Or: The Gifts of Authentic Movement, Sound, and Safe Community

It was dark and one by one we entered the small, comforting building lit only by the glow of a few tiny candles. The others sat in a circle with an opening, an invitation for me to join them and fill the empty space. Greeted by sincere smiles I went to each, these friends I know so well, and bent down to each for a deep hug, and the next, until I sat down too, adding to the circle. A few minutes later another woman arrived and this woman slipped in, filling more of the crescent, met by the kindest of gazes, a squeeze of the hand. She doesn't know the others as well, I thought, but the capacity of this group for love and welcoming moves me every time. Finally, a last woman arrived who I had never seen before. She timidly found her place, completing the circle. Again, more warmth as the rest of us instinctively moved in a bit closer.

Soon we settled our 7 bodies and busy lives into complete silence and stillness. Sibylle guided us to wordlessly call in the spirits of the women of our families, so we invited them to bear witness to what we were about to do, create, unleash. It was so easy to imagine them there, joining us. Women long gone, who we may or may not have "known," and those still with us, but who without proximity or inclination, could not explore such a wild process as this. There they were- poof- forming more circles around ours like petals and rings on water.

My Grandma Frannie (neé Francis), my mother’s mother, was suddenly standing behind me with a wry, sweet smile, mischievous blue eyes sparkling in the darkened room, her hand with its softest of touch on my shoulder. There in the half dark and my inner seeing: obligatory coral colored lipstick, tan limbs, little poofy tummy, and her beautifully mapped face from years of clandestine cigarette smoking, laughing riotously, and also all she took in and felt, but didn't say. And irony had seemed to find its place among us too. I imagined that even her spirit couldn't be separated from those ridiculous all-white tennis outfits she often wore later in life, though she hadn't played or even tossed a ball to one of us kids in years. Apparently as a tennis champion's wife and the maker of formidable tennis rackets, Frannie felt she should don the part of Irving's sporty Mrs. whether she still actually swung a racket or not. (And truth be told, she never did so very well.) Still, the sight in my mind's eye of that too-short skort design, showing off her wrinkled knees and flaccid legs in that reverent space made me love her even more for all of it.

My mind tracked other women closest to me, incredible beings who flank me in my life from all corners of the globe: kooky, complex and beautiful blends of laughter and deep love, feistiness and devotion, intuition and inner strength. I felt washed in gratitude for all their unique parts and the ways they show up in my life and my boys’, all these women who are so humble and genuine, trying to find balance in an imbalanced world.

In calling Frannie in and the others I so often long to hold, daily raise our kids with, and share meals, I immediately dropped into the deepest, most tender place in me, tears already filling behind closed eyes, and Frannie's knowing smile on my lips, as if I caught it like a flame.

Still seated, we Om'd for a while, then more loosely wove our voices, harmonizing and stretching beyond to discordance, exploring edges of sound and what was comfortable, what feels messy, so we could begin to spill out too. Candles extinguished, we gathered blankets and each found a corner or swath in the dark, a space that felt just right so that there, eyes closed, we could each explore in our own way how we needed to move and express.

Our “rules” each time are simple: eyes closed, move and sound in any way you are called to. If you brush up against another, this can be permissible and further explored, or not, depending on what you both feel. If your movements are big, open your eyes just enough to see who and what’s around. Movements and/or sounds can be inspired by the realm of what you have been familiar with or you are free to explore beyond that too, to experiment, play. And from grunts to sighs, songs to toning, whinnying, screaming, silence, and more, the range of sounds expressed is as free and unconstrained.

