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This entry was posted on 4/20/2007 10:11 PM and is filed under Announcements.

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• 4/24/2007 10:00 PM Concha of CA wrote:
  I have been re-preparing to dance for years. Automobiles keep hitting me too. Each accident has robbed me of my healthy body freedom, and given me hundreds (no exageration) of hours of learning and work to do on my recovery. My body was so contorted/skewed this last accident that my arm was contracted down, my spine so mis-shaped I could not do anything close to a dance drill. Since this last rear-ender (28 mo. ago) I have been working through a meshwork of pain and limitation that has added difficulty and increased time requirements to the complexity and work of the 9 years of recovery efforts (lots of $$s! too) that came before. I had just begun to transform my drills into dance, my old injury into simply a memory in my long history of disability. I thought my simplest dance drills were making statements of my triumph when this last accident struck my life...me completely innocent, just sitting there, as usual. I am once again struggling, as I ready to recover the dance I first lost 35 years ago--and several times thereafter. Luckily I hold dance all over/in my being. It is so all over and in me that I can follow/almost chase it through my hurts and contortions into interesting mind/body space and physical --experience that is dance preparation, that is dance, though it may not look it from outside. My movement/and imagined dance is even deeper, has required more body awareness, and a more complex exploration while healing and metamorphizing into my renewed creative art dance. I find that I "feeeel" my body and the dance, go more deeply into myself and become the dance more with every hr. of specialized effort towards normal balanced body movement than before this life of auto accident-injury-pain-limitation-dance seemingly disappearing-struggle-recovery-increased body awareness-dance drills-imagined dance. All this re-played over and over again. I am moving and beginning to stream into my dance, and the dance is streaming through me again. I can feel it--feels soooo good. Coming alive again. Me, my body, my dance-all awakening at the same time. Izzy, your story is so me. You are literally helping me get my dance out again--from where it has been hiding, hovering, rigidly stuck, temporarily. Thankyou for making your personal recovery knowable to me.
  You are fortifying my own own living moving truth. More later. Warmly, Concha
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  1. 4/25/2007 2:10 AM Izzy wrote:
     Dear Concha-- Thank you so much for your comment and for sharing your story too! This is precisely why I wrote what I did--to pass on what others gave to me when I really needed it in order to go on, to help myself put it all in perspective, and simply to share with others who understand. Giving and receiving...somehow it all turns out to be the same thing... *grin* May you continue to dance your dances--whatever they may be at any given moment! Whether they be the dance of anger, joy, grief, mischief, or simply the dance of stillness...may you enjoy the sorts of blessings in your recovery as I have experienced in mine. And may all vehicles be repelled away from yours and mine, forever and ever amen! *wink* 'Night! ~~Isidora
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     1. 5/11/2007 7:35 PM Concha of CA wrote:
        Dear Izzy,
        
        I am writing to you again to continue to give you a glance into my healing. To remind you that you are growing your connections and are making a good difference. I know the reason you have written to all of us (out here) is to connect--inspire and help grow our personal energy for healing for ourselves and each other. Reading each others thoughts to understand more about ourselves and what is possible lightens my load, reduces (every kind of mental-emotional-spiritual) drag, as I free up my body and allow my mind to experience the sense that there are dancers "out there" who are surviving physical changes towards their changing dance too. There are many important things to be noticed about our many success stories--the varied strategies and efforts we are putting forth--the progression towards our changing goals, the trial and error proccess, the interest we have each for the other (that is the living "cross referencing" to many other peoples relevant very personal and unique experiences). I kind of tour all of this stuff I am talking about here in my mind and let it feed my soul. I find that thoughts of you and my fellow adaptives cross my mind sometimes in my meditations, and prayers, and are easing my way towards many many places (ultimately, soul feeding places) I want to be. I enjoy my process more each day. The things I have just written about are contributing to that feeling of "I can, and I am". I have learned to like what I have to, and Epictetus 2500 year old advice "Think what you want to become and be it" is what I am living each day, little by little. I am getting along fine, and I know you are too.
        
        By the way, I have noticed how naturally you communicate yourself in your dance (ref: Temtation of Bellydance dvd). I hope I can do the same--that is, naturally just be/show me--a most important thing to give our friends. Human, kind, connecting, inspiring, exciting, authentic, a gift. I think this is another aspect of the precious model you have offered to me, so thank you for it. Your contribution is important.
        Treat yourself with kindness and gentleness--as your greatest love. I know you know how, even when sometimes you don't feel like it. You are so good, you deserve it. More later.
        
