We had heavy snow in London this month, and my internal experience over the winter has felt thick and fast like a blizzard. Still, I’ve been reluctant to write about it. I don’t know how to deal with the fixative nature of words: the way they make things this and not that, when really things are both and neither. I’ve wondered if art disappears in proportion to awareness emerging, but I see from a review in Shambhala Sun that Chögyam Trungpa didn’t think so:

From a Western perspective, art is often about shoring up the self – or at the very least is held to emanate from a self, whereas in the Buddhist view there is no self. Chögyam Trungpa says that when we are creating from a more awakened place: ‘We no longer regard a work of art as a gimmick or as confirmation, it is simply expression – not even self-expression, just expression.’

Dance, when I am completely present, is for me essentially like mushrooms or hailstones – it’s simply the truest possible expression of myself existing. Writing is a lot more tricky. And yet it seems to be important in some way for me to write. Not indispensible, like dancing, but important.


Some people have commented on the degree of self-exposure in this blog. The reality is that I don’t feel I actually expose myself much at all. What I write here is a specific kind of distillation of my experience. A lot of the time – like now – I’m writing about writing (or not writing) about my experience. I don’t reveal the tender places.

When the last snow finally melted from my garden, the primroses had come into bloom underneath. That's how I feel about writing here. I leave the snow alone, and if in the end some flowers show themselves, that's OK with me.

I wrote my dancing story as part of an application process.

My dancing story
In one form or another, I’ve been dancing all my life. Age four: I dress up in old curtains and 1950s winklepickers to dance to Top of the Pops (‘Those were the days my friend / I thought they’d never end / Singing dance forever and a day’). Age nine: my grandfather teaches me to waltz (one-two-three, two-two-three). Age 13: I wait until everyone’s out and do Isadora Duncan to the Readers Digest Chopin collection.

Dancing was an invisible activity in my parents’ house. If it was seen at all, it was seen as something embarrassing, unfit for public view, like masturbation. I internalised this view of things. Other girls at school went to ballet classes, but it never occurred to me even to want to learn ballet. I took it for granted that I was a lesser class of being than the kind of girl who got to wear a leotard.

My dancing energy got dislocated and I became a writer. Although writing never offered me the doorway into the ecstatic that dancing did, I wrote for many years and got quite good at it – won prizes, got a first class degree and a doctorate, published a book and poetry, and here I am writing still. It doesn’t surprise me, though, that I’ve ended up with a highly ambivalent relationship to writing.

While in my head I’d defined myself as a writer, my body was subversive. It just kept dancing, no matter what I couldn’t see about who I was really meant to be. For many years I did professional ballet class every day. I remember fidgetting through my PhD viva and rushing off hell for leather to make it just in time for the 4pm ballet class at Covent Garden. Although I couldn’t acknowledge it, in reality dancing was always my number one priority.

I went into ballet wanting to gain control over my body. However, you can’t put your body into movement, even in a highly regulated way, and not have all of you shift. Ballet was a big paradox for me in this way: both an anorexic endeavour, a way of restraining and constraining myself; and at the same time a means of finding myself, liberating myself, creating moments of bliss. I wasn't interested in performing (although in later years I've adored being witnessed), and I found this hard to reconcile with my dedication to the regimen of daily class. It was at odds with the whole rationale. In retrospect, I can see that what spoke to me was the discipline of dance, and the pathway that dancing offers into the deep self, the self that cannot be known by the mind.

After many years, to cut a long story short, I got into astanga vinyasa (yoga that moves!) and then began teaching it. Around the same time that I discovered astanga, I started dancing Gabrielle Roth’s Five Rhythms, which has been my dance practice for the past seven or eight years.

The spiral rounds another bend and I find myself wanting to bring dance into my work. I want to be legitimate. I want to face the world full on and own that I’m here in it to dance. I’m aware that I’m tracing the pathway of my spine, which has an S-type scoliosis. Like my spine, I’ve deviated and I’m bringing myself back into alignment, though the kinks will always be there. This is exciting and terrifying, and is without a doubt the most radical movement into my own centre that I can make.