‘Choose the paths which are not worn out by many feet!’

MEHMET MURAT ILDAN

One of Gabrielle’s pithy invitations, which we heard her repeat many, many hundreds of times, was: ‘Put your mind in your feet.’ My own education, probably much like yours, had placed a strong emphasis on getting me to think. Actually, it wasn’t even thinking, rather remembering and regurgitating what others had thought. Either way, the head was boss and that was that. In the conscious dance world that we were part of creating, ‘getting out of our heads’ was the new creed. It was a good first step and we all had the ‘Dance first, think later’ T-shirt.

We were both excited and scared by the prospect of our new careers as movement teachers. The week before teaching our first dance workshop was hellish. Although we had a full course, made up mostly of friends and friends of friends, I was super-stressed about the whole thing. I was about as far from my feet as I could get and my practice went to the wall. I’ve since come to learn that it is when life gets difficult that practice is most important. Without it, we tend to revert to the default mode that we learned early on to deal with life. As that week went on, that old phrase ‘we teach best what we most need to learn’ kept coming to mind.

Most of the week was spent trying to get our music in order. In those days, we had to teach using cassette tapes. That meant that if we wanted to play a song twice, we had to record it onto a separate tape, use a double cassette player and rewind one whilst the other was playing.

At night, I hardly slept, and when I did, every type of ‘worst-case scenario’ presented itself through my dreams. I wondered why I was doing this to myself. Surely there must be an easier way to make a living. Who the hell did I think I was to teach anything, let alone dance? They’ll all see through you immediately, I thought. The sound system will fail. Your music is rubbish. You only got a place on the training because there were so few to choose from. Walk away now, Mikk, before you make a total fool of yourself!

My ego was having a field day. At the same time, I hung on to the thread of soul that was steadfastly keeping me on track. It wasn’t a lot of fun and it got worse as the week went by. I could hardly eat. And I had no space to support Susannah, who was in the middle of a battle with her own demons. Nevertheless, come Saturday, ‘Life Dance’ was to be the first workshop offered by the 5 to Midnight Gaia Dance Project.

I remember driving the two miles to the venue with the car packed full of stuff. It was a bright day. I remember wishing that I’d been teaching for 10 years. I thought I might have something to offer by then.

In actuality, the event was much easier than all the fears had led me to believe it would be. The longer the weekend went on, the more we found our feet. Whilst I was teaching, I found that the ego voices that had plagued me all week were silent. There was just no space for them when I had people in front of me who not only deserved my undivided attention but to whom it was a great pleasure to give it!

By the Sunday evening, we were both elated. We’d taught our first movement workshop, the people attending had got something out of it, and, miracle of miracles, we were being paid for the pleasure of it. Witnessing some of our friends get the simple magic of the dance was an absolutely beautiful experience.

One thing we discovered rather quickly on the dancing path was that if you give yourself to the drums, move your body that deeply and let go that much, then you’re in for some serious changes. Strange as it seemed to a young man who used to be too self-conscious to dance, this powerful meditation technique was opening up a deeper sense of self than I’d previously accessed. It was pure embodied shamanism.

Our second module of training was due in the early summer. During the months leading up to it, my daily practice was bringing me closer and closer to Earth. I felt as if I was landing in my life for the very first time. I was starting to have some choice about how much influence past hurts, fears and limiting self-concepts were having in my life. I was getting stronger and finding the beginnings of something I’d been short of – a very real confidence. For the first time, I started to see that there might be a way for me to stay true to my values and make a living. At the same time, I still had lots of attitudes about money. It took me a long time to work out that if I wanted to make a difference in this world, then learning to live in it was a prerequisite. And that meant paying off my debts and keeping up with my bills.

As my movement practice went deeper, so the unpredictability and spontaneous nature of what we were teaching started to find its way into my life. Change was soon the only constant as my sense of self went on a rollercoaster ride. Although things were going in a good direction, I’d often wake up with an underlying sense of dread. The unfinished business of my childhood and teenage years was starting to knock on the door of my psyche.

