We keep hearing embodied teachers, psychologists and healers telling us to down-regulate. Come home to the body. Settle. Meanwhile, dancers and lineage carriers demonstrate the power of community and the importance of respect and ritual with the land. But what if home is under attack? What if the body you’ve trained so carefully still does things it doesn’t know it shouldn’t be doing? And what if, right now, there is no community to return to? What if what is really needed is movement towards a way out? I am not suggesting that these questions point to some sort of personal failure, or that any of us need more retreats to process things. I’m saying that most somatic and embodied modalities available teach people how to live in a world that is safer than the one we are in. I am saying most communal and land-based practices are in fact specific to those places and those people—and in many cases are closed practices and at best we were only guests when we visit them. The signs of teachings falling short for well-meaning teachers, healers and beginners are everywhere. You see the burnout on peoples faces. You have seen—many times at this point—the fallout when someone finds out something that healed them wasn’t meant for them to keep. Or you might know the experience of laying down in comfortable clothes, feeling the singing bowls wash over you and the promise that a little more self-awareness and regulation will bring safety when in fact your body is collecting different data. Your body feels danger while wellness says to settle. How then do we embody in a world that won’t admit it’s at war? As someone raised within a tradition built for survival and finding ways out of impossible situations, I know this struggle from the inside, and from much further back than my own life. I’m a Bashaldo Gypsy, raised with a legacy of five-hundred years of American Gypsy culture—a dancer, harper and researcher with a PhD in impact-driven dance. My family knows all about being told that we are safe while in fact, our homes, culture and lives are under constant attack that is invisible to outsiders. What my people built inside this crack—as Roma and Sinti people have for thousands of years—is a movement technology for staying mobile and at rest at the same time. This is not hyper-vigilance, which will burn the nervous system down and lock up the fascia and lymphs. This isn’t down-regulation or relaxation either, which—I am going to borrow from my mother here—is like leaving your ass open in the breeze. Sure, it’s liberating and good to know, but it’s an incomplete instruction when you’re facing hardship or danger whether it’s perceived or real. What I am sharing with you in Timedancer Meditations is a distillation through rigorous research that came to me when I opened to the Blackness of the Atlantic ocean and the lives of sailors.1 They led me home to my own culture and identity—that which I had thought was cursed. During my PhD at the University of Limerick, I confirmed this impact-driven knowledge was carried by Roma and Sinti people and adapted around the world, including in many percussive dance styles.2 The methods behind the forms are what I offer to you—to gadje (non-Roma). While many Roma and Sinti communities remain closed, my people have always taught how to read through the roads of time, how to dance alone on stage while still finding community in that and made songs to mourn the innocence of being human in an inhuman world. We taught people how to survive. Through our ingenuity we helped teach the world to navigate: the trained capacity to perceive danger accurately, move in relation to it and keep dancing through the fullness of being alive. I’m not saying that you need to stay traumatized. I’m not saying that polyvagal people are wrong—although this theory has recently been disproven—or that poetic embodied teachers are lying to you. Landing in the body and understanding what a healthy balanced, regulated body is for you is wonderful tech. But for many of us it’s only half a curriculum. Human rights law teaches us that everyone has a right to a safe home, but what happens when the ground of that home is shaking, or has fallen away entirely? That’s the half my tradition are experts at moving through, and the half of the curriculum that has saved my life many times. This is the magic that has allowed me to survive, thrive when I can and stand in social responsibility to others, even during this last year when disaster took my life in New York City away from me. This is choreography that welcomes calmness but does not depend upon it to cross an ocean onto safer ground. I’m inviting you to consider that life is full of impact, and we could even say it is led by it. Collisions great and small are how we come to know the world and ourselves better, or perhaps at all. If you’re feeling pretty hopeless, that’s a sign of readiness. If things haven’t worked out, that’s a meaningful opening. If you’ve considered giving up the fight, whether it’s in rage, terror, self-pity or catastrophic grief, I invite you to be still for a moment. And then let that be the beginning of a creative journey to understand who you really are. Gypsy Fires is a reader-supported publication. Subscribe for more access in Timedancer Meditations and the Micro-Dance School. A Manifesto for Timedancing For as long as we can remember, we have been timedancers. In dreams, in the eyes of a stranger, across murdered ground and rested universe—through clock, compass and wheel—we spin. At other times we seem to twist time right back. In some moments, we whirl together. In our journeys across the earth, we have come to account for crossings. Some care more for beginnings, some for departure and others for their finding. As the number of witnesses of this wayfaring has grown, so too have our ways of keeping track of where we have been, where we are, and where we might want to go. Some map hope, and others wanting—a hunger with no shore. The ruins of borders, however, teach few throughout the ages. Our celestial orb, our continents, our homelands, our houses and our bodies are moving. These edges—our names, identities and boundaries—are so fiercely protected, but they can never, ever be immortalized. We are not just held by the space we take up on the earth, but our time upon it. The will we bring to the dirt, shamrock, sea and eagle—to the arms of our beloved—is our dance. For some timedancers, we glimpse only bits and snatches of ghosts. Sometimes it is a whisper from the lift of our fallen, or simply an apparition of the stuck. Somehow, it seems, our will becomes our energy and that becomes our destiny, and that can be felt throughout time and space. As a medium, in every dance of life I have ever delivered from those who have transitioned out of their bodies (the dead)—every parent who wanted to apologize to their children, every child who wanted to comfort their parent, every spouse who wanted to say “I’m still here”—I was only ever able to do so when I dropped into my heart. The ego lets go, the mind releases, the heart falls…and time opens. This connection is what I mean by your birthright. It can never be taken away, but you can be convinced to refuse it. As Frantz Fanon so thoroughly observed, colonization is not just on land, over resources or our bodies, but in the mind when it tricks us to identify with those who do not have our best intentions at heart. Occupations are not just externally imposed though. In our human condition we long for security and we can easily create choreographies that forget leaving, returning and change; we prefer to stay. We want to defend our identities, borders and walls. And still, the warp and weft of fate brings collision, drifting and devouring stillness. We can push and pull the floor that shakes and breaks with the w… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit newsletter.gypsyfires.com/subscribe
