To Move Like A Prayer

The slow worship of movement.

Like Water.

I have always carried a weight in my chest. Something that has been impossible to ignore. Moving my body has always been a hard chore, when I was still learning myself. Tales of myself felt like a sour taste, something I couldn't translate into words. Then, I knew the feeling all too deeply; Longing, devotion, othering, sacredness. I didn't know how I did it then but those things lasted longer between the spaces of each door. Something else began to form, it was a wonder. My body broke and repaired itself in a swift dance of movement. There is always this chill settling in my lower back, when my body translates a sound into longing, another swift step into sacredness. What I loved the most was my body deep in a bold surrender. Like anything could hit me afterwards and I could face it. This translation is how I placed words in where pictures had formed, where brushes and ink had met, where noise distorts into sound. It is satisfying knowing I could beat my body out of dying by deeply surrendering to a sound. Whether external or internal. In that moment, my body becomes a whisper, needing one song to make a form and I trust myself with the rest. The assured working of what I could be, if only I could inject a song in my blood.

Early on, I walked around with a boom box in my chest. I participated in mini dance steps in school. I felt cringe half the time, laughed at and mocked, half the time. But in the streaming heat on my skin, I felt alive. The only excitement, that changed the course of my own fluidity. At that moment, I became water. Always flowing, with swayed hips and dancing fingers. There is a way movement translates the emotions into your blood and in that moment, you are not yourself. You are something else, the other. Something higher than yourself, your legs beat the drums of prayer. Your breath starts whispering firm devotions to yourself, like you are beginning to trust yourself entirely with the intricate details of you. Just as writing has become spiritual for me, so is dance. The weird part of all of these is that I am not the party type. I don't thrive in those scenes, even when I own the night with the silence of a stranger breathing down my neck. Never will I speak of those nights, when wildness was a way to expel myself into nothingness. Making movement a ritual in the dark of my room, had taught me one thing; you cannot run away from yourself when you become one in the dark. You cannot expel yourself to death, when you can find new ways to become you again.

I slowly break and heal myself all at once, only I have the power to do that.

The first time I felt the communion between my body and spirit was in a club. Or so I thought. My body moved like a sacred prayer that had ached to surrender. Fighting my way through the noise, the excitement in my bones was from lightness, after devoting my movement to another body. It was terrifying and a different kind of surrender, one I wasn't used to at the time. I remembered it wasn't the first time. I didn't know what dancing could do for me, back then in school. In the early hours of the morning after a long night reading, I dance on a lonely road between my faculty buildings. Yeah, it became a thing for a whole week. I did other bizarre things; like walking barefoot home, capturing my shadows because my own appearance scared me at the time. Standing on the bridge for long hours, watching the traffic and busy lights. Staring at the moon too long, you can actually feel the dull colours on your face. I recognized the spaces at which cry and laughter occurred. In dance, silence is nurtured, and it doesn't bury you. In fact, every step translates an emotion you don't understand, something, far off, where tears have become a by-product. Like the tingling sensation in your fingers, translates longing, the relieved tension in your shoulders translates burden. Another step, translates surrender, another, devotion. And another, another, another.

When you move like a prayer, your body knows before the self catches up. Some emotions don't need explanations but preservation. The silence between your ears, when even sounds fade, doesn't need translation but nurturing. Notice the desire in your hesitation, the fear in your stiffness, the loosened freedom on your legs and thighs. This discipline sets you in a trance where music is memory, which surfaces when your mind needs a bend again. When language fails, that communion between your body and spirit is a form of worship too. A form of surrendering to a huge part of you, you are yet to understand.

Whenever you are carrying weight, shrinking, adjusting the pace of your becoming, anticipating shifting in a new form, know that movement isn't seduction, it is accommodation. You can either disassociate or come together, disappear into the air or command it to move with you. You can explain your emotions or allow your language to fall into silence and trust your body and the music to speak for you. It is absolutely freeing.

Our bodies are often treated as shameful, unreliable, excessive, vulnerable and temporary. What if the body is capable of prayer? What if it speaks how you should heal and care for yourself? How to be gentle with yourself? What if it's obsessed with your growth as much as you are obsessed with it? What if it can be disciplined? What if it surrenders to your truth too? What if it is capable of returning?

You see, through movement our bodies can be devoted to memory. When I hear Doin Time by Lana Del Rey or Refuge by Elisé Luna or This is What Makes Us Girls also by Lana Del Rey, my body remembers before my mind. I embody the memory the song carries even before I can picture it. The body stores memory differently than the mind and movement—dance— and music is a way to access those memories physically before intellectually. When a song comes on, you don't feel archived, you allow everything. Grief resurfaces, a younger self returns, your feet remembers, your chest tightens. There's a flow down your spine that allows you to remember moments tied to a particular song. There are some songs my body trusts more than my mind does. For example, after a heavy loss, my body remembers someone more vividly than my mind. I remember the rhythm they moved with, the energy they carried, the songs they loved, the way I was being held by them; good or bad. I feel nostalgic.

It tells me one thing; you can block your mind from remembering but the body does not forget. It survives by rehearsing you back into existence.

Repetitive movement for me, creates meaning. When I sway unconsciously (mostly), dancing alone at night in the swell of the dark, returning to familiar songs. My body becomes devotional, not because I'm good at it but because my body returns to me. There's something intimate about the way I take back ownership from whatever it is that is consuming me at the moment. So you ask, why dance? Why movement?

For me, movement itself is sacred. It stabilizes my emotion, reorganizes my grief. It gives meaning to what I feel, and shapes my loneliness. Restores my self continuity. It is a revival even when I collapse into myself.