From the moment I’d left home to the time I’d begun teaching, I’d had a wild ride. Like most teenagers, I’d started to question everything. The rules and laws of my religion that had satisfied me as a child had become empty of meaning. I wanted answers to the deep questions that my life was bringing into my awareness. I’d seen ghosts, experienced psychic phenomena and had numerous out-of-body experiences. Sometimes I’d seen people’s illness or heard their thoughts. What did it all mean?

I used to take our dog for long walks on the beach at Southport and sit watching the sea. I loved open vistas where there was nothing man-made visible to tell me what century I was in. I’d get lost in the rhythmic sound of the ocean and the shapes in the sand as the waves retreated, and I’d write angst-filled poetry. I asked my questions out loud just in case God was listening. And though I was alone in those places, I never felt lonely there. Nature’s voice was always calming. Out in the open, I knew I belonged. Amongst people, things were more complex. Nature never tried to be anything other than what it was. People, on the other hand, so often said one thing and meant another altogether.

Nevertheless, I wanted to be cool and one of the gang. I got by with a blend of being good at sport, being a strong leader and going to football. Shouting and swearing both as player and spectator was wonderfully cathartic. I had an active fantasy life, replete with many a romantic episode on moonlit beaches, and a sweetness which had girls often wanting to share their hearts with me but not their bodies.

I developed a rather dramatic way of leaving any situation that I found too emotional: I would simply make myself leave my body. I can remember choosing to faint and watching from above as people went into action to deal with the supine body of a teenager whom I recognized but didn’t identify with from my safe out-of-body place.

By the time I met Susannah, in May 1986, I was 22 years old, a serious peacenik and had adopted the feminist ideals of what it meant to be a good man in the 20th century: caring, unthreatening, emotionally literate and much more passive than the previous 9,000 years of patriarchy had been famous for. Of course, my friends and I felt responsible for that. So, theoretically, inspired by Gandhi, I was totally into non-violence.

In actuality, I was full of repressed impulses of all kinds. I was working for the Youth Service and had learned to be scared of saying the wrong thing. Political correctness was all-important. I learned later that telling people what to say or think doesn’t change or even touch the layers of ignorance and insecurity from which all kinds of -isms arise. Real change demands real work with the body, heart and mind. But back then I thought it was enough simply to agree with an idea in order to live it.

My very first conversation with Susannah took place in her bedroom in the squat in Hackney where she and her women friends lived. We’d met earlier in the garden and though it wasn’t love at first sight for either of us, it was definitely recognition at first sight. We felt we must have met somewhere before, but we didn’t know where.

Later that day, I was at a planning meeting, and as it progressed, I found myself more and more distracted. I made my excuses and left. I wanted to find Susannah and talk.

I found her in her room. Our very first conversation was about whether it was possible to be completely free and completely committed at the same time. It was a time of grand ideas and high ideals. I was ready to explore the big wide world. Susannah’s encouragement to do so was provocative. I felt a door inside me beginning to open.

I moved to the peace camp at Faslane. The camp had a serious mission: to protest against the building of further nuclear submarines and to highlight the damage done to the loch by nuclear leakage. At the same time, it was full of people who saw no paradox in blending serious protesting with serious partying. It was a wild summer of political action, partying and loving. In the day, we protested. At night, we were rarely sober. We smoked chillums standing on our heads, sang songs by the fire and talked about how to put the world to rights.

In my time in the peace movement I was arrested four times for nonviolent direct action, twice in Scotland at Faslane nuclear submarine base, once in Belgium and once in Denmark. In each incident, my nonviolence training, which taught me to resist arrest by going floppy and refusing to cooperate, worked well. I noticed on each occasion that the arresting officers were furious with our tactics. And I noticed how strangely superior that made me feel. They were the violent ones. They were the oppressors. My fellow protestors and I were the victims and we held the moral high ground.

I learned later that my passivity had actually been a form of indirect violence. And I recognized that much of the violence I’d met in those situations had been an expression of my own unowned aggression. After one of those arrests, alone in a cell for four days, I had nothing to do but look at the white wall and think. On that wall, I kept seeing the angry face of my arresting officer. And I saw how the more passive I’d become, the angrier he’d become. I started to get an inkling that the two things were related. But playing the righteous victim was part of my survival system and it would take me many years to see this clearly and be able to make the choice to step out of it. Back then, on the outside, I was sweet. On the inside, I was seething, with some justification, about the ills of the world. But being angry didn’t fit my self-image as a Gandhi-esque non-violent activist. So I didn’t notice. Apparently, my arresting officers did.

