Today is harder for me to connect to the physical ideas. My body doesn’t want to accept them. I’m being too internal and not seeing out enough.
We begin by softening our hearts, reaching our arms from our backs.
I feel my arms moving out, not from where they attach to my torso, but from a place much deeper. The connection runs from my hands to the center of my ribcage. My hands and arms are moving, but I don’t really feel them. My focus is on the outpouring sensation from my chest through my arms, and the energy dissipates as it reaches my fingertips. It’s a good feeling, something very personal.
“Describe circles with the front of your chest and the back of your back at the same time.” I know you can’t actually separate them, but once the teacher tells us this, these two points seem to be moving independently. It feels strange to bring my attention to these two spots that are on opposite sides of my body, feeling them not as a whole but as two different parts. Gaga really breaks your body up into pieces in ways you’d never consider. My coordination feels challenged. I’m thinking too much about the dimensionality of these circles, getting too in my head.
We move to exploring the freedom and range in our hips by bringing tension and squeezing our ass cheeks before releasing to find more movement, first with our legs closed and then with our legs wider. I feel constricted and bottled up when my legs are touching. The teacher tells us to move into a wider stance, and immediately, the curves find more freedom and range in my hips. As we explore all directions, I realize I often explore the range in the back of my hips and sitz bones more so than I do in the front of my hips. There, I feel tightness and immobility. We grab our lower stomach to tuck our tail under and release to tuck further.
“Continue to find these areas in your hips as you bring one foot in front and describe figure eights.” This is so difficult! My hips do not want to listen, or don’t know how to. My coordination continues to be challenged when we shift our weight from leg to leg while pulling and stretching our arms like gum. “Keep your feet light and tell a different story.” This stretching in my arms makes me want to ground into the floor so I have something to stretch against. It’s challenging to stay light while feeling juicy in my hips.
We begin to bring texture into our hands, like we’re kneading dough. “Let this texture travel into your feet, like the floor you’re on has become really soft.” This plush carpet I’m on really lets me dig my feet into the floor and play with the texture.
It wasn’t until near the end of class that I felt I really connected to an idea. “Let’s have a ‘doll’ moment. Connect to the buckling sensation in your knees, hips, shoulders, ankles. Grab to buckle again.” I let my body give in to invisible forces with ease, using my muscles to restore some structure and then break it again. It feels good to relinquish control of my body and give into gravity. Something I don’t have to think about. We layer a shake on top of this, and I can feel my body in a million tiny pieces moving in every direction possible, free within the container of my flesh.