week 12.

May 2, 2026 – Chengdu Airport

Prelude

I’m back in China. I’ll be staying in Dali for a week, with Anqi.

I called her a couple of months ago to ask if I could visit. Not an ordinary visit though.

I’ve been feeling — how can I put it? — like shit.

I’ve been confused. And groundless. For four months now.

Scared. And alone.

It hasn’t been getting any better, and I’ve already tried all my usual tricks – exercise, socializing, family time, meditation, travel.

Since I couldn’t do anything else on my own, I saw only one other option – reaching out to others. Anqi was one of those people.

I told her that I wasn’t sure what I was asking for, but that I’d like to spend some time around her energy.

I also wanted her help exploring my feelings. And for this, I had to ask for permission.

She was unsure, so she suggested that we have a ‘consultation’ over the phone. To see if this was something we could do together.

During the session, she took me on some kind of guided meditation into a corner of my psyche that I cannot say I’d ever visited before. Now that I think about it, I’m unsure who was guiding who. Anqi’s soft voice, over the phone, would point out places where I might go—like some sort of shamanic tour guide—and then I’d describe to her what I encountered there, so that she could follow me inside.

There was an immense sense of vulnerability, exploring myself together with Anqi.

I realized what an immense trust I had for her, and an immense respect. Even love.

Trust that she wouldn’t find me lame, respect that she’d guide me faithfully, and love that we could share ourselves so deeply with each other.

Anqi thinks that my inner child is a needy Chinese girlfriend. And my super ego is a rude old Chinese man.

I never realized that I’m Chinese. But I guess that’s what therapy is for?

I’m not sure how to describe Anqi’s methodology. Just like Anqi herself, it’s a mixture of eastern spirituality, western therapy, and Mesoamerican plant-medicine.

If I were Woody Allen, I’d describe her as ‘very somatic’.

We agree that I’d come visit for a week. My flight from Chengdu to Dali leaves in 2 hours.

Dali, China

I arrived in Dali just in time for the busy market holiday. Due to road closures, the usual 40-minute drive from the airport was now 90 minutes and the taxi dropped me off a mile away from Anqi’s home.

In the two years since I’d last visited, Dali has flourished. The streets along the university are lined with bohemian cafes, craft breweries, chic restaurants, and apparel boutiques with names like ‘Dahab Winds’.

I’m among the only foreigners, and people shout random English phrases at me from passing motorcycles or as we brush past on the narrow sidewalk.

As usual, whenever I visit China, I marvel at all the local car brands that cram the roads. Mostly electric. Soon to be self-driving.

It’s exciting to be in China – a country poised so deliberately toward the future.

The 90-minute taxi ride didn’t cost more than $15.

Even Anqi confesses to me her newfound patriotism as she unpacks a small pile of delivery boxes she’d ordered from Taobao. (Over the coming days, I’d grow accustomed to her nightly unpacking rituals.)

But here’s the thing: she’s participating in a dance workshop all week—something called Contact Improvisation. She further informs me, somewhat sheepishly, that she’s done me the favor of obtaining special permission for me to join midway.

Now, let’s be very clear here. I am terrible at dancing. And I don’t even enjoy it. Now add in the fact that this is a group workshop with strangers and that I’ll be joining halfway, and let’s just say that I’m not exactly thrilled.

But Anqi looks at me with wide-eyes, silently encouraging me.

I agree to try it for one day, while surreptitiously sneaking my book into the tote bag – just in caseeeee I give up early.

May 3

We drive 30 minutes north, tracing the western shore of Lake Erhai, until we arrive at one of the many small villages nestled up against Mount Cangshan. The local ethnic group is called Bai, which means ‘white’, and all their houses are painted accordingly. The crisp white walls provide the perfect canvas for beautiful deep blue and brown frescoes and are topped with drooping maroon eaves. 

Small patches of cultivated farmland dot the landscape. We drive slowly along the narrow lanes that meander through the fields, making our way to the very rear of the village. We park and take the final 100 meters by foot, finally arriving at a couple of handsome buildings surrounding a shallow koi pond. Large panoramic windows set into the wooden walls cast uninterrupted views out onto the thick forest.

The building materials are natural and strong and simple and beautiful. There is an air of tasteful comfort, all set beneath the warm shadow of Sino tradition.