I learned a lot from the crowd of regulars and visitors who frequented the peace camp, but by the summer’s end I was ready for something else. I moved into the Mornington Grove community in London in the early autumn of 1986. It was less than five miles from where Susannah was living. Having spent a couple of months courting by sending each other notes through mutual friends, we got it together. She was ready to find all she needed in one man, and though I’d enjoyed my summer of free love, I was ready for something deeper and more meaningful. We fell in love.

When we met Gabrielle, the physicality and immediacy of her work was very different from the kind of shamanic work we’d studied until then. The deeper I went in the dance, the more I discovered the wisdom that was living in the extraordinary, complex and intelligent structure that is the human body.

Our second module of training was due soon after Susannah’s 26th birthday. For her birthday, I decided to have a ring designed and made by a jeweller we’d met. When I gave her the ring, she thought that I was asking her to marry me. I was shocked. I hadn’t thought about the obvious significance of having a ring made for her! It was an awkward moment as I apologized for any confusion and Susannah backtracked as gracefully as she could.

We went to our second module of teacher training with a lot going on. I was even feeling an uneasy sense of dread. Nevertheless, we were delighted to see everyone again and to catch up with our fellow trainees. And as far as I knew, I was there to do more training. But my heart had other ideas.

We were working in a new venue called the Karuna Institute, also in Devon. It was May 1989. One afternoon, Gabrielle was teaching us how to work with emotion through the dance. The central premise of her work was that the dancer inside us could move through anything if we got ourselves out of the way. She told us that the body was like clay. If you shaped it into a sculpture of sadness, sadness would fill that sculpture if sadness was present. If you made a sculpture that acknowledged anger and let the body bring movement to it, if anger needed to move, it would. She encouraged us to increase the body’s vocabulary by working with different tempos, shapes and expressions. If we could remind the body of its capacity to move with emotion, when emotion was present in our day-to-day life, we would have a much wider vocabulary for moving with it.

I loved this way of working. It gave such freedom to express the heart responsibly without having to justify or explain any of it. That particular morning, though, I couldn’t seem to find my dance. The further we went, the heavier I became. I was exhausted. I felt grey and sluggish. And by the time we reached the end of the dance, a time when I would have expected myself to be in a shimmering silence, I felt awful. The feeling of dread that had been creeping up on me for the past few weeks had truly landed.

As the dance wound to a close, I asked myself why. I was totally shocked by the answer that came back, clear as a lightning flash: ‘You want to marry Susannah and you’re terrified of how your family will react.’

Although my rational mind started turning somersaults in an attempt to obscure again what had become so clear, I knew immediately that it was true. I knew my parents would be deeply upset, as Susannah wasn’t Jewish and I’d been brought up with stories of the terrible family consequences that had followed any decision to ‘marry out’. Echoes of a distant great-great-uncle who’d been banished from the family for following his heart rang loud between my ears. Despite this, I couldn’t ignore what had become obvious.

At the end of the session, I asked for a word with Gabrielle before we had lunch. We sat down and she asked me what was wrong. It was clear from my state that something was seriously upsetting me. I told her simply that I wanted to marry Susannah and I knew that my parents and grandparents would be devastated. I was scared and I didn’t know what to do.

There were a few times in my 18-year apprenticeship with Gabrielle when light shone through her dark eyes and she spoke words that shook me to the core. This was one of them.

‘Nobody is asking you to give up your family. Life is just asking you to give up your need for their approval.’

Boom! Time to grow up and take responsibility for your own life, Mikk. In an instant I went from fear of ‘what if’ to elation. Concern for my family and their responses didn’t disappear, not at all. But Gabrielle had helped me to put it into perspective.

‘I want to spend my life with this woman. I’m going to ask her to marry me.’

I went into the dining room to find Susannah and in front of my friends and colleagues I got down on my knees and asked her. She said yes and the dining room erupted. More than anything, she was relieved. The ring incident had been hard for her.

We both knew this was going to make things difficult with my family and we accepted that. But we were going to get married.

Life was good. My mind was landing in my feet and I was learning that the feet always know the way home.