In that nearly black room, we stretched, pounded the floor, gracefully arcing or moving clumsily. Someone may have been moving one small finger or nothing at all, or shaking spastically. The beauty each time is that all this is happening with such…privacy. No one is looking, judging or caring what you do here. You have entered a space beyond the realm of right and wrong. Of time. And yet, the further to the edge you explore, the more you have also given permission to the others in the room to uncover what has been hidden. In that studio called Iris (and then beyond, beyond), we remind each other that messy, ugly, loud, tender, animal, it is all perfect. Here we remember that each of us is perfect, compassionately held and even invited. Soon, along with all that feeling of we “are enough”, expressions of love, trauma, ancient ones, the shoots of spring, fury, sadness, wolves and tiny, vulnerable inner little girls are released to find their places safely among us.

I lay huddled under my blanket after an initial attempt to stretch and move, soon realizing I was being called to stillness, to safety. Child’s pose, child like, I grew smaller and reentered a space within a space full of warmth and mother love. I didn’t remember what it meant or when I had ever heard it but suddenly the only sound that wanted to be uttered through me was Ham Sa. I pushed past “meaning” and “whys” and allowed those 2 simple sounds to come up through the earth, my spine, into my belly, out my open mouth. This was a quiet expression, buried under the comfort of the exquisite rawness of the other women’s cacophony. I was happy to be lost under all that, unseen, unheard, all mine.

There I am, a clenched ball of bone and muscle, grief and gratitude, old and young. Images flash across a black field. My three incredible sons laughing, holding each other; us playing, the swells of love I feel for them. All I want to do and share with them. Ham-Sa. Abstractions. Faces. Shapes. Trails through woods. Lists. Like clouds. K., the father of my youngest son, a man with whom I have shared deep love and discordance for 11 years. Do you see him too: floating from his house to mine and back again, ghost like, between worlds, not charged with passion for our life together, not fully, gratefully, anywhere at all. Where did he really go? What wounds of my own pushed him away? Either way, whoosh, tears, like placental fluid, whoosh, I am being carried by a river. Whether it leads you closer together or to a different truth, release with love, love and release, no sense of failure. It’s been time to start celebrating Life again, bursting with possibility, with all the excitement and passion YOU are, Jenny, and is sprouting all around you.

Shhh, I croon to me, and then Ham-Sa so gratefully for the healing of the truth in the dark.

I re-enter our home over the holidays, bursting with gifts and holiday cheer, this beautiful old house filled and surrounded with love, clean air and good soil, the sturdiest and most forgiving of mountains, gentle fields and generously flowing water. All this when so many have so little. This poor tired house that could use some love too. Ham-Sa. My mom, who visited last month as she often does with her erratic ways and good intentions, how she just wouldn’t stop with her litany of negativity, her regrets, rehashing the challenges of her old relationships again, until finally, finally, couldn’t you hear us screaming, my grown man of a brother crying so tenderly, all of us crying, and then laughter again tumbling out, my mother lifting her obligatory joint to her lips, those she once taped at night for years as a ‘tween to help her look more like Bridget Bardot?

Whether her toils at vanity had actually worked or her genetics simply did what they were meant to, her naturally full lips have been very much real since, and even they too made their way into my Iris-womb with the rest of her. I could so clearly see her strikingly beautiful face with its own complex map of wrinkles at 71. She was sitting at my kitchen table in that miserable aftermath of Christmas 2018 with no one but us around. Still, her perfectly made-up lips were carefully lined and shining in their purple opalescent glory because, well, you never know who may drop in, yes even on a dark country road. Let it be known that she would, and will forever be the Downtown Diva, always ready for anything, marijuana smoke rising into her squinting eyes, while she attempted a sheepish apology because yet again, she could not control her over-reactions, her dramas about so little when we have so much. Don't make me cry again, she said. Shit my mascara is running, Ham-Sa. Ham- Sa.

A woman in the darkened room is howling. There is cackling, someone whooping, singing, another voice that sounds like an operatic bird, gorgeous and haunting, as it all is. I return to what is mine and let the other sounds recede again to do their separate work. But first I think, how can something so collective also be so personal and even private? So healing??! And yet, how can it not be with such a confluence as this: this miraculous, unbridled process of “Authentic Soul Sound Expression,” these brave women who are searching for meaning and their own truths, and Iris, our magical little sanctuary in a small town called Accord, NY, that was the dream baby of Sibylle and Paul Lichtenberg. Time is broken down here, we come wildly undone and put back together, whole, in what a mere clock holds in one miniscule hour.