I follow Anqi to the second floor where there is a long spacious hall, maybe 70 x 30 feet. The floor is made of a sturdy soft wood; the windows are floor-to-ceiling. A few people sit scattered around the floor, stretching their bodies and warming up.

As the rest of the dancers file in, we join them in a large circle. The facilitator, Fran, is an Italian man, around my own age. He has long brown hair, a bushy beard, and is dressed in loose colorful clothing. Exactly what you’d expect from a self-professed anarchist cum dance instructor in Yunnan.

But his eyes are kind and his voice – as he welcomes us – is friendly.

To start things off, Fran asks for a volunteer to accompany him in the middle of the circle.

A boy – maybe 30 years old, one of only 3 men in a group of women – jumps in. Fran has him lay on his back and instructs him to move his body however it feels comfortable, while always making sure to turn/roll/twist in Fran’s direction.

While the boy slowly adjusts his body – stretching and curling quite luxuriously, almost cat-like – Fran begins to find spaces to assist. For example, if an arm is raised above his head, exposing a stretched side, Fran might place his hands on his hips and shoulder, providing just a bit more of a stretch.

If a leg is extended, Fran supports it, even helping to raise it further into the air.

As the boy practices finding comfort with his parter, Fran practices looking for spaces to provide that gentle unhurried support.

Gradually, as the boy curls toward Fran, he is offered Fran’s kneeling knees to rest his arched back. And so, their bodies meet, intertwining, in an attitude of comfort and support.

One person explores their body in space, while the other gifts them an ever-morphing structure to expand their limits.

How do you ask for support without saying a word? How do you accept it? Do you trust it? Do you demand it? Cling to it?

We divide into pairs. I’m with Anqi. We begin practicing together.

The night before, I’d told Anqi that Contact Improvisation (CI) seems very sexual. She assured me that it wasn’t at all. I’d thrown her a sideways glance, as if a mass of soft writhing bodies could possibly be platonic.

Turns out she was entirely correct.

As Anqi and I spent 30-some minutes rolling, curling, collapsing, extending, squeezing our bodies across each other, there wasn’t even a hint of eroticism.

What was there instead?

Exploration: how do these bodies like to move?

Experimentation: how can these bodies move together?

There was the impossible coexistence of complete embodiment and sheer abandon. Almost as though we’d left our bodies all to themselves.

I later asked Fran what to do when I feel unsure about my movements. He giggled, “Close your eyes and feel your body.” And then he nodded, almost to himself, with complete certainty.

I opened my mouth, about to respond, but then decided to let his nods speak for the both of us.

Luckily, I’m pretty submissive.

--

The second exercise was called ‘Finding the Under’ and was again done in pairs.

As we move, there is always a part of our body which is pointed at the ground, extended over open space. This is our Under. Stretch out your arm in front of you. Feel the edge of your arm which is facing the ground. Twist it slowly and notice the Under change.

Bend over from your waist and feel the Under emerge against your chest.

The ‘mover’ in this exercise spends 15 minutes moving their body in whatever way they want – standing, sitting, laying – and paying careful attention to their shifting Under.

At the same time, the ‘Supporter’ moves around them on the lookout for the mover’s Under. When the supporter finds an outstretched arm or an extended leg or a bent waist – or any other Under – the supporter rushes to gently offer their support. To carry that weight.

Lucky for me, I chose Fran as my partner for this exercise.

The movements ranged from simple touches of his arms and neck, to fully carrying his collapsed body over my shoulder.

Over the duration of the practice, we took turns exploring the limits of what Fran calls our kinosphere – the totality of our immediate somatic environment – but now with the inclusion of an external support which appears and melts away almost on demand.

What becomes possible when bodies support each other? How does it feel to grant another body our Under? As our bodies move in unison, does our world – our kinosphere – somehow shift along with it?

Do we trust the support which is given? Do we collapse when it is taken away? Do we retain our independence – as supporter and as mover – or do we wait for permission before we move?

After the practice, we sat cross-legged on the floor, catching out breath. I asked Fran what CI is. He laughed loudly.

He paused and then said that CI was created by a few postmodern dancers, most famously Steve Paxton, who were frustrated by contemporary dance’s solitude. They wanted to explore how bodies can dance together in complete solidarity, while retaining the complete freedom of movement for the individual participants.

“So, it’s a spiritual practice?” I asked.

“Oh, fuck no,” he responded. “There are those who like to say that it is, but I reject that entirely. CI is a physical practice rooted in dance. Nothing more and nothing less.”

