on sacred movement: A polemic

This is a film I directed and edited, shot by Chris Scarafile with an original score entitled "Enso" by my sibling, Dani Hawkins. It's of my teacher, then-92-year-old modern dance legend Mary Anthony, doing a circle meditation that was, of all the dances she taught to me in the 9 years I studied with her, my very favorite. She was known to cry out happily, "dervishes!!" when she witnessed us doing it. I don't know if the choreography was inspired by her work in Laban technique, or from some other early modern source interested in Sufi spinning. But her hands, y'all, her hands... the voices are my mom and dad and Thich Nhat Hanh, riffing on the cyclical return to source, the current of away and back we all ride, over and over. 

I want to talk about a deep longing. One that we were born with, one that predates us, a hunger in us that is foundational for who we are and how we move in the world. How we move. My longing took root in the years just before my conception, in my mother's discovery of sacred movement. This passion for an embodied communion with something higher - one I'm so lucky to share with you - might come from her. I know I know, this is my second newsletter that holds my mom at its heart, but isn't that the way? Maybe the mother is really actually at the heart of everything, especially if it's true that the creator-as-mother predates all patriarchal religions... in any case, she's on my mind since I'm just returning from a week at the ocean with this mother of mine, who banned cell phones and not-so-subtly pressured us into swimming in perilous waves churned up by hurricane/tornado/flood conditions. We were given the evacuation order on day three, when my daughters arrived on the last plane. We moved the car off the island, shored up our food and water supplies, flashlights, and candles, and got right back in those waves. A sibling and I each held one of her hands, until the whitecaps got real and I had to physically shove her out to where she could dive under the big swells. And I thought to myself once again as I so often have... this lady is crazy.

And while she almost certainly is, she also defies the insanity of our culture and its priorities. Is it sane to experience much of life through the lens of a six-inch glowing screen? Is it so crazy to revoke our right to that addiction, to return us to an experience of being on Ocean Time, on Storm Time, on Real Time? Is it totally crazy for an octogenarian with pretty radical end-of-life preferences who feels she's lived her life fully to risk drowning in that stormy sea? The ocean is home to her. Every day, all summer, her mother would drop her at the beach in the morning and pick her up at sunset. She would explore the tide pools and body-surf the waves, part natural scientist and part mystic. Actually, those are probably the same: my mother's mysticism centers on observing the natural world, from its beasties to its weather patterns, and her love-verging-on-worship of the ocean is kind of the perfect instantiation of this animist fusion. Across cultures, the ocean is associated with consciousness itself: a vast mystery, less understood by humans than outer space. The shoreline is the threshold, a liminal ground between the known world and the beyond. To love the ocean is to love - and feel most beloved at - that edge. That is where my mom has always lived, if you rewind her from eighty, in her second Thai Chi class of the day, to writing books about Christian mystics in her forties, back to her twenties, the time just before motherhood, when she was peeled open at the core by a certain practice of sacred movement.  

There was a Gurdjieff Center in Rochester, New York, where she went to college and grad school. She tolerated the top-down hierarchy of culty culture, its misogyny and the rule-bound obeisance that her imagination so resisted, just to move in a circle of bodies at the thresholds of dawn and dusk every day. She describes being ineluctably drawn to this practice of movements, although she can't remember a single one! Not one. Perhaps this is because Gurdjieff's movements were not about thinking or feeling, but about total absorption into moving. Plenty of folk in his day were turning to dance as a way to resuscitate the sacred in the face of the rational empiricism that dominated the time - Laban was doing it, Dalcroze was doing it, Steiner, others. What distinguished Gurdjeiff's movement from similar practices by his contemporaries was expressly the resistance to making them about ideas or emotions or artistic expression. Instead they were gestures designed to imprint the deeper patternings of creation into the human body.

