My Dance Meditation starts the same every day. I move. I am not patient enough to listen for the beginning. I begin listening as I go. Once inside my movement, I want to move away from my motion, running inside from the outer running, distressed and driven, like a car with the gas pedal floored.

One-pointed concentration can release me from the compulsion to escape myself. I park my ever-noisy mind on a task, giving it something to occupy its habitual obsessions. Now I am lava under a crust of task-filled mind, but the effort to release often becomes unreleased. Tight. I must release the effort of release. Release is so exhausting that I finally give up releasing. I give up. My mind dithers. My body flails. I am still moving.

I am moving one level down inside myself. I know less, releasing into a 'not knowing'. Folds of endless movement tumble like towels out of a dryer, and I don't know what me-ness they are comprised of. To stop grasping with my know-it-all mind and greedy emotions leaves me waffling I feel divorced from that which habitually motivates me: a going towards 'being right' and away from 'being wrong'. Towards being loved and away from being reviled or ignored. These inclusions and exclusions, which define survival on an animal level, are like a bloated, wild river always going somewhere too brutally fast. They don't allow time to be in the experience of release. I surrender them at long last. It feels good.

'Surrender', the word most commonly associated with meditation, is suspending the need to both identify everything and to identify with everything coming from oneself. In surrender I release the meaning of a movement. I let my movement be the voice and ear of my body - a body's motion dream, a body chewing and savoring the essence of its experience. Sentinel mind stands empty, compassionately watching waves of motion cast into space and time, redolent with tales no mind could think of, beyond the self-referential and self-generated - a messenger from the other side riding swiftly into view waving a sleek shining flag of unknown origin.

I read somewhere that learning is the removal of synaptic impulse. We begin sentience with a blazing, bleary overwhelming load of impressions and, in order to survive, cut a path through thick woods, associating this feeling with that action, this sequence leading to that consequence and voila! stumble into adulthood all tidy, connected up and ready for action. Our lives becomes cultural shorthand rather than elaborate personal calligraphy. As I surrender to the disorganized, dangerous, magical underbrush of unconsciousness, I feel safer than I feared. I am released from primal fear that is, after all, separation from the unified subtle field. I am in motion and surrender to the dissolution of "I-ness". Far inside my movement, replete with moment-by-moment explosions of infinity, I am faintly aware as my personality, that diligent container of anxieties and dear definitions, grow soft like morphine haze and finally blips into eternity.

First printed in Movement Research Performance Journal, Spring 1999