M is suddenly there with me in the dark. Or more correctly, I am there with her, having just zoomed to where she was that night a few weeks ago when I massaged her swollen belly in the guest bedroom opposite mine. She had been spending a few nights with L, her grown daughter and one of my closest friends. M’s belly swells dramatically when she’s stressed, all her griefs that have been so carefully tucked quietly within the writhing and coiled intestines and dark organs, hidden insidiously but always prepared to rise up, ready to betray her. When she’s worried, which occurs fairly often, this kindest of women must take to bed, mesmerized by the writhing and pain, the unnatural swelling before her eyes like a helium balloon, by her own body’s insistence that she better pay attention to the things she hopes she can forget. I stood over her again in my mind’s eye just as I had a few days before, my hands warmed by her skin and my good intentions. Round, I had circled and soothed, round, clockwise, coaxing so gently. I am not a professional masseuse, just following my instincts, and I follow the path of my hands’ knowing. Round and round, I am mothering this mother, pouring all my mother love like milk into her, swirling, blending, healing summoned from my womb into hers, beneath, above, inviting my guides and hers to help.

I had cared for M this way once a year or so ago after a yoga session I had led for just the three of us on my dining room floor. I felt so grateful that I could nurture her, this kind woman who nurtures others so easily. After a while, a message sprang clearly to me, though neither L or M had ever shared this information with me: M had once lost a child she was still holding on to. My intuition was strong, so I had voiced this question: Have you ever lost a child and is it possible you are afraid to let go and so betray that tiny spirit? Immediately, M’s tears were flowing, her face behind her hands. He was three months. Her husband didn’t want another. He forced her to abort. Yes so late. Ham-Sa. Ham. Sa. For all the betrayals we offer up for what we call love. Ham. Sa. For such violences that are inflicted, that we submit to. Ham. Sa. For my dear, sweet friend M who is 55 but holding still on to this 25 year old pain.

The other week when she visited, though, a different grief of hers was rising up, revealing itself to me. This one was about sexual betrayal, about shame, about how she wouldn’t allow her body to offer and receive the pleasures it really does deserve because there’s too much pain wrapped up in delicious: dirty, ugly things, a loss of control, loss. She has never known the healing and honoring that is meant to fill up and drape across our body’s perfectly imperfect terrain ever so gently, love dabbed like holy water at our entry points, trust breathed into our darkest places, earned, until it is safe enough to explore in other less careful and maybe even not-so-tender ways.

I had asked her about this, and I watched her shut down before me like a little girl, her body like the blinds on a window, feathers pulled in tight. She wouldn’t look at me at first, this woman who so easily knows and relishes connection, her mouth so often loose in laughter and kind smiles suddenly drawn into a tight line, her arms stiff, this resilient woman who is all love, is a healer of her own, and whose hugs envelope the lucky recipient with the most thorough of compassion.

I offered her the strange message I had received the day before they arrived. And I had received this under, ahem, unusual circumstances.

Uncharacteristically I was inspired to touch myself. It was morning, there was a long list of stuff to do but I had the sudden urgent thought: I am going to be the lover I want to be honoring me, though that is not what my life is manifesting right now. I am going to allow my body to be the magic portal I know it is, to connect me with Spirit in the single most powerful way I know how.

And so I did. After I pleasured myself (many delicious times I will admit) I lay there and poof! M’s face floated before me. I meditated for a while and I connected with her belly, the pain she holds there, and tried to send it out of her body as if I was the North Wind, imagined I was wrapping her in coils of white light.

Round and round, like bellies and breasts, soft hips and soft lips, the curve of shoulders, babies in arms, women arcing and twirling through space, I pray now for soft, round, help to help my friend. M’s body finally surrendered a bit to my belly massage, and her face and form were soft again.

