My Body, The Buddhist

introduction

introduction Alone in candlelight one evening several years ago I made a list of the most valued teachings learned from my teacher, my body. I wanted to itemize, to see a written account of the practical wisdom I have discovered while experimenting with my teacher as guide. Each of the eighteen lessons is a chapter title in My Body, The Buddhist . When the inventory was complete, it spanned twenty-six years. I also noticed a parallel with Buddhist thought, although I am not a practicing Buddhist. For as long as I can remember I have intuitively preferred the politics of nonviolence. Nonresistance, seen in the bodies of many Buddhists, has always drawn my attention. And action through nonaction, at least as I perceived it on the surface, secretly appealed to my middle-class upbringing. In the early 1970s, when I was living at Mad Brook Farm in Vermont , the books I was reading—in particular, Be Here Now by Baba Ram Dass and Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche—advocated a spiritual path that was analogous to my experiences dancing. I was inspired to construct a verbal dance vocabulary that merged personal and universal images. I wanted it to include the sensual experiences of perception. With the help of language, I wanted to simplify access to dancing while expanding the territory from which a dancer could draw immediate kinesthetic experience. Books and articles concerning Buddhist philosophy have proliferated in comparable measure to those written about the body. Yet I am certain that no two people living in a western culture would define in the same way either body or Buddhism. How we describe the body even changes several times a day for some of us. I have come to understand that the body’s form and content are not what they appear to be; likewise, my dances do not coalesce around specific subject matter. Deborah Hay: My Body, The Buddhist page xxiii xxiii Deborah Hay: My Body, The Buddhist page xxiv xxiv : introduction one line short . . . once you have that experience of the presence of life, don’t hang onto it. Just touch and go. Touch that presence of life being lived, then go. You do not have to ignore it. “Go” does not mean that we have to turn our back on the experience and shut ourselves off from it; it means just being in it without further analysis and without further reinforcement. Holding onto life, or trying to reassure oneself that it is so, has the sense of death rather than life. (Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, The Heart of the Buddha) My Body in the title of this book refers to a prescribed set of what ifs organized around my work as a practicing performer, choreographer , and teacher: What if alignment is everywhere? What if your teacher (your 53 trillion cells) inspires mine? Such imagined conditions , changed periodically, are necessary for me even to begin dancing. There has to be a certain discipline so that we are neither lost in daydream nor missing the freshness and openness that come from not holding our attention too tightly. This balance is a state of wakefulness, mindfulness. (Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, The Heart of the Buddha) My Body, dancing, is formed and sustained imaginatively. I reconfigure the three-dimensional body into an immeasurable fifty-three trillion cells perceived perceiving, all of them, at once. Impossibly whole and ridiculous to presume, I remain, in attendance to the feedback. At such times Deborah Hay assumes the devotion of a dog to its master; reading the simplest signs of life, lapping up whatever nuance my teacher produces. When the greater part of the Buddhist world finds its strength, solace, and wisdom through a practiced devotion to a guru, or Rinpoche, please imagine my hesitancy in admitting to twenty-eight years of devotion to an imagined 53-trillion-celled teacher. The book grew from the list of eighteen statements that form its chapter headings. But I did not write the material to fit the headings. Several pieces had already been written when I began. Others I wrote to help me understand and gain a wider perspective on how Deborah Hay: My Body, The Buddhist page xxv introduction : xxv one line short dancing impacts my life and how life impacts my dance. With each story, or score, I would scan the table of contents until an unusually obvious or uncanny link...