What, you might wonder, am I doing in the photograph at left—which was taken by photographer Jim Boyden of Ojai, California?

Crawling across the floor in my underwear? Yes. That’s the short version of the story. It wasn’t the first picture I posted here—but when I switched out the unprepossessing headshot for this one, I started getting a heck of a lot more traffic. Go figure.

Anyhow, this photo was taken at a photoshoot for SonneBlauma Dancz, a modern dance company of which I was a member for a couple of years. Misa Kelly, its director, had me get down and crawl across the floor while cackling about a topic I now forget. This photo was the result.

I love this picture. It so encapsulates my whole experience of this life: crawling along, belly to the earth, palms to the sky, laughing my ass off.

I danced for about 15 years before I had kids. Took a lengthy hiatus, then returned to it at age 37, about three years ago. I’ve never been spectacular at it. But folks tell me I move well enough: that when I am onstage, I am interesting and compelling to watch. The kind of dance I do is known variously as modern dance or contemporary dance.When I tell people this, many have never seen this kind of dance—or they’ve seen spectacularly bad, self-indulgent, or poorly realized versions that turned them off to it forever. I hear that show “So You Think You Can Dance” is giving more people an idea of the potential of this kind of dance. (Don’t have TV. Can’t watch it myself.) Some would say that the kind of showmanship and dazzling technique highlighted in that show doesn’t do contemproary dance justice—that those are “routines” and that real modern dance aims to create a work of art, not just ooh-ah athleticism and purty girls who can kick themselves in the head without bending their knees.

I’m not going to get into that part of the debate right now. I’m going to talk about a rehearsal I went to last Tuesday.

Three other female dancers and I have been working on a piece together. Each of us showed up at our first rehearsal having created a few eight-counts of movement on our own. Each of us taught our phrase to the others.

Each one was very different in terms of the actual movements--the direction in which limbs and body center moved in relationship to each other and the space around them. But the most remarkable differences showed up in the quality and rhythm of each person’s phrase.

(This is one of the most amazing things about contemporary dance: there is no proscribed quality for the movements that make up a piece of choreography. It can be staccato or smooth, sharply angular or curvaceous, rhythmic or fluid, low or high, heavy or light. Qualities can shift and change from piece to piece, minute to minute, even second to second. No other dance form incorporates such range. Because of its range, this medium can encompass the human experience every bit as completely as the visual arts, theater arts, or even literature.)

A few rehearsals later, I was still struggling with the phrase created by the fabulous Amy Fritzler, a dancer, choreographer and Pilates instructor. I had finally figured out all the changes in direction (and there seemed to be a bajillion of them) and level. My feet and arms and legs knew where they were supposed to go. But I wasn’t feeling it.

I felt like Hansel and Gretel wandering the woods looking for their trail of breadcrumbs. I wasn’t afraid of being cooked and eaten, but the fear of trying to perform  the phrase without feeling it in my body at all was almost as bad—particularly, performing it with three others who are all at least five years younger and gorgeous dancers. I asked Amy to help me out before she ran off to teach a Pilates client.

She coached me on the tiniest details of the movements. That turn and lunge forward initiates with the hip. The hip thrusts forward and the head drops back. Yes! Lift the ribs. A little more. That’s it! Breathe here. Then when you turn it’s a body half, just push off the front leg and make a half turn to the right. Then the hips switch and the left leg loops loose to the down right corner and the foot literally slaps onto the floor.

She gave me very clear details about what body part (knee, hip, head) initiates each movement and the quality of each movement. The knee didn’t just bend, it collapsed into the bent position. The arabesque wasn’t just a posture adopted from there; the whole body gathered and grew into it, from the ball of the standing foot all the way up and out through the fingers.

After about five minutes of this kind of instruction, I felt my life had changed. Not only did I start to feel the movement from the very core of my body: I felt a shift in my perspective on the details of dance and of life in general. Can I use the word epiphany here? Has that one been done to death? Yes, but I’ll still use it. I had an epiphany.

I realized how good it felt to surrender to doing each part of that phrase in exactly the way the choreographer told me to do it. My work was to intently listen and try to internalize every instruction Amy gave me. In doing this, I would allow my body to learn how to inhabit that movement completely, down to the last detail. Then, and only then, would I have the freedom to start dancing it. It could then become almost Pavlovian: the piece would start and the ol’ bag of flesh and bones would do the rest. Eventually, ideally, the phrase would dance me instead of me trying to dance the phrase. In the luminous center of it all, I'd be awake and humming with the joy of this. And the people who observed this in me and my fellow dancers would be drawn into that luminosity.

Little did I know that day that Amy would become an important teacher in my life. All she was doing was sharing her expertise to answer a question she'd been asked. But she was the teacher at hand for me that day. In that short exchange, attended to with intense concentration by yours truly, I learned something important that I believe will alter my dancing self for the better. It will make dancing more fulfilling for me--and hopefully it'll make me more fun to watch, too.

So often, we turn away from those who might turn out to be valuable teachers. We are taught to always think for ourselves and to argue against those who tell us how to do something--because that threatens our egoic selves, with which we're taught to identify very, very strongly in this culture (cult?) of individualism called the U.S.A.

Try this: the next time someone tells you how to do something, stop and take a breath. See if you can bypass that initial urge to argue that your way is just fine, thanks, and that you don't need anyone to tell you how to do it better. Say something like this: "Okay...just tell  me what to do, and I'll put my heart and soul into doing it exactly as you say."

See what happens. Maybe you'll have your own epiphany.