The S... Forget Everything I just Told You

(Dear Reader: Please Disregard Parts 1, 2, & 3, posted prior to this, as None of them have much to do with S-Factor at all...)

www.sfactor.com

I take S-factor because it is my way, my path, into an amazingly deep, full, rich, present, experience with my own divinity. When I dance at the S-studio, I disappear into the music, and become part of the fabric of an irrepeatable experience.

Sheila Kelley describes S-Factor as "Organic Feminine Movement". That, to me, sums it up completely. Through S-factor, it has become abundantly clear to me (a heterosexual woman) how beautiful the body and movement of women are. These women are my sisters. They are each uniquely gifted with different things, and each of us is having our own beautiful experience, evolving our own dance. We witness each others movement, triumphs, and tears.

I have had no experience more closely aligned with Spirit / God / Universe / Zen than I have inside that studio. I have become Light. I have felt a metal pole become wet clay on the suggestion of my teacher. I have danced raw emotion. I have shed deep tears that had been held in my hip flexors for several lifetimes, while in a meditative "Ruby's Pose", to the song Hallelujah (as sung by Rufus Wainwright).

I danced the grief of Woman (with a capital W) to songs like They Dance Alone (Cueca Solo) by Sting and Three Weeks Shy by Jim Boggia. The centuries of ungrieved loss, that resides in our cellular memories, so easily accessible, and so desirous of expression. I dance my ownpersonal ups & downs, and can feel the voice of my body and appreciate Her as something with her own separate expression from my brain. And good god, is she smart and wise and intuitive.

And yes, if another person could be a "fly on the wall" in this experience... if this could be all the things it is in the sacred space of the room that is the studio, and at the same time performed for a group of observers, I'm quite sure that we would each and all blow the observers away... That anything that the observer thought that they were about to see, would evaporate completely, in the presence of what real, living, moving beauty would be present before them.

I once had was graced to coreograph and perform an S-Factor routine for a group of women, as a performance... And the thing is... the coreography was almost entirely improvised, but I created a structure inside which that improvisation could happen... We made the audience cry with the beauty of us. and... quite a few of us were above a size 8.

When S-factor classmates go out for a drink, you will see a variety of ages, sizes, and races, all sitting together, being women. It does not escape me at all that this experience is precisely what would move international relations... if heads of state all took an S-factor session together. As it is, it's so irrelevant that we're "different". the language of dance and of being a woman transcends anything we think we are.

And yes, we are beautiful when we dance, our experience of our own beauty and strength, joy and grief, will turn you on, will mesmorise you, make you scream, sigh, laugh, cheer, and cry... but that's because we are experiencing and dancing raw juicy life.

So, before you dismiss your friend / daughter / sister / wife / colleague for this "thing" she does that you don't understand... Consider that she is quite possibly experiencing grace itself... all under the umbrella of something that some fools may write off as a profane waste of time... consider yourself very blessed to know her. And even moreso if she allows you the privelege of seeing her sacredness.