LIFE LESSONS -- "Let the Man Come to You"

In my life I have great luck with money and achievement--sometimes more than most other women. Where I do not have luck is with relationships -- and sometimes it seems in that arena I also have more (lack of luck) than other women. At one point in my life I decided to take ballroom dancing in lieu of therapy for depression -- depression brought on by said lack of luck in relationships. Over the five year period I danced with my teacher, John, it became apparent that the lessons I learned on the dance floor could possibly constitute a philosophy of life.

For a woman on the dance floor, as my teacher told me over and over, it is imperative to the success of the dance that I let the man come to me. "Don't be so anxious to do the next step that you anticipate his next move or mess up the rhythm by rushing through the move you are doing together." I had to stop my natural urge to take the reins and make the dance my creation. Until I learned to do that, I could not truly enjoy dancing at its best. For years, other male partners I danced with at social events would say to me, "When are you going to learn to follow?" It's a hard concept for a woman like me, one who had learned in life to take charge of a household and situations that needed handling, to give up “contributing” my management of a situation, even if it were only a dance.

What I finally learned, to the extent that I DID learn to follow, was that I had to provide the man with a ready form – a dance position indicating that I was ready to take his lead and one that would make it easy for me to know what he wanted me to do. I had to be patient and not rush the steps and not crowd him so that he had to take a step back or move out of my way.

While John and I would joke that perhaps I should use what I learned on the dance floor in my relationships, I said that it didn’t always work that way in real life. But I HAVE found that in many ways it does. Particularly at the beginning of a relationship—when things are new and not clear about what direction they will take. It makes me cringe to say it, because the 1970’s feminist doctrine I grew up on is fighting that notion, but it seems that it works much better to wait for things to happen than to make them happen. And maybe that is not true for generations that follow mine – they were brought up in times past that when only men would be the leaders. Perhaps that is the key to the cougar phenomenon – younger men liking the cougar (feminist era) women taking the lead with where things will go. Somewhere in there is a desire for a balance of movement, leading and following, and enjoying the dance.

LIFE AFTER LIFE LESSONS -- "Look for the Ringpop"

An interesting philosophical/spiritual side to the idea of taking the lead and learning to follow is emptying the mind. “To look for reality is delusion. Not using the mind to look for reality is awareness. Freeing oneself from words is liberation,” says the Bodhidharma. I first learned about this concept in the half sleep-half awake state early one morning before work about 11 years ago. I was counting the minutes to the time I had to force my weary body from the warm secure comfort of my bed and in my half sleep – or possibly in not using my “mind” but my unfocused awareness—I realized something that is actually hard to put into words. The thought, if I can call it that, that I had at that moment was that while on the clock there were four minutes until the time I would be getting out of bed—there actually was not a certainty that I would be getting out of bed in four minutes. That each of those moments was an eternity in itself for whatever I was experiencing in that moment – that while I was lying in bed, that was the reality of my experience and that in less than four minutes, when I was expected to get up, anything could happen to change that future reality. I could suddenly die and never get out of bed, or an explosion could occur making it impossible for me to get out of bed. So that my true reality was that for that moment I was in bed, perhaps for eternity, until I actually would get out of the bed. And that I should experience that fully for the time it is my reality. I later came to learn about that as a meditation skill of "being present in the moment. "

Akin to that concept was the fact that actually experiencing it as an awareness happened while not thinking – but perceiving the eternity of the moment – perceiving that there is a reality beyond what my mind creates as reality. And what I later learned that to be, in reading The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, was that perceiving my life as being on one side of a veil beyond which lies the true reality – the rigpa—is a lesson necessary in life to prepare oneself for death. To see the reality beyond the veil, to look for the rigpa, the true reality behind what is happening in my life.

This had been a concept that came to me in other times of my life, often quiet and pensive moments that I could sneak in during highly stressful times that made me wonder why life had to be so hard. I would see the light from a window shining onto a tabletop and it would trigger in me a realization somehow that the things happening around me were not the important thing to focus on – that there was an ongoing higher level to everything I was experiencing.

I was explaining this concept to my friend on a subway, after I had read about it in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, and in straining to hear me over the background noise of the train, she asked, “Look for the what? The ringpop?” We laughed at the thought of that – ringpops are lollipops shaped like gems atop little plastic rings that kids can wear on their fingers. While shopping soon after that I came across a bin of ringpops in a store and bought two for each of us to hang on our bulletin boards at work to remind us to “Look for the ringpop” in our daily experiences to keep things in perspective.


Moral of the story? Letting go of control and preconceived notions and experiencing things beyond our idea of reality.