Reflection on Forgiveness several weeks before Sharon arrived in Alfred

In April I got a new tattoo.

This one is of a blue heart on the back of my body where my real beating heart is. I wanted it as a reminder to trust the depths of the heart and stay true to what is in my heart, even if it hurts to do so. 

The presence of that tattoo has brought a responsibility I did not anticipate, a responsibility to stay at the center of myself and my body, a responsibility to be settled into ‘what is’ and settled into ‘what is’ all the way into my bones. Being at the center of myself in this way is a felt, physical, kinesthetic experience that requires me to attune to and work with my moving body such that movement is a form of knowing and processing and coming into my center. 

Sometimes the body knows something before the mind and heart know it.

Movement has a way of bringing what is known in my body to the surface, so I can first more consciously know what is there and then have a way of physically working with it. There are many structures that support this kind of opening of awareness. For example, there is the Dance Movement Therapy structure known as Authentic Movement in which the mover “enters the space of possibility and invites what needs to be moved.” The mover then closes their eyes and moves, without pre-planning, whatever comes up. During this time, the mover tracks the movements as they arise. After the session, the mover speaks with a witness about what emerged in movement, paying attention to how it felt and what it brings up now in reflection. Often in this practice, or others like it, movement carries messages into our awareness.

My heart tattoo is not filled in; it is an outline. This has felt to me like an invitation to simultaneously stay in the space of possibility with my heart and at the center of myself. In short, there is room for me here and room for what could be that is not yet known. 

Forgiveness is threaded into staying at the center of myself and in the space of what is possible within my heart.

I cannot get away with being at the center of myself, having space at my heart, and avoiding forgiveness. Forgiveness is required. Sometimes I put pressure on myself, like I need to forgive and this pressure makes me mad… It feels rushed and about getting to a place the tension is dissolved. My big brain wants to forgive quickly, so I can move on. Yet it also wants to not really forgive, so it can hold onto the narrative and pain it so identifies with. 

Like most biological processes, forgiveness has a rhythm and timing of its own intelligence, one my big brain cannot force upon it or hold hostage. Typically, forgiveness comes to me through my body before it becomes known to me in other ways. Like in Authentic Movement, forgiveness shows up in my movement first. There is a loosening in my joints, my gaze softens, and my feet are newly pliable onto the ground underneath them. Then, I notice that the person/moment/behavior/pattern of institutional frustration/frogged sweater/proverbial ‘it’ is just a little more adaptable under my attention. Whatever ‘it’ was that had me enraged before, now the energy around ‘it’ can morph just a little bit – and ever so slightly, like my bones, what was previously held rigid can give.

Here, in the place where there is newly a possibility for my understanding to shift, my movements become similar, like an echo, to that which activates, possibly enrages, me. I think some disciplines would call this attuning or compassion, but it is embodied for me. My body takes on, though to a lesser amount, the shapes, character, dynamism, and body phrasing of what needs to be worked through and known in a more whole way. As I move what irks me, I feel ‘its’ life in my tissues, and thus, I know ‘it’ differently. Through this embodied process I have a sense of who or how and what ‘it’ is. And as my body moves ‘it,’ the hold ‘it’ has upon me dissolves… sometimes very slowly. Over days and months I experience glimpses of this passing through my body, slowing being let go of. Other times, like a wave from another land, the forgiveness process wooshes through me, and I am literally “over it” and back in the center of myself.

Sometimes forgiveness hurts because it means loss and letting go. Especially forgiveness means letting go of what previously held me up. This metaphor connects to what it physically feels like to stand or sit when I am holding forgiveness hostage – like being held vertical with tightness and a superficial edge of what I want to remember from a righteous place. Getting ready to move through a cycle towards forgiveness often starts when holding the edge of being angry or hurt gets too hard and tiring. Then forgiveness does not break me; instead it moves like a river through me. 

However forgiveness happens, its impact runs deep into my body.

Forgiveness quickly radiates through my heart tattoo and my skin; it slides through the fascia and muscle and fat and nerves. Forgiveness gets into the core of my bones and lets me stand easier into them. Forgiveness lets me land onto the earth in a way that I am located newly on it and freshly back into the center of myself and ready to follow the space of possibility centered in my heart.

Reflection Post Sharon’s Residency 

Tattoo 

I had completely forgotten I wrote about my heart tattoo in connection to forgiveness and Sharon’s arrival in Alfred, NY. During the week of Sharon’s residency, Compassion in Action, I got another tattoo as the companion to the heart I wrote about above. (I have only a few tattoos.) When I got the blue heart tattoo, I knew it was not yet complete. I did not only want the deep back of the heart, I also wanted my heart to shine forward, radiant into the world. But I did not know what it would look like or what would complete it. 

Rainbows have been everywhere – miraculous, unreal, sparkling rainbows. Maybe a rainbow tattoo? 