        Warmly,
        Concha of CA
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• 5/7/2007 6:35 PM Concha of CA wrote:
  Dear Izzy,
  Thankyou for your quick responses and candid expressions. Your writing is so, so alive with your expressiveness and art. You make me look forward to checking in.
  ----------
  I am going to write the following to clarify my original message. I was so tired that I edited wrong, mispeaking my story. I do want you to know that the problems I have now with my shoulder, knee, etc. have evolved from this last auto accident, that one thing has become another and that 28mo. ago, a simple whip lash, which became just "typical" problems, later "morphed" into my frozen down and contorted-atrophied shoulder/torso.
  -------------------------
  Now with that clarified for the record, I'll tell you about my therapuetical movement training today--2 1/2 hrs to 4 hrs (5 days/wk). Some physical training in very very very slow motion--in water, on land, some with assistance (sports injury specialist/or physical therapist/chiropractor), and some not. Amazing progress, but very very slow. Deeply fatiguing. Sometimes I think of what I am doing now as my dance. Music helps--that and imagination...I have learned to like what I have to. That has taken time, but I get along with what I need to do well now and my expectations for my art grow naturally with time. This is deliberate--simple meditation/prayer/visualization practice has helped greatly. All taken together have contributed to my deep felt sense of satisfaction and rightness as I train, because I am training for something that is ultimately so interesting--and so alive in me as art. I feel like I am moving myself right into it, and it is moving me into it. I often feel my training (which is simply prep for dance, really) is my living art dance, and the more I feel this the more I want to do "prep" which would ordinarily be boring. I no longer have trouble getting myself started--my intention becomes my training and I "stream".
  I know you know what I mean. I have little frustration, and have accepted my situation as something that offers me deep learning and understanding, especially as a dancer.
  
  I need to rest now. More another time. Just wanted to touch base and share a little something of my healing/dance life.
  
  Warmly,
  Concha
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  1. 5/16/2007 1:26 PM Izzy wrote:
     Hello again! So for some strange reason I received a notification in my inbox of your first post, but none of the others, so I just popped on here quick and saw that you had written again. Yes, it is definitely in sharing our stories that we get to connect! And I absolutely do this in my dancing too. I'm always speaking when I dance, communicating how I feel, how the music makes me feel. This is why I often have a hard time duplicating dances or performing the "same"ish dance for more than a year. When I get requests for specific dances long past their initial creation, I have to find a new inspiration for them, or else they tend to be dry, lacking all that spirit of the reason why it inspired me in the first place. We're always moving, always growing (well, hopefully we are) and I haven't ever been able to stop expressing in these ways, whatever I happen to be feeling at any given moment. My dances are always about my journeys.
     
     It's good to hear that you are enjoying your PT dance...it is a valuable and powerful dance, if we can get past the misery of it. And when we can't...eh...that is a powerful dance too and just as valid. I hope that it all goes really well and that you can get back to some more creative, rather than functional dances! I find that acceptance is an elusive dance that comes and goes. So I just dance it all. And write it all. And sometimes I even share those thoughts with the world.
     
     Much continued luck to you!
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     1. 5/21/2007 4:46 PM Concha of CA wrote:
        Dear Izzy,
        
        Quick write:
        
        I liked reading your thoughts. I am tired after a too long a day of training (4hrs-w/related breathing and visualization mediation). My muscles did not seem to ever warm up today. They were short, contracted, making my body short and locked down from wake up- on this morning. I simply felt like I could not get my muscle fibers to "slide". I felt my parts were in conflict with each other (torso not giving in co-operation with my arm. The first day in a while that things seemed to have regressed and shut down, resisting motion, resisting me. Probably because my therapist's work w/me stopped temporarily--and little training over the weekend. Wow, huge affect. Past misery has crept up-hopelessness in disquise erupting as fatique. I still plan on putting my dance dvd on, because I dance it all however I can--even if just in my mind--and now share my related thoughts: very valuable. Part of moving forward. Going to rest now.
        
        ..and much continued luck to you!
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     2. 7/7/2007 7:07 PM Concha of CA wrote:
        Dear Izzy,
        
        I have just revisited our conversations of weeks ago and have relived the importance of them to me--and I hope for others.
        So I want to add this, even as a quick note...
        
