Everything begins with the posture. The worldview, the relation to partner and self, the energy we send out, the way we receive what comes in. The posture is the essence of this. It seems peculiar at first. Why should my slouching shoulders affect my worldview? Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of Aikido, said, a good posture shows a good state of mind. He also said the essence of Aikido is contained within greeting someone with a smile. This is also why you hear of samurai who have stood facing each other for minutes and minutes - because only when the stance is compromised is there an opening to strike. The man with good posture who can greet people with a smile has defeated all things that could defeat him, and those things are always internal.
Someone once described good posture to me as the way a 3 year old holds their body. Upright, shoulders back - approaching the world head on without fear, without arrogance. After we learn to stand, we learn bad posture. And in this posture is somehow contained all our fears, aversions, and insecurities.* I can feel my arms close in to protect my chest. The shoulders bend in and forward for the same reason. The head droops to avoid the eye of passersby.
It becomes ever more clear to me that without good posture, superlative dancing remains impossible. We must correct our posture (and meanwhile, our worldview as well) to dance well. This is why dancing is hard to me. To fix the posture, one is forced to confront things inside. To walk well, much less complete a swingout, seems a daunting task in the face of fixing the posture. But it seems that once the posture is correct, the task is finished. After that, dancing is merely learning rhythms, patterns, getting stronger. These latter things have clear paths to attain. They are comparatively simple to fixing the posture and dissolving stress. When I used to ask Brenda how to relax tense parts of my body, she would say, just stay aware of it and breathe. IN fact, this is the way to improve, and maybe this gets down to the essence of why posture is difficult. To fix the posture, we must not do. We have to sit still and focus. It's easier to lift weights and practice steps, because these things can be used to distract the mind. When we sit, we must focus, and this becomes evident. When we act, we should focus, but it's easy to forget.
It is the essence of not-doing - of using the breath and focusing that I must master. Then I think I will have good posture and find the way of least resistance through this world. And oh yeah, I'll probably be a pretty good dancer too.
*The enigmatic "somehow" of Lincoln's second inaugural. "These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war." As my professor David Blight said, it is the nature of that "somehow" that has been argued over ever since.
