Janice said to me, as we were sitting down to begin our writer's group, "You must love dancing. To do it so much."

Right away I said, "No I hate it!" She was surprised, but even before this utterance a team of wild statements fought to leap out of my mouth. She continued, "And I read your piece on dancemeditation - it seems to do so much for you. How can you hate that?"

A good question. My complex relationship to dance is not about love or hate or any one feeling. Feelings, in fact, are just one part of the experience, an aspect of understanding, but since they are embedded in my cells they must be negotiated like any rocky terrain whenever I move and take attentive notice of my motion. No, I don’t I hate dancing. There are just days when my hatred is in it.

When I said 'hate' it was a drama queen way of saying 'resistance'. And 'resistance' is a miasmic way of saying that I don't know why I am having a hard time getting down to my practice today. I lose sight of an action's result despite the proven benefit. It is a state-of-mind - big and dumb, mean and crafty. I can smash it in one whack, then watch it, Terminator-like, reassemble itself un-phased. It has worn a rut so deep in my brain that there are days it threatens to split my skull apart.

One morning several weeks ago as I stretched gently with my eyes closed, I saw myself strapped into a dentist-like chair, above me an evil giant poised clutching a gargantuan syringe. The syringe was full of poison. It pierced my heart, then skull, genitalia, the tender soles of my feet, my palms. I was stunned by the wash of poison. This poisoning had been going on for centuries. My mother and father were inculcated, as were my grade school teachers, baby sitters, parish ministers, newscasters. In fact every formative being in my childhood world, except my dog. The poison was this: that my body is dirty, sinful, gluttonous, unclean, carnal and stupid while pristine higher-self is all mind and thought. The vision passed, leaving my heart thudding heavily against my chest wall.

By moving and letting my body speak I encounter generations and centuries of remorse and terror. Something sweet and real was corrupted for us all but, as I dance, I must grieve solitarily.

Individual, specific accumulated shames or worries tangle in my tissues as well. Practice shoos them out of hiding, like a hound in underbrush putting up game. I resist my practice because it is an unaccustomed act of turning loving attention towards myself after years of not doing so. I've avoided myself, creating a fantasy of who I am in my separated, lofty, supposedly-spiritual mind. Now I delve down so embodiment can teach me the whole.

In the movie 'Fast, Cheap and Out of Control', an artificial life researcher at MIT has a robotics lab. Machines resembling crabs, storks and insects meander around the room falling over objects, banging into doorframes. Their movements are oddly familiar but clumsy, retarded versions of the animals after which they are modeled. The researcher says it is relatively easy to make a computer that will think as well as a human. (Just look at Deep Blue in chess.) But it is virtually impossible to make a machine that can move like any living creature let alone something as complex as a human. He goes on to explain that the leg of coach roach has over 3000 hairs each of which is a receptor. And each of those receptors responds to the environment bringing information to the creature, making its movements quick, silky, physically intelligent. I think of a narrow-minded millipede gliding elegantly across the kitchen floor.

Humans have billions of receptors. We feel our way through life, making decisions based on those sensations. All of this, as well as the thought and emotion with which I've been encouraged to identify, is me. I patiently retrieve my particulars through conscious movement and breathing in my daily practice, innocent of the enormity of forgotten or missing detail I will uncover. Much of it is remorse. Or discomfort. Much of it is inscrutable pre-cognitive tissue memory. Thus a daily practice is a reformation of identity, a process entailing recovery, discovery and integration. It must be what an adoptee feels when in adulthood she finds her birth mother and must reconsider who she is.

For me this is nurturing Self-regard. I regard self. Watching and listening to learn who I really am. No longer piecing my self together from photos, newspaper reviews or fairy tales. I wiggle myself into myself, as if into a tight stocking. The habit of self-nurture will probably take as long to instill as its inculcated paucity has taken.

During the rare periods when I neglect practice, I feel disgruntled and separate. Lonely. Practice erases all that. Its intention, continuity and consistency dissolve the subjective, despairing sensation of isolation. I experience realities that have little to do with my educated mind or atavistic greed. I feel compassion. Contentment with the details of my situation. Appreciation for my breath.

I look over at Janice. What have I said to her? None of this. I feel uneasy, unfinished, wondering if she thinks I'm strange. But wouldn't it be stranger to choke out that "Dance is my spiritual home." casually? Instead I turn to her and add, "But when I went to do my practice this morning I was glad to be there."

Excerpted from Dunya's upcoming book "Room for Infinite Dances"

©2001 Dianne Dunya McPherson