“So, you have a dance background?”

“Oh no, I come from the political world. I perform and teach CI as a powerful political device,” he said, just before standing up to begin the next exercise.

“Oh…” I thought to myself, suddenly alone and rather confused.

--

The third exercise went as follows:

The mover stands still, while the supporter places a hand somewhere on their body. Wherever the hand is placed, the mover shifts their weight to apply pressure against that spot. If the hand is on your back, you slowly lean back until the pressure is equalized (the harder the pressure exerted by the supporter, the more weight the mover can apply).

If the hand is on your left hip, you lean your weight to the left, into the hand.

The hand can even be placed on top of the mover’s shoulder or head, so that the mover must exert force vertically.

Once this is comfortable, the supporter can begin to decrease pressure in the hand, forcing the mover to move toward them in order to maintain that constant tension.

And so, a dance begins. The supporter uses their hand – or any other part of their body, like a shoulder, back, hip, forehead – to indicate to the mover where and to what degree to apply the reciprocal force. As the supporter moves around the hall, the mover is brought along with them. Two beings, one movement.

--

It was finally time to jam! Jamming, as far as I can tell, is the centerpiece of CI practice. It can be ‘unscored’ – that is, completely unstructured – just bodies improvising together. Or it can be ‘scored’, with some constraint or rule applied. A typical jam seems to last about 1 or 2 hours.

Today’s jam is scored as follows: we will all have our eyes closed.

Fran will keep his eyes open to protect us in case we’re about to get hurt, but in general we are instructed to move in such a way as to protect ourselves and others. Slow, sweeping, gentle, exploratory.

When you come up against something – a wall, a body, the floor – how can you include it in your movement? How can you move together with it? All with eyes closed.

The music starts playing. I close my eyes and begin to move. At first, just swaying naturally to the rhythm. I take a few gentle steps. Feeling the floor with the tips of my toes as I step across lightless space. My arms extend slightly, serving as my new tentacle eyes.

Within moments, I come across a soft body. Fabric. Hair.

I pause for the slightest instant. A personless body falls against me. Feels against me. Shares itself and its motion against me.

I realized that this body trusts me. More, this body wants me. No, that’s not quite right. This body welcomes me.

And my body? My body wants to play.

I cannot say how long we twirled, stretched, fell, curled, collapsed, spun, and held each other.

I cannot say if this body was male or female. Young or old.

I cannot say why this body sought my presence, or I why I granted it.

But what I do know is that in our movement, in our blind togetherness, I felt a new kind of freedom. A new kind of Being.

Was I dancing? Yes, but not really.

Was I learning? Experimenting? Yes, but not really.

The best way I can describe it was that I was re-entering a primordial space, a long-forgotten space, a space consisting solely of bodies amongst bodies.

I felt as though I had released my body back into itself and back into its world – a world composed of motion and stillness, surface and space, and yes, a world filled with bodies.

In a flash of darkness, I came alive in a way that I’d never imagined but immediately loved.

As our bodies naturally came apart, with just our outstretched arms passing over each other before disappearing back into the faceless void, a wave of gratitude washed over me, thankful that I was there, thankful that I was granted this experience, this moment in this body in this world in this life, and then there were more bodies and more dances and more spaces and more collisions, some just for an instant, some which I fought to escape. But there was no body like my first body, and I will always hold that first dance preciously in my heart, and the invisible One who gifted me their Being and brought me into our world.

Is this life? Are we all tumbling blindly against each other? Are we dancing in the dark?

May 4

We arrived a bit early to join some of the others for tea. We sat on cushions arranged around a low wooden table.

Fran brewed green tea he’d brought from Japan, and we sipped from tiny porcelain cups, enjoying the last minutes of calm before we’d go to battle into the hall upstairs.

Outside of class, Fran is really quite friendly. Not at all the austere personality that I’d feared.

He’s the type of guy who looks you in the eyes when he talks, and his voice easily spills over into laughter.

The room we sit in is truly beautiful, the large windows welcome in the green landscape. It smells of fresh wood and bitter tea. There is a large earthen fireplace built into the far wall. The space is divided into 3 sections, each on a slightly different level, inviting you to step up and sit down. Shades of browns and beiges. You know the type.

As we sit down in a circle to begin the day’s work, Fran tells us that CI contains three kinds of trust: trust that you can catch yourself if you fall, trust that your partner can catch themself if they fall, and trust that your partner can catch you if you fall.