Questions were intuitively pouring through. If she had ever had an orgasm. If she enjoyed sex. If she had ever been violated.

Gratefully, (though I may not have always appreciated such candor and liberation) I come from a mother who openly discussed her orgasms and lovers, who celebrated the pleasures her body brought, and who taught me early on that my body was important enough to care for, heal, fight for and protect.

No, I would soon learn, M had never had an orgasm, she did not enjoy sex, and she had been molested on several occasions by two different men before age 6. L explained all this, translating more. M still only speaks Russian, her arrival to the US recent, but words between us have always been unnecessary anyhow. I worked on her belly some more while L. and I considered her maternal grandparents’ relationship. M couldn’t imagine her parents ever having sex, and definitely not enjoying it. “They talked about it like it was immoral,” L said. Apparently that was also the climate in Russia under Communism and until not that long ago. There was so much shame wrapped up in it all, and that was without the blatant violence of molestation that M only just recently admitted about to anyone.

Pleasure. Sacred. Healing? These were not synonymous concepts with sex for her, and L in turn admitted that as her mother’s daughter there’s some work she too can do around this. As I finished off her massage, I encouraged M to light candles, take a bath, romance herself and begin to know and heal her own body. And yes, that meant through her vagina and the pleasures it could give her as hard as that would be after a lifetime of ignoring it, betraying it, and using it to only accommodate another. Ham-Sa I whispered a last time, more tears flowing, as the sounds around me subsided and I lay there, immobilized for many moments later, even though it was time to rejoin the circle.

It’s all too big, too heavy, too sad, there’s too much work to do, all these bodies and hearts feeling unlovable, incomplete, unclean, bad. This beautiful Mama earth that we are harming too because, like our bodies, and our womanness, our MOTHER-NESS we can’t fathom our preciousness, our boundless magic and healing strength. That has been done to us, but we also in so many ways continue to do this to ourselves.

I will just stay here a long while in this good place, stuck on this warm and lovely floor, a puddle. How can I possibly get back into shoes, drive a car, drive a life? So little, I am tiny; I am but one small woman.

A familiar voice came near my ear, whispering, “Do you think you could join us?” Ilonka crooned so gently, “I love you, we love you, come…” and out poured more tears, how and where could I have held them all, my body shaking under my dear friend’s kindness, her reminder that No you are not alone and we are many. She spooned her body in alongside my curled form. Then after a moment, when she knew it felt safe, we slid and shuffled awkwardly, messy and outstretched, while still on the floor. Of course we didn’t get very far, clumsy siamese serpentine crying and laughing oneness, inching along until she and I crumpled into uncontrollable laughter, deep and true, of the kind that only sisters can share, and then the others joined us laughing, laughing, a pile of love, our legs and hands and arms braided, all these sisters’ tears falling for all my grief I have been trying to make sense of, and has now suddenly become theirs too. We are here to help you carry it, they seemed to say. No, you are not alone and we are many. Our laughter said this, our strong hands held this, our tears like rivulets joining and washing us, all our oneness rising up into the dark woods, the big sky, the whole world.

As for the Sanskrit mantra that appeared to find its way to me, Ham-Sa (I would discover later in the glow of my screen), means I Am God, and what a beautifully appropriate concept for each of us to remember as divinely female, perfect as we are, innate healers, givers and receivers of life in all its lushest, most confusing, hilarious and darkest potential...

“Well, usually we close this with a love circle,” Ilonka announced. “But I would say this is more like a love clump!” We broke out into more laughter, some whoops and even a nice, loud, wolfy howl. And we stayed there for a while more and talked until we felt free, our voices, stories, ancestors, grief and laughter now tightly woven… like tapestries, dark and light, and life.

-end-

Circles and a Clump

Travels, stays, (mostly stays these days) explorations of the heart and life.