Un-weighting
This past Tuesday, on the solstice, we had our 6th focus jam of the year. The focus for the evening:
*** Un-weighting ***
“Unweighting” is a term used in skiing. You can think of it physically: unweighting a foot, or when laying down-- your limbs or core from the floor. You can also unweight from the day, giving up some of your psychic weight, or unweighting your self-critic.
Here are some of the comments made in the closing circle or overheard during the jam:
* I found that when I was receiving support, especially if I was on someone’s hip or shoulder, that I could unweight the periphery to organize and mobilize myself around my partner at the place of support.
* I worked with unweighting things being important: making the dance less precious. This gave me more permission to be idiosyncratic.
* Some people moved in big colorful ways -- but like cotton candy they were mass-less.
* How do you get someone else to unweight? I found myself experimenting with playfulness, humorous rhythms, unusual touch--like tapping, pinching, and scratching. It worked. It became a contagious effervescence.
* Loftiness!
* It is easy to unweight the limbs when laying on the floor – it takes more organization to unweight the core.
* When I unweight I become more mobile, more influence-able -- and I can keep a stronger connection when not in physical contact.
* Sometimes I was frustrated. I wanted to feel their weight on me. I felt teased -- I wanted the compression.
* I sometimes had the surprise of us both dancing in an unweighted fashion and suddenly my partner becoming present with all their weight.
* I saw a lot of scary situations tonight where someone could have been hurt—but out of the lightness no one did get hurt.
* I played with the variation of collapsing into my partner, leaning into them, and also trying a more subtle approach of reaching in and reading the floor through my partner – I found that when my partner and I shared a mutual plumb line, a shared point of balance, that it became more filled with possibility when we didn’t collapse into it, or even lean into it, but in a more subtle way, read into it.
Return to Focus Jam page