        My "physical therapy" dance
        is especially difficult now. My flexibility edge used to have spring to it, but now when I go there I discover the hard "stop" of it, and the old hopeless feeling of me as a child with steel braces (even in the crib) on my feet comes back. It does not feel devastating as it did intermittantly when I was a child, and occasionally in my adult life when physcial challenges made moving and living almost impossible here and there, but it is mostly that "I don't feel like it" stuck on to the invisible indefinable "What's the use" that gets recorded in so many plagued for a lifetime (s) with too much pain and struggle. The hard edge I meet as I try to move, and the lack of progress (maybe just VERY SLOW ????) does not inspire me and I have to
        deliberately fill my life up with inspirational boosts like music I love, good dance company, dvds that give me dance joy, imagine time for movement/dance/meditation, prayer, different physical therapy "toys", different training strategies, draw my dance on paper "therapy", treat my body to home spa luxury, deliberately experience my senses, and appreciate nature (especially the sand under my feet, my body moving water as it moves me, and the warm penetrating sun moving like a wave through me). Just writing about any/all of this counters the discouragement. I find the strategy we used in the clinical psychology practice where I worked for years helps: make up the story on paper that will heal you if the real one is not helping you now. Simply journal it until you are back where you want to be: interested,inspired, bursting with imagination!, consistant, joy filled, living the progress of dreams--feeling your dreams coming true.
        Well, I feel better, more hopeful now than when I first sat down to write this note. Think I'll go organize more of the above into my life....feeeling HOPEFUL again!..and back at it.
        
        Izzy, you go girl---I know you are... Warmly, Concha
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• 5/18/2007 3:12 PM Gail wrote:
  Hey, Izzy, congrats on getting this thing going! I've never been in a serious auto accident (thank goodness, ::knock wood:, but in struggling for yeeeeeeeeeeeears with first a mysterious chronic pain problem (no longer that mysterious and largely under control), and then fighting thyroid- and Lyme disease (also working to get under control), I can somewhat relate to the challenge and frustration of being knocked out of it completely, sometimes for months at a time. And then the arduous task of rehabilitation and reclaiming the ability to use my body in the ways I took for granted before. Luckily, I never really lost the motivation to do what I love; it's just been difficult sometimes to push through roadblocks.
  
  Also, one of my sisters-in-law was hit by another driver on the L.A. freeway (hit and run) back in February and suffered a serious back injury. She's doing better now (won't need surgery, whew), but she asked me about my belly dancing, which I'd said helped me with some of my particular muscle problems--once I was ABLE to get back to dancing, that is--and then I told her about you. She doesn't dance, but I think stories of recovery have at least inspired her to hope for the best.
  
  Anyway, I'm looking forward to reading more. Take care, and keep smilin'! ~Warm Wishes~
  
  Gail
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• 5/18/2007 3:14 PM Yolanda wrote:
  Hello. I am fairly new to this belly-dancing stuff. I have only been belly dancing for a few months and I LOVE it. I have latina heritage and my hips have always been a little loose but honey, you have got the technique down!! Watching your cane dance made me cry. You are amazing. You have excellent control and your timing is tight. But best of all, your stage presence is lovely, and humble:> You are an inspiration to me and to every other dancer out there, I'm sure. Will you be traveling to Phoenix, AZ anytime soon?
  
  Many Blessings to You my Sister
  Yolanda
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• 5/29/2007 7:22 PM Concha of CA wrote:
  Dear Izzy,
  
  I have been thinking of your "Bootcamp" dvds. When do you think they will be available? I expect they will be a special inspiration to all adaptive dancers...I know they will be to me. I am looking forward to seeing them.
  
  Warmly,
  Concha
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• 1/6/2009 2:54 AM luisa wrote:
  re - clip of Izzy dancing to msafret I think that is how its spelt....loved it but can't find it again on utube or what dvd its on can anyone help????
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  1. 1/28/2009 12:46 PM Izzy wrote:
     You know, as I am starting to rehearse Msafer for Glastonbury, you are not alone in thinking I've danced to this song before...I swear I never have!  But the more of you who think I have, the more I wonder if there is another memory I have lost to Dain Bramage!  Hahahaha!  See you soon!
     
     
     
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