Today, we’ll practice all three.

The first exercise takes things up a notch. We work in triads; one mover and two supporters.

The Mover closes their eyes and stands back-to-back with Supporter #1. Then, the Mover stretches out one arm which is gripped by Supporter #2 who stands facing them.

To begin with, all three stand upright, but then – at first gently – the Mover, with eyes closed, leans back against Support #1. Now off balance, the Mover’s weight is supported be the back of Supporter #1as well as by the grip that Supporter #2 has on their arm.

The further back that the Mover leans, the more weight that the two Supporters must carry.

Gradually, as the Mover gains trust, they can experiment with letting go of the arm of Supporter #2, placing all their weight solely on the back of Supporter #1. Alternatively, they can grip both arms of Supporter #2 and let their back hang free over open air.

The Mover spends the dance experimenting—eyes closed—leaning in new directions and feeling the support that magically appears just beneath them. And sometimes, the support never appears.

The Mover can begin to move around the hall. They can crouch low or lay on the ground. They can move wherever and however they wish, exploring the limits of their new kinosphere.

Remember, the Mover’s eyes remain closed this entire time. There are only body, surface, and movement.

After some 15 or 20 minutes, the Mover swaps places with one of the Supporters, and the process starts anew.

As a Mover, it’s important to ‘ask’ for help clearly – an extended arm, a drooping hip – and as a Supporter it’s critical to pay close attention to the Moder’s body and rhythm, to provide the right support at the right time. And no more support than requested.

After the dance, my partners shared with me that more than once my ‘support’ turned into guidance, as I would occasionally use the weight placed upon me to redirect the Mover’s trajectory.

I explained that sometimes I’d reach the limits of my support – perhaps I was carrying too much of their weight on my lower back – and the redirection was my attempt to guide them naturally away from me without disrupting their flow.

We began to learn where support is welcome and how it can become an imposition.

As a Mover, you may begin a movement expecting support to appear in some form, only to be left hanging (literally).

How do you adjust your dance? What is your next step when you are left alone? Do you collapse? Or pause?

--

The next exercise was probably my favorite. And because I’m far heavier than anyone else in the class, I got to practice it with Fran (who is about my size).

In fact, Fran used me as a model to help him demonstrate the exercise in front of the class, forcing me right into the spotlight.

But I liked it! I felt proud to feel so comfortable practicing new dance moves in front of a group of strangers. WHO IS THIS NEW DANIEL??

Out of the corner of my eye, I catch a glimmer of pride in Anqi’s eyes as well. Or so I tell myself.

I stand face-to-face with Fran. He places his palms firmly against my chest. I lean into them until we’re a single stable unit. As he slowly takes a step back, my body follows his movement, maintaining our center of balance. As he steps forward, I seamlessly retreat.

Our bodies, now, work as one.

Then, we do it again, only this time his hands are on my hips. My center of gravity shifts lower to meet his force.

Next, he instructs me – hands still pressed into my hips – to leap toward him. I make it a foot or two into the air before his hands guide me back down to where I started.

Again, I leap up, rise a foot or so into the air, and then am placed right back down.

Finally, the culmination of the exercise: instead of gently jumping toward him, this time I take several long strides against him and launch myself over his shoulder.

Just before reaching the apex of my leap, Fran catches me on his shoulder and we continue backward, now together, in one motion. He doesn’t exactly catch me. Rather, he welcomes my weight into his own, and then it becomes no burden at all.

I mean this quite literally. When it was my turn to catch his 200 pounds of propelled force, I found him to be virtually weightless. All on the condition that I don’t brace against his force but accept it as my own and enter into the movement that is being offered to me.

It felt really cool! And powerful. I think I even giggled.

--

Fran talked about treating your partner’s weight as a gift. For the rest of the afternoon, we experimented with giving and receiving these gifts. We did this in pairs and triads, with vertical jumps and horizontal, carrying the weight forward or spinning it around. And all too often, dropping it on the floor.

At this point – only a day and a half in – I was severely bruised and sore all over my knees, down my back, along my sides, and on my elbows. Although deceptively slow and gentle, CI is certainly not for the faint of heart.

Bruises aside, I really enjoyed having my body put on display. Being used by Fran to demonstrate today’s exercises. To have my body included among these other bodies, accepted as one of their own. Not my mind. Not my profession. Just my body.

