As the stay-at-home order here in California goes on and on, week after week, month after month, I keep thinking about the concept of Home Position.
When my body is in the Home Position—the starting posture of my dance format—I go into a kind of meditation. It’s where I find awareness in my soul, where I’m quiet. I can listen, receive, and find a sense of clarity. It’s where I feel awake, alive, and safe.
And even though this is a physical body posture, I believe Home Position is inside each of us. It’s where we begin. We have to go inward before we can expand and go out.
Even if the world outside is chaotic and uncertain, we can find insight into Home Position.
At this pivotal moment in our nation’s history, we need to do some major self-reflection and figure out what we really want. I think a lot of us are trying to figure out who we are. We’re facing these core issues of identity, growth, and what we have to offer our communities. Over these past months, I have felt that so many people are feeling burnt out, depressed, and afraid.
When I stand in Home Position, I ask myself a lot of difficult questions about what’s been happening.
What is sustainability? What’s normal for the planet, for the animals, for humans? What does change look like, and how do we make it happen?
I’m asking hard questions about myself, too. Am I motivated to change things for the better? Am I dependent, greedy, selfish, lazy, or a bigot?
Even though change can be really scary, because of its uncertainty, I get really excited about it. Moments of change give us a chance to examine ourselves and our own power.
In the Home Position, I can receive clarity.
And even though sometimes we might think of our inner life as not “real life,” our inner lives tell us how we’ll behave in the outside world.
Our inner life is real life. We just need to come home so we can listen.
The original blog was published in the Salimpour School blog on July 31, 2020.
