After high school I pursued an education to become a professional dancer. Dancing was my passion - what I loved to do and what I wanted to do forever. I quit towards the end of the first year, because within this training, within this school - I felt I no longer enjoyed dancing the way I used to. The training was intense of course and the school was competitive. Dancing for me had always been something I did in my free time, for me - where I 'got away from it all'.
In movies they romanticize what it means to get in to a professional dancing school, and so had I. The physical reality was different from what I had expected. The group I started in seemed to share the same expectations - we were all excited initially, but it didn't take long before we were all continuously exhausted and struggling emotionally to make it through the week. The weekend, when I wasn't dancing, was now the time we would get 'away from it all'.
After I quit the school, I joined an amateur dance company. I had seen them perform while I was still in the professional dance school and remember being impressed by the choreography, their level of technique/ability and the passion of the dancers.
There were several new dancers in the company when I joined. The group was obviously 'tight' with each other and so the newbies would mostly hang with each other - but this didn't last for long. Within the choreographies, there was a lot of partnerwork - where two or more dancers have to work in absolute harmony in order to pull of a particular part/section of the choreography - and for no one to fall or get hurt. Your timing, your positioning, your intensity, your speed has to be absolutely specific - and you have to trust the other to do the same. And if for some reason you get out of sync, you have to adjust yourself in a moment - and trust that the other would do the same. Trust on this level is quite interesting - because it is a decision that has to be made - where you allow yourself to place trust in another - to catch you, to hold you or to release you.
To be continued
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I have been observing an interesting point that was briefly mentioned in one of the EQAFE interviews of the "Parenting - Perfecting the Human Race" series in myself: that I have the tendency to first want to 'know' how to do something or get an explanation of how something is done, before I am willing to develop the point for myself. I have very much ingrained this pattern from my schooling years where this approach is how things are 'taught' in school - where you are first told and explained the 'rules' you have to follow and only once you have memorized the guidelines and the 'knowledge' part - do you have you put it into practice. This approach of 'teaching' also limits how things are done, because everyone follows the same format, you are already constrained in your expression through the instructions you are taught to follow. An interesting approach would be, for instance, to give children a task to do and to have each one have their own approach, their own perspective, their own style - and from there suggestions can be given in how things can be done more effectively for each individual student.
And so - for myself - every time I am faced with doing something new, I'll have this idea and perception that I can't do it, just because no-one has given me any instructions to follow. And within this, it is clear that I have very much defined self-trust in relation to knowledge - where 'I trust myself' means 'I am confident that I possess the knowledge in terms of how this is done and that I can effectively carry out the instructions contained within it' - lol - sounds quite robotic, right, lol. It's like I first need to be 'fed' a program or a script, so that I can just mindlessly follow the program or script in actual doing.
And, what I have found when I do push myself to just do it - just start somewhere, throw myself into the deep end - I can simply evaluate what I have done and from there, I can see for myself where I require to take a different approach, or where I can improve something and how to improve it in order to get a better result. And it is actually in those moments that self-trust comes in - because it is the seeing of what requires to change that is not based on knowledge or information that requires self-trust. Obviously, there is also always the point of being able to ask for assistance from someone who has already developed the particular skill or who has experience with the particular task to be able to specify one's own application - where, one can make one's own assessment and then ask another to share their perspective as well - and then the points can be merged and transformed into a plan for improvement.
And these attempts and try-outs don't have to be a dreadful thing - one determines this for oneself - when one can walk through the fear in breath and simply be here within and as the experiment, one can easily enjoy oneself - and even in making the assessment and making a plan for improvement. None of these points are inherently 'dreadful' or 'scary' or 'negative' - yet it's how we've often come to define them through our schooling experience - where it is strongly linked to 'not being good enough' or 'doing it wrong' or 'failing'.
So - here some perspective when one sees this pattern in oneself - to consider not placing trust in 'knowledge', but in and as ourselves - to simply walk here, in the moment from a starting-point of self-support. It's not about proving oneself to others and it's not about getting praise - it's about doing it for oneself and to discover who we are when we walk through our self-imposed limitations, fears and resistances!
To start this process, one can find support on http://lite.desteniiprocess.com, which is a free course where one is supported by a buddy - or one can go to http://forum.desteni.org where a group of people will welcome you and be ready to assist!
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I noticed a point today that, when I am faced with a life-altering decision, I go into a complete point of resistance. Eventually, I move myself towards practically considering the facts involved - but initially, that first experience still comes up.
The resistance is not so much in relation to either one of the options - but in relation to having to make the decision itself. I keep going back to the thought 'I don't know what would be best!'
Considering my previous blog-series this is quite fascinating as my whole life I've been wanting to make my own decisions and having the space and money to make my own decisions - but now, when it comes to it, I just keep thinking that someone else should tell me what to do - and most prominently, I find myself wanting to get advise from my mother.
Throughout my life I was never really shown how to practically make a decision - when I asked for advise - people would present me with questions to answer, such as:
- What do you want?
- Will you regret doing option B if you go for option A?
- If you go for option A and it fails, do you have a back-up plan?
The advanced considerations always stood in the context of my fears and my desires - where I would then weigh my fears against my desires and then make a decision according to what I perceived would yield the highest positive result.
So - in realizing that desires and fears are no valid premise to base a decision upon, because positive and negative charges are volatile,where something that was first seen as positive turns into something negative or something expected to be negative, is actually experienced as positive - so my expectations of and experiences of negative and positive points would keep changing and altering during the decision-making and even after the decision-making, which would then confuse me and make me wonder whether I made the 'right choice'.
So - in realizing that my feelings and emotions are no trustworthy guide in life, I feel I am left with nothing - that is my first, initial, immediate experience: a big black hole of nothingness.
I've within my process developed a method of making practical decisions - but the fact that this resistance-experience still comes up, indicates that I still have a tendency of not trusting myself in the face of the unknown - where - when I see nothingness and have to actually direct, create and move myself into the future - I immediately go into a belief of limitation and am grabbing to something or someone else to get a foothold, to have a reference, to have confirmation, to have validation - instead of simply trusting myself here - standing equal and one as the nothingness, one can consider everything. If one doesn't stand equal and one as nothingness, it means one has already placed oneself into a particular mind-set, a particular opinion, a particular belief, a particular attitude - from where you already limit and compromise your ability to see what would actually be best.
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