Body Song
11/02/09 06:24 AM Filed in: Life Masks
When I was young I was fortunate to live in small town in Rural PA where my back yard was the woods. I can remember days and weeks with no sense of anything but this forest and my body and senses open to the mysteries I found there. I would spend hours and hours building beautiful communities in the soft pines that had fallen from this grove of trees, swinging with abandon over Toby creek, finding my way to the dark wood where I could lay down in the fairy circle and listen to the birds and see the clouds thought the trees A deep sense of joy, passion and timelessness, a connection to this other than human world. a knowing of my own body song, of my name before I was born. And then I went to elementary school all the way through graduate school and I was lost for a very long time.
I have since spent
my life looking for how to bring back home to my
body, songs that I once knew in the woods of PA and
bring them to those I love. How to have that scared
conversation with other, community, the more than
Human world and myself. It has taken me awhile and
many excursions into the humbling art of parenting,
living life, vision fasts, wild rivers, master
teachers, and rhythm, to arrive back at the place I
already knew, to that little girl in the woods. How
do we lose our use of body and senses, and how do we
get back? These have been my unknowing questions all
these years.
There are now many ways I access body songs and guide others in this process of reconnection and reconciliation. In a weekend in July after 19 years of bringing a Body Song process I call Life Masks (the laying of cast plaster on the face) to many groups; I had an experience with three of my friends who have been involved in a Year Long Process of Soul Work with Bill Plotkin that made me realize on a new level how amazing it is for community to create ritual and use mask making as a tool to bring our body song into community. The mask making itself is a life death rebirth process. Masks have been used in almost all indigenous cultures as parts of ceremony and ritual to bring alive the ancestors, the shadow selves, archetypes, dis-ease and to dance them into being for community so as to deal with these energies in ways that promote our larger selves to show up.
We started with a shamanic journey to find the mask or have the mask find us and begin our relationship with what was calling us. We spent the night with our dreams.
The next morning we set up a massage table and one by one did a mask on the face of the other. This tender process of entombment is quite amazing for the maskee. We played specific music for each of us as we went into our body underneath the tender laying on of strips of plaster coated warm gauze, We asked each person their intention for this mask and the words they would like spoken as we were transforming their face into the bone structure of the mask.
Once the mask dries on the face you scrunch to allow the mask comes apart from the face. As our skin face emerges we looked like babies that had just been born and our second face beside us looked like the bones of something that had died. After all of us had had our turn and we had continued to add our contributions to this ritual we dried the masks in the oven and the skeleton was complete.
We then gave them their first coat of skin. And the masks begin their own journey of transformation as we paint, decorate and play. Each mask has its unique signature of our own body song. We take these masks to dream on and to ask questions. We journey once again to the mask to find our body song in connection with the masks and bring it forth in community so all can benefit from the gift of this aspect of our jeweled selves. We find our own unique way to give voice to the mask and let it dance its story.
What are your body songs and how do you bring them into the world? Angeles Arrien often says. Where have you quit dancing, where have you quit telling your story and where have you forgotten the sweet territory of silence? These forgotten places are calling for soul retrieval so we can be wholly present in the world. In my language we need to allow our Body Song to answer to our Soul’s Calling.
Body Song
Your Soul calls to you
Calling your true name over and over again
When your senses are wide open
When you have done the death dance over and over
When you are deeply rooted in the earth
You might hear this call
And when your body answers the call
It comes in your unique creative expression
It comes in silence, in music, movement, in colors and scents
It comes from you sensuous sensate body
From you connection to trees, stones and rivers
It is your Body Song
When the Soul hears this song
It rejoices
Tears and laughter flow
Fire Works are set off in your honor
Now you fully occupy your soul niche
Your place in the human and more than human world
Your way of belonging
Evolution happens
DNA changes
And you become sacred prey
To the human and more than human universe
Namaste’
Nancy Gordon
There are now many ways I access body songs and guide others in this process of reconnection and reconciliation. In a weekend in July after 19 years of bringing a Body Song process I call Life Masks (the laying of cast plaster on the face) to many groups; I had an experience with three of my friends who have been involved in a Year Long Process of Soul Work with Bill Plotkin that made me realize on a new level how amazing it is for community to create ritual and use mask making as a tool to bring our body song into community. The mask making itself is a life death rebirth process. Masks have been used in almost all indigenous cultures as parts of ceremony and ritual to bring alive the ancestors, the shadow selves, archetypes, dis-ease and to dance them into being for community so as to deal with these energies in ways that promote our larger selves to show up.
We started with a shamanic journey to find the mask or have the mask find us and begin our relationship with what was calling us. We spent the night with our dreams.
The next morning we set up a massage table and one by one did a mask on the face of the other. This tender process of entombment is quite amazing for the maskee. We played specific music for each of us as we went into our body underneath the tender laying on of strips of plaster coated warm gauze, We asked each person their intention for this mask and the words they would like spoken as we were transforming their face into the bone structure of the mask.
Once the mask dries on the face you scrunch to allow the mask comes apart from the face. As our skin face emerges we looked like babies that had just been born and our second face beside us looked like the bones of something that had died. After all of us had had our turn and we had continued to add our contributions to this ritual we dried the masks in the oven and the skeleton was complete.
We then gave them their first coat of skin. And the masks begin their own journey of transformation as we paint, decorate and play. Each mask has its unique signature of our own body song. We take these masks to dream on and to ask questions. We journey once again to the mask to find our body song in connection with the masks and bring it forth in community so all can benefit from the gift of this aspect of our jeweled selves. We find our own unique way to give voice to the mask and let it dance its story.
What are your body songs and how do you bring them into the world? Angeles Arrien often says. Where have you quit dancing, where have you quit telling your story and where have you forgotten the sweet territory of silence? These forgotten places are calling for soul retrieval so we can be wholly present in the world. In my language we need to allow our Body Song to answer to our Soul’s Calling.
Body Song
Your Soul calls to you
Calling your true name over and over again
When your senses are wide open
When you have done the death dance over and over
When you are deeply rooted in the earth
You might hear this call
And when your body answers the call
It comes in your unique creative expression
It comes in silence, in music, movement, in colors and scents
It comes from you sensuous sensate body
From you connection to trees, stones and rivers
It is your Body Song
When the Soul hears this song
It rejoices
Tears and laughter flow
Fire Works are set off in your honor
Now you fully occupy your soul niche
Your place in the human and more than human world
Your way of belonging
Evolution happens
DNA changes
And you become sacred prey
To the human and more than human universe
Namaste’
Nancy Gordon
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