When Movement Was Our Language

Here's a teaser line from a wonderful novel I'm reading right now, Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier: 

"Given that we can live only a small part of what there is in us--what happens to the rest?" 

Dance and creative movement are a way to experience "the rest"  in us.   Our interior universe mirrors our exterior universe,  and through our movement, we weave ourselves deeper into the space of who we are.  Here I find myself, 55 years old, a divorced male with a 30+ year professional career in one of the most rigid and conservative of all businesses, falling in love with ecstatic dancing.  This dancing isn't ballroom, latin, line, contra, hip hop, tango, or any  type of structured dance technique.  This dancing is spiritual practice, therapy, art, a way of creative expression.

Mary Starks Whitehouse, who founded dance therapy, said this in 1956!:

"We no longer know it but there was a time when movement was our language.  It was long ago and we can't remember, but we were born into an alien world in which the first movement was breathing--that sharp inflation of the lungs that brings the first cry."

When I use the language of movement, I feel poetry  inside me, an "imaginative awareness of experience expressed through meaning, sound, and rhythm."  Dancing with that awareness is the experience of my breath.  At the core of my experience, growing with my practice , is my stillpoint.   Gabrielle Roth, the founder and developer of the 5Rhythms dance practice, has said that the quickest way to still the mind is to move the body.  It really works for me!