I noticed that there was something incredibly fun about practicing CI, and something equally profound. This overlap of play and depth (deep play?) is exactly the type of activity that I love the most. It is the kind of work in which my entire being – body, mind, spirit – truly thrives.

I decided to be on the lookout for other forms of deep play. (Is this the key to sexuality?)

--

Totally exhausted and aching, I decided to sit out this afternoon’s jam. I grabbed a bottle of water and sank to the floor.

The score for today’s jam: half of the dancers will have their eyes open and half will have them closed.

Halfway through, they swapped roles. It was during this swap that my eyes caught Anqi’s. She was across the hall, but between the moving bodies, we locked onto each other.

Still on the floor, I closed my eyes and lifted my arms into the air. And waited.

Some moments passed before I felt two hands gripping my own, lifting me off the floor and into a dance.

There is a funny moment during CI in which I feel as though it is not I or Anqi who are dancing, but our bodies. A kind of dissociation from the pure physicality of it all.

Anqi calls it art. But art is a form of expression. During CI, I cease to express. I feel as though CI brings me beyond expression, beneath art. CI guides me to a primordial space of Being Body, of total somatic submission. It feels so easy!

It feels free. Intentionless. Not at all like art.

Maybe: CI is the practice of open joint exploration of the shifting limits of physicality.

CI is learning! But real learning. Not learning information but learning experience. Like a child’s first step. In CI, we learn to walk together.

Our dance comes to an end. As usual, Fran announces, “Find a landing.”

Our bodies hold each other for two extra moments. Then we separate and prepare for dinner.

--

On the way home, Anqi informs me that I am Water. And that I just sink to the bottom and flow away. She tells me that she is Fire. She explodes upward.

As I rest in my own heavy presence, she gazes out onto a beckoning world.

I adapt to change. I seek it out and mold myself to its contours. Anqi creates change, taking reality in her hands and molding it.

Understandably, she sometimes feels exhausted. And frustrated.

I try my best to adapt.

I really do love water. In all its forms. I drink more water than anyone I know. The smell of the sea enchants me. As well as the sound of the waves, the glimmer of the ripples on a pond.

The bathtub is my temple.

But Anqi is fire.

Do I extinguish her flames?

May 5

The final session begins with Fran asking us about our expectations. I point out that I never in a million years expected to participate in a dance workshop. So just showing up has already exceeded my expectations. (“Fair enough,” Fran mutters under his breath.)

The topic for today is structure. We experiment with unstable structures, supporting our partner on our back while we’re in motion, or purposively collapsing our partner’s structure by kicking out their legs and observing how they fall.

And then, to cap off the workshop, we played two games.

In the first, we all gather around in a group and wait until someone – anyone—dashes off to another spot in the room. We all follow in pursuit. When we arrive, another person shouts a number. For example, seven.

Again spontaneously, seven people need to enter the circle and dance together. They dance until, as a group, they silently decide that they’re done. It can be one minute or an hour. They just keep dancing until their bodies stop. Once they’ve all frozen in place, someone from the circle dashes off to another area and the cycle repeats.

The game started out innocently enough until one smart aleck darted out of the room and onto the roof.

We all followed in pursuit. Some paused to slip on their shoes, others quickly squeezed into slippers, most just went barefoot.

And there we danced, on the warm red roof in the late afternoon, overlooking the sparkling sea and the mountain trees that seemed to dance along with us, all beneath our ancient and youthful yellow sun.

We danced and danced. Forty hands, forty feet, twenty bodies.

We danced for each other and we danced for ourselves. And we danced for all the world on that warm red roof on that late Dali afternoon.

--

When we finally made it back inside the hall, we began our final practice. The Round Robin.

We begin by sitting on the floor in a very large circle.

Then, someone enters the circle and begins to dance. Another person joins them, and then a third.

Each person enters spontaneously. At their own discretion. But once they enter, they cannot leave.

Only the first person who entered can leave. And even then, the others can’t stop dancing until a new third joins them. At that point, the ‘oldest’ dancer can leave. Or stay. However long they want.

Once the oldest leaves, the two remaining must continue on their own until they are once again completed by a third.

This dance – pairs and triads – continues indefinitely.

Throughout the Round Robin, I sit and watch.

I watch as an ever-shifting symphony of bodies appear on stage, light up the room (or dim it down), and disappear back into the silent boundary of spectators.

