Standing in the centre of our lives

“Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living room” ~ from Everybody’s Free to Wear Sunscreen (Baz Luhrman)

I have just got home from two hours of hot, rhythmic, ecstatic, emotive, expressive, wild dancing. The silence of my living room is enveloping me in stark contrast to the glowing, thrumming, electrifying hall where a couple of hundred people went wild, dancing to the incredible set and powerfully held space by Martine Kirkbride, the founder of possibly my favourite movement practice – Danceitation.

I have been dancing for many years. I’m not trained and know next to nothing about choreographed dancing, but when it comes to movement as meditation, to ecstatic, untamed, untidy, raw, animalistic, childlike, freedom-hungry dancing, I have notched up hundreds of hours’ practice over the years. I turned up to tonight’s sober rave having battled a lot of lethargic resistance; two hours before class I was in floods of tears. I was in a load of emotional and mental shit, and keen to shift it. Emotion is energy in motion; I knew that movement would help. My incredible friend Hannah Massarella came along for her first time ever, and we agreed that we could leave at any point.

I danced in different places in the space tonight, but kept finding myself pulled as if magnetically to the front and centre of the room, in front of the headphone-wearing, multicoloured-light-wearing Buddha statue-slash-altar. The two hundred or so dancing humans moved and grooved and whooped and clapped, our feet and hips and hands and heads stamping and rocking and spinning and shaking to one banging tune after another. I was in my body and my mind, working a load of stuff out, and I came to something.

I was dancing in the front and centre of the space because I am not willing to be anywhere other than in the centre of my life.

Women are conditioned to be appealing, appeasing and agreeable. We become shapeshifters, often morphing and shaping ourselves so that we are not an inconvenience or do not disrupt the status quo. I realised that I had waited too long to ask for what I want recently, and that there are some very key ways in which I have been holding back, minimising the entirety of my experience around different people so as not to be an inconvenience, a trouble-maker or the instigator of any pain. I’ve been standing, in small but important ways, on the outskirts of my life, and my body has been keeping score.

I thought tonight of the moment when I knew I had changed my life forever; it was July 23rd 2018, the day after I had left my husband, and I had gone back to my marital home to collect a car’s worth of stuff. As I loaded up my little red Suzuki, I realised that I had done it. I had done the most difficult thing I had ever had to do in my adult life. I had changed the entire course of my future. It was heartbreaking and utterly disruptive to my ex, and it was also exactly what I needed. To thine own self be true.

Tonight I thought of that version of Elloa, the woman standing on the edge of the abyss, the brave phoenix setting fire to her own nest, the woman who had no fucking clue what lay ahead, and I thought about what it means to really stand in the centre of my life, rooted and clear about who I am, what I want and what I am and am not willing to do, be and become. I allowed myself to acknowledge exactly what I want. It felt powerful and bright and strong (and daunting and boat-rocking and uncomfortable).

As my body did her thing, deep belly-dwelling knowledge rose to the surface.

I will not let that woman down.

I have battled to be where I am right now.

I will stand in the centre of my life.

What about you? Does this idea speak to you? I don’t know that I’ve fully expressed what it means to me, but I wonder if it says something to you, something personal and meaningful and perhaps even provocative.

(Photo by Ahmad Odeh on Unsplash. Thank you, Ahmad. This is how I feel sometimes when I dance.)