disappoints us. In the dance we can get to know ourselves well enough to be aware of the judgments, expectations, and attachments that inevitably get in our way.” GABRIELLE ROTH

 

After a lovely and intense passage from the Old Year into the New, at our Tribal Dance workshop, I dove deep into my winter sleep. After many working winters, getting stuck in snow with the car on my way to lead workshops in other cities, halls without heating, cancellations at the last minute due to illness or snow, I realized that, like a squirrel, I had been working hard gathering food during autumn and was now able to allow myself to spend a part of winter in my tree hole, chewing on hazelnuts, watching good TV series. This year I also gave myself a present of going into the unknown. I have not done something this exciting and stirring for quite a long time. I travelled to a place I had never been before and did not know anything about where I was going or who and what awaited me there. There I was met by wonderful people who manage a little retreat (I was the only one of three possible guests) with a lush garden overflowing with flowers, fruit, and vegetables that they had created on volcanic soil up on a hill overlooking the ocean. During the day the ocean merged with the sky and every day the sunset told me when it was time to stop eating on this detox retreat of mine, as I enjoyed the most amazing star-studded night sky that I had ever seen. The taxi driver by the name of Angel, who saved me several times during my “hiking” adventures, told me everything about his life in Spanish, which I barely understand and speak even less. Every day I went through a letting go of the old shit, quite literally thanks to the hydrocolon therapy, which by itself did not make me very happy, but the lightness that I felt afterwards was certainly worth it. I was surprised to see that in this silence I was embraced by so much peace and quiet. It is as if I was not really aware that I had it within me through life, that I had this ability to settle down, just be, observe the clouds, and now I was mature enough to be able to enjoy it, too. One of the great driving forces in my life, as well as a source of much anxiety and neurosis, is my need to be useful. This time I was useful to myself – everything was there for me, my health, my balance, my cleansing, my rest. I knew I had deserved it. I knew that I had gone through a very difficult, demanding and tough period of my life at full speed recently and that this was prevention instead of me waiting to break down completely. And actually, when I look back over the years, it seems that I have a period like this every year. Like every wave has its turning point, the moments of the darkest night, the point where we get lost in order to find ourselves, the life test or life alarm clock that asks us to be fully ready for whatever is going on. The moments when we know what it is that we should keep holding on to and what it is that we need to let go. When we need to keep both our feet on the ground, with flexible knees so that we can change direction when the undercurrent that is guiding us changes, with our minds focused on our breath, and our bellies relaxed so that we can hear the inner voice which bypasses all the crazy voices in our head, with our heart as a compass in our chest that stands tall and is open even when it is breaking under a palm of a hand that instinctively found its way there to give it support. With our eyes that can see the smallest details and our consciousness that can see the bigger picture and encompasses both where we came from and where we are going.   

Coming home was like a plane landing on rough ground. The period right after my return was like equalising the air pressure after being submerged deep in the water or coming back from Outer Space or coming down from some hallucinogenic trip. I am observing how quickly old habits return and how they come into conflict with the newly formed ones.

I am still grateful that I went, grateful for new dances that are waiting for me around the corner, for new and old friends in the dance.

I hope that our feet shall meet in some of these sacred dance spaces! Kisses, Silvija