I watch bodies spill across the floor. I watch them jump high in the air. I watch them stretch and twirl and collapse. I watch them carry each other’s weight, fall on each other, and stand far apart. Apart but never alone.

And then, just after Fran announces the last ten minutes, someone leaves the circle, and there are only two people dancing.

Their dance is quite primitive. The dancers cling to each other, one standing over the other, like deer or baby monkeys.

I feel something grow inside of me.

I pause. Waiting to see if someone else will enter. And then I put my paw into the circle.

I stalk them, on all fours. I circle my prey.

I search for my opening. And then pounce.

What follows is a blurry ten minutes of tumbling, transporting, flinging, spinning, and dancing – celebrating my catch.

The ‘eldest’ dancer never leaves; she wants it all. She won’t give in. She desperately wants to stay alive.

And so we dance until the end. We dance until the bell tolls, and it all draws to a close. I fall on my back, staring at the ceiling. My chest heaving as I catch my breath, as I come back from my daze, back from my body.

I leave the workshop with just a few casual hugs. I don’t really know the people inside these bodies. No exchanged numbers, no lingering goodbyes.

Anqi tells me that CI is art.

I disagree. CI is the lost garden.

Addendum

Anqi:

I think I used to have a similar tendency as you, like, I don't care what I eat. I don't have much connection with the material world. And I don't mind; I was sleeping on a floor in a railway station in India. And I don’t mind.

But then, I feel all this physical pleasure. Makes me feel like, oh, it's nice to have a human body, you know? It’s nice to experience these things. And I do think the better you are at it, the more fun you can have.

And I do have a little bit of a goal or target. Like, I see, for example, these three guys. I feel like, wow, they can do so much with their bodies and have fun together. That's cool.

I made a little mental ‘flag’ 10 years ago, that I want to be more connected with my body.

I don't know if I told you about this, but I tell this story a lot. When I was studying Buddhist philosophy, I was in gelug school, the most logical school. They say that there are five levels of emptiness, and eight ways of establishing impermanence. It’s very logical.

And there was one: five levels of reality.

There’s the reality that you’ve heard about. So that's kind of trustworthy.

And then the second level is the reality that you learn from some logical conclusion.

But the realist level of reality is experiential level. And I was asking, what does th experiential level mean?

They said: it's something that you can feel with your body. I was, like, really shocked.

What do you mean, “body”, and what do you mean, “experience with the body”?

The body was also always a burden that I dragged along in my life. The body is creating so many problems, it's tired, it’s gasping, it's heavy, it's sick, and blah, blah, blah.

So... I think from that time on, I had this thing. I want to be more connected with my body. And appreciate it. Respect it, and try to feel the world through it.

I went through the binary period where I was teaching the intellect to go with the body. And it's very recent that now I want to re-embrace the mind.

I was throwing away the prefrontal cortex. I was throwing away the intellect. I was running away from reading books.

All of this made me want to go fully into the body. And fuck all this rationality and intellect and stuff.

CI is a very embodied practice. So, I was doing body work, I was giving people massages, and I do all this more somatic thing, like what we did yesterday. Like how does your pinky connect to your right eyeball? And how does your little toe connect with the tip of your head?

And also, Chinese medicine. It’s also part of the connection with the body. And CI provides a lot of the fun part of the body.

You have some intentions. How are you expressing yourself with your body?

But that's not all of it. That's one part. CI sees my pattern and my communication. It sees other people’s patterns. And it’s just fun!

And I really enjoyed it. Sometimes, like I said in the circle, I would consider it a good job when I did something different. When I made some different choice. When I'm not in this very controlling mode. You know, your body has a big impact on your mind. If your body is stiff, the mind is also very stiff. I was feeling so bad about, fuck, I've been so controlling and critical and judgmental about other people. Maybe that's a big problem that I've been blind to all this time. And blah, blah, blah. But then, at the same time, I’m moving my spine and it makes the reflection not so stiff, not going into a cycle of self-judgement. And it makes possibilities.

In CI there's a sentence that says you never dance alone. Because you are always dancing with a floor. You are always dancing with gravity.

I think what you were saying – when we talk about the togetherness – I think it also brings the acknowledgement of the already existing togetherness.

