Unhook your chest from your hips. . ..

Man, now is a strange time in my life. Oh yeah, I know, I say THAT about 50 times a year along with “I’m busy” and “Things are crazy,” But seriously folks, this last set of months have been stranger and more transformative than most.

It has been seeded by the direct alignment of “I’m getting married” and “What do I want to do for a living” which resulted in a lot of belly-button gazing. More than even usual. At this point, the books “The Conscious Bride” and “Do What you Are” really pulled me through, along with sage advice passed on by Alice: “Allow room for serendipity in your life.”

It was a theme that echoed through Life Sciences Career Day: “Don’t worry about your career so much. What is important is to be open to opportunity.”

Then I started taking my beginning belly dance class, which changed me even further. At first I thought it would just be fun and pretty. Then I found that it was a challenge to get my body to move in a totally different way. I thought my years in ballet class had come in handy, because I could memorize a routine. I thought my years in marching band had come in handy, because I could keep rhythm and stay in a line. But then it was the end of class and we did the routine one last time and without the teacher up there, I kept messing up. All the movements felt stiff and stretched and jerky.

The next day I woke up and realized I knew I had missed the key to belly dancing. It was in the first two movements we practiced: torso isolations and hip isolations. Move your chest without your hips, move your hips without your chest. If you want folks to notice your hips, you must unhook your chest from the movement. All through the class, I had wanted to make everything BIG and stretched and linked. But the dance is actually small, and it’s the isolation, the contrast that makes it look so striking.

Somehow—although I’m doing a poor job of elaborating it—this unhooking of body parts feels like the absolute embodiment of what has been going on the last couple of months. I have let go of a certain degree of worry. Thanks to the book “Getting Things Done: the art of stress-free productivity” I’m starting to become a real multitasker, and instead of worrying about all the things I have to do and locking up in stress. . . I just do it. And suddenly when I’m not working I’m actually relaxing. When I stop worrying about what I don’t know in science, these creative ideas for projects flow out. I’m unhooking all the irrational worrying from my work. One muscle at a time.