It's a crazy claim, I know. Gurdjieff was crazy. And arrogant. And *possibly* slightly cruel - or at least really, really rigorous in the demands he made on his people. But he might also arguably be the only Western spiritual master ever to create a systematic practice for cultivating a deeper experience of mind, heart, and body. In what was dubbed "The Work," each of these three "centers" - moving, thinking, and feeling - were given equal attention, in tandem, their balance carefully maintained. According to Gurdjieff, human development is stunted if attention to any single one of these centers dominates, as he perceived to be true in Sufism, yoga, and Christian monasticism - the three traditions he claimed not just to fuse, but actually to intensify and expedite in a "Fourth Way." This proud approach would be perfunctorily cancelled, in our current climate of hypersensitivity to cultural appropriation and its history in the West. Which would be an entirely legit accusation to lob at a guy who almost certainly lied about his travels in the "Far East," and who is believed to have fudged ancient esoteric origins to the practices he taught. Is the Enneagram truly a secret system of the Babylonian Sarong Brotherhood dating back to 2500 BCE? So secret that even though there's no written evidence of its existence, it was revealed to someone who, just in examining the timeline of his life, couldn't have sustainably engaged any one spiritual tradition for more than a decade? Maybe, but probably not. Does this mean we should toss aside the longing that inspired his life's work? He was a major player in his time, and many of his teachings inform current practices that could not exist without him. Feldenkrais, for example, names Gurdjieff as his primary influence. The Enneagram traces back to him. And importantly, he used the Enneagram not as a nifty personality profiling tool for exploring our individualism (this isn't quite fair - I love Enneagram work - but this entry is meant to be polemical!) but instead as a tool for experimenting with dynamics within the collective body. The Enneagram in Gurdjieff Movement was a structural template for imagining how the sacred moves inside the collective, and how the collective can interact inside the sacred. The nine points and their intersections governed how multiple bodies interacted in space and time. So like, maybe he was a charlatan who had no business teaching Sufi dervish dances and also maybe he was working out some mad important shit - of which the radical cutting edge of progressive politics is just beginning to get a proverbial whiff. 

In this particular moment of history, as in Gurdjieff's, there are very real exigencies at play in the search for a way to deepen and bring into balance the thinking, feeling, and somatic centers of human experience. I'm upstairs reading Thomas de Hartmann's account of nearly dying (as in, hospitalized and unresponsive for weeks) after following this crazy-eyed Master through a treacherous mountain pass - his bad-ass wife in heels, btw. And while Gurdjieff framed this as a spiritual exercise, de Hartmann learned that the journey had saved him from the Bolsheviks. He followed someone on a crazy escapade that broke every cultural norm, to learn that he probably would have been assassinated in the fever-pitch social chaos exploding as two rival political parties struggled for the power to define a country according to their own particular worldview. How the sacred moves in the collective, how the collective moves in the sacred. And I come downstairs from my book to watch the Olympics, one of the few cultural traditions that remain fairly sacrosanct, and the special coverage of the oh-so-heartbreaking story of Jordan Chiles' "revoked" bronze is paused so we can be force-fed ads for destroying the planet, like DoorDash's promise to "unlock unlimited power" with immediate access to unlimited stuff. Oh, and also political smear campaigns brilliantly concocted to stoke the fear that will empower a different wild-eyed dude - crazy, arrogant, and clearly cruel. And I'm thinking hmmm... What is our "Work"? And how do we recover the fervor of our search for it, knowing that it just possibly could be the most important thing right now?

After this past weekend,  I'm more convinced than ever of the political imperative to engage collective healing of the split between body, mind, and spirit that was created by design to keep us all numbed out. A group from Shiné joined me for a retreat focused on the concept of the Sacred Compass, a concept borrowed from Quaker J. Brent Bill. We explored his idea of an internal compass that helps us find our direction, our next right step, and placed it in conversation with a Gurdjieffian mode of thinking that I can describe in more detail if you ask me about it in class. Most simply, we explored three truths about what a compass needs to function properly, three things we too require, if we're to keep our wayfinding spidey-sense functional:
1. Its needle must be tethered to the center. So do we. And we can't know our center if we lose connection with our bodies. We can't keep an intuitive sense of operating in the world from our center if we are dissociated. So the first step to building our sacred compass is centering meditation and centering movement.  
2. A compass can't find its True North if outside magnetic forces overwhelm it. How can we keep the destabilizing forces in the outside world from pulling us away from clear gravitation towards our True North - our purpose, our calling, the thing we're here to be in the world?
3. How do we come to understand the dynamic dance between the need to stay oriented inward towards center, and the pull outward towards our growth, our expansion, our deepening into the True North of our lives? I'm so so sooooo grateful to have shared a deep dive into these questions in a powerful group of people with some mad juju, and I can't wait for winter retreat. Keep your eyes peeled for dates, maybe in January. In the meantime, I hope those of you who are interested in questions like these will join me for the 10-week Wednesday night series that begins in mid-September, focusing on the exploration of sacred movement. Deets soon on Katyhawkins.com.