• Sunday, before Compassion in Action began, I decided to get a rainbow tattoo, but I did not have the details yet. 

• Monday, I realized I needed the rainbow to shine from the front of my heart. 

• Tuesday, I called and made an appointment for Thursday morning. 

• Wednesday, Sharon gave a 50-year retrospective of her work at the Wednesday Night Speaker Series. She was asked after explaining what her parents had said to future generations, what she would say. She responded, “Don’t ever give up on keeping your heart open” or something to that effect, as that is the message I took away. After her talk I sat on my newly built (by me, Dad, and friends Nick, Randy, and Deb) deck with a glass of wine, meditating and watching the moon rise up over the hill. There circling around the moon was a rainbow, actually a moon-bow.

• Thursday, eight dots, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet and white of a rainbow were tattooed onto the front of my heart in the form of a semicircle under my left breast. The depths of my heart are now able to radiate forward into my life.  

• Friday, the show wrapped up. My mom, Kathy, and her friend, Cindy, saw the final hour. Afterwards, we talked about how the gods crave a mortal experience, just as us mortals crave the experience of immortality and that what we as mortals are experiencing fulfills the needs and curiosities of the gods… 

• Saturday, I told the friend who helped build the deck about how as a child I shared with my therapist how I was really good at leaving my body and watching myself from above, and she (my therapist) responded that this was a really good skill I had learned but that I also needed to learn to come back into my body after I do that. I later reflected that right now, coming back into the body is the central organizing idea of my life, and my advice for future generations is, “keep going back into your body to know.”

Luminaception

This week in classes, the terms interoception, exteroception, and proprioception came up – totally organically as students explored their learning through the democratic and liberatory dance making form known as a movement choir. Those “-ception” terms refer to the sense of what is happening inside of one’s body, what is happening outside of one’s body, and the sense of one’s orientation in space or where the body is in the space around it (as in when you close your eyes and put your hands together). 

I especially love the etymology of the word proprioception. “Proprio-” comes from the word property, as if to suggest the body and its orientation in the world is to the agency of each one of us and that our bodies, as the primary material of our lives, is our central and orienting property. 

A student asked if there was a term for feeling one’s soul or filled by one’s soul. I did not know of one and asked a few friends who might. Nope, we could not find one, so we decided to make one. A few back-and-forth texts with my beloved friend and colleague Erin Law followed. Our ideas included words like “animaception” after the Latin word anima for spirit or soul, and “diamaception” after James Hillman’s idea of the Diamond. As of this writing, we landed on the term “luminaception,” the feeling of one’s own inner radiant light. Yes, seems right. Seems ready to be shared here and in other places. 

Forest

In Jungian perspectives the forest is linked to the unconscious and is a metaphor for entering the unknown. I went to the forest to meditate and reflect on forgiveness before I wrote the first reflection. 

I went to a different forest after Sharon’s departure to meditate: on her time, what unfolded, what I know now that I did not know before. I know that in this lifetime, we are asked to untangle the threads of wounds not of this material body, threads that are not of this life’s proprioception but threads that connect us to bodies and energetic souls before us and after us. 

The forest floor was golden with fallen leaves. I thought about that metaphor – a markable (and remarkable) foundation of my life today as radiant and golden. I meandered a gully and thought about the solid stone that provided fluid pathways of connection between geographies. The sky was so clear it morphed from blue to white, and the sun’s spark turned it clear. This sequence of color, the earth through the evergreen pines to the sky, echoed the colors of the rainbow. I felt my body, my orientation in material property, as a conduit between the earth and the ether like a passage between the material of the world and radiant soul. 

Forgiveness

I am not sure “I,” in my big brain, know more about forgiveness except that I feel its life in my body and see its threads in the world around me. It feels safer to forgive today such that I do not need to hold forgiveness hostage in order to hold the lesson or emotions of the experience. Perhaps those wounds do not need to be dwelled upon, but the wounds can be there and my identity, my selfhood, can be impacted and not defined by them. I feel that my heart can soften and open. My heart feels juicy, alive, and present, very three-dimensional and tender and strong. I sense that my body (proprio-), the environment within and around me (intero- and extero-), and my soul (lumina-) have agreed in coherent togetherness in these shifts. 

I wrote letters to people this week in which I forgave them. In the writing of those letters I found sometimes in the process of forgiving I was angrier at them than I have previously known, and the anger had to slide through with the forgiveness. The anger and disgust surprised me… Was holding forgiveness hostage keeping me from having to deal with the emotions I did not want to feel? Maybe that is how not forgiving holds us up. Forgiving feels like it risks hurting my heart… Without forgiveness my heart is at risk. 

Rainbows

A few days after the forest and writing the second section, I sat down to read through this for a final edit. As I sat at my breakfast table, I felt the sun on my back and looked out the big window next to me, and there, over the valley was, of course, another, wait – actually a series of two rainbows.

Colleen Wahl, dance professor at Alfred University