There's so much in different somatic practice schools. In CI, feldenchrist, and tai chi, whatever. There's so much about grounding and connecting with the Earth. And CI has a bit more emphasis on relationships. You are always in a relationship. The idea that you are alone is a big illusion. It's not true. The earth is holding you, and the earth is pulling you. And you're always working with different forces.

You know, sometimes I say, I feel stuck in a jam, because I'm sitting there. Like, I take myself out. But then, when you are in the thing, even if you are dancing alone, you are joining the jam.

Eventually something will happen.

And then I thought, you know, today, I felt so sensitive with my body. I was worried about going there, because I have my period, and really I don't want to touch people.

I went there with this feeling. I want to be alone, and I don’t feel connected with humanity. And then suddenly something happened! I'm resistant, but then it happened.

There's all this improvisational dance, like ecstatic dance, that you do on your own. You follow your intuition, but then it can get quite boring. With another person, you never know what happens, which first comes, and then you just have to react.

I feel like my body's still not so ready. My own structure. But this time with Fran, he said you just have to adjust your structure all the time. And usually before I start, it's like, oh, I need to take a long time on my own to prepare my body, to practice my core, my arm muscles, my coordination, so that I can be more reactive and responsive.

But this time he was very strict with me. He kept jumping on me. And he said, “Get your structure ready.” Trust your structure, trust your structure.

So that made me think, maybe if I do it at that moment… it's not about a later time, when I get home, when I’ve already strengthened my core. Or after doing some pushups. But it's at each moment.

In CI it is very equal, and there's a slogan of everyone can dance, but then... there are levels, and that level sometimes doesn't feel so comfortable.

We want to dance with people with more experience, and we do judge people by skill. I don't like that. So I was very happy yesterday, I enjoyed dancing with people that don't have skills.

For me, it's quite real, these levels. But I'm open to the fluctuation of life. Yesterday, I was dancing with people, and there were two women I danced with. And when we were sharing, I realized one of them only danced once, 10 years ago. And I enjoyed that dance with her somehow. So, you know, the level is not so rigid.

And that happens so much in CI. You're with people, and there's all these things here that are out of your control. And how do you survive it? And how do you create from that?

Like the last time there was a score. You dance with the same partner for 5 minutes, for 5 rounds. And while we danced, 2 people write what they see. And then we take turns.

So I have to dance with you for 5 rounds of 5 minutes. And I was with this girl, this American university girl. She sucks. She speaks so much about how she did Chinese classic dance. She's not listening at all. She's speaking, speaking, speaking, speaking. With her body. During the dance. Talking so much with her body without seeing where we are going. And where's my partner? Where's my partner's foot?

And I was so annoyed in the beginning, but then I had to surrender to this dance, and then I joined her game. And I had a little bit of fun. I would still not choose to dance with her, but then I was really like, how do I deal with it? Like, I'm stuck here.

You know, it's about reacting to the relationship now. I think I have this tendency that I need to go back to my own, prepare, and then interact with you. I think it's a belief system. I believe in working on my own, taking my responsibility, becoming better so that I can be with you better. It makes sense, but then, maybe it's only one side.

I might need to go prepare myself, get better already. The alternative is that I can get ready at this moment. By trusting.

It's not about later. I think we're always like waiting. Waiting for life to happen.

That's why I feel very proud of you. You just go fully in it. And I think a lot of times my strategy, especially when I first participate, is that I don't want to get the best out of it, I want to get a little bit out of it, and I will get the best out of it, eventually, at some point, later on. When I’m better and more qualified and I’m prepared. I think CI has a very rapid physical time.

There's really a physical reaction to time. It's very solid timing. If you're thinking about it, it's already too late.

And that's what I mean about the reality, the experiential reality. My body is capable of being with you, without analysis. My body knows your body’s moments and where you are the lightest.

And I feel that physical thing makes me feel strong. Makes me feel like I have two feet in the world.

Before I always felt like I have a big head. Like, you know, I have a mind. I have good grades in school, but my limbs were just like seaweed, floating. I don't know, where's my leg? What am I doing with my body? Now, in these moments where I can catch a person in the right time, I feel like I have such strong legs on the floor. I have a human body. I'm not just a spirit. I'm not some thoughts, some cluster of mind. I also have my animal side, my very grounded instinct.

It’s a more integrated strength. It’s not solitary and shy.

I think that that's what I was trying to tell you about Native Americans. They don't have an otherworld. They say a healthy person is a person that can get what they need.

That's very powerful. That's very solid.