There is a playful intelligence in the way she looks back at you. Her face is fresh, alert and mischievous. Navanita Harris, is a radiant Australian who has been dancing since childhood. Her courses - replicated throughout the world - are widely known as lively, transformative events. And fun. Not long ago she almost lost both her legs, and the profound healing that emerged from her near-death experience changed her life. In this talk, she shares her story.
The essence of my work is to help people to connect with the space inside the body - the "temple of the beloved" we call it - and to remember that connection. And then let the dance dance through it. First this temple has to be welcomed - it has to be received, acknowledged and loved. This is where relaxation comes in.
So much is going on in your body -- blood coursing through you, the lungs breathing you, thoughts flying across the screen of your mind. Just to see how the body responds to our feelings and thoughts is incredible in itself! The spine is the core of the body, so in my work, I start with the spine - sensing how it moves and feels; what the inner body looks like. Becoming conscious of this inner body is a profound healing on its own. Just by bringing awareness to the inside, the magic happens. I don't do it, I'm just a facilitator, that's the beauty of it. I support consciousness and the experience of connecting with the body, and then watch how each individual is somehow danced through.
Letting go is a major part of it. We usually live outside our body without experiencing it from the inside - a bit like seeing your house from the outside only, even though you live inside it. It takes time to learn to look at the body from the inside, and to become familiar with it. If you enter the body-mind system on the cellular level and let go and just be, accepting what is going on without judging it, the whole system understands that this is significant, this is the dance of life. It's a gift people can experience directly: just by becoming conscious of, for example, your hand, watching as it floats through the air, letting it do whatever it needs to do - this already connects you to the watcher.
What in meditation we also call the witnessing self - the part of you that's observing whatever's going on but not identified with it, not caught up in it. Watching is important, but before we are able to watch, we must first love and accept the body. Loving the body creates the relaxation which opens the door.
The love we've been looking for is there inside us anyway, it's just a matter of recognizing it. This recognition itself brings the energy back to the body. Once you open the body-instrument to love, you connect with whatever supports you in living love and you let go of whatever stops love's flowing. You have to keep asking yourself how to allow the love through, so you can receive it? Then you receive the love and as it flows through, you give - you receive, you give.
We are conditioned only to give out, rather than moving in this circular way where there is no separation between giving and receiving. Learning how to love is an art which involves knowing how to receive as much as how to give. And it's important to know it's safe to receive, that when you receive, it feels good, and that it's ok to feel good. If we feel happy in the body then we are ready to listen to it.
What I've understood over the years is that as we learn to listen to the language of the body, we discover it has its own special guidance - in fact listening to and connecting with the body is the special guidance. By listening to what it's saying, we find it has a way of providing whatever we need to keep connecting us back home.
But it's not that you just sit and close your eyes and say "O.K., body, do your thing!" It may mean that sometimes your body needs a good shake or a good cry or a good cathartic release, so as to create space for you to connect with that guidance. When we ask the body to tell us what's needed, it could mean just moving a shoulder or arm a little, and it may be no more than that that connects you homeb& this is how the body speaks to us. And dancing is about allowing the body to reveal what's needed for this healing.
By healing I mean becoming whole. This is not about healing sicknesses so much as about healing the wounds of our contractions - emotional stuff. Although being ill or damaged comes into it, of course.
My own discovery about how the body is a temple began with a longing to find that which is not the body. It must sound strange because everybody assumes they are the body - it's a worldwide conditioning.
For example, I was a trained sprinter, being pushed to international standards. Then at 18, I moved into bio-energetics and then I became a fitness instructor. I was always looking through the body, but still looking for something that was beyond the body.
Being so body-focused I became aware of how I couldn't get the distance; I couldn't see myself as anything more than the body. I knew there was a door, but hadn't found a way to open it. That became a quest for me, to know what this "nobody", this being is.
I was always a natural dancer, not a trained one. As a kid, I used to dance on my own in the bush in Australia. I experimented with classical technique but found it was not for me. For a long time I was searching for what in dance I was looking for until someone directed me to this Indian spiritual master, Osho, who uses dance a lot in his meditations. And that's how it all started. I was still looking for this way when I was initiated into Osho's work. And now here I am teaching it!
I also have a diploma in dance and in dance teaching, but I've actually learned by living dance. Life is always teaching me about dance.
I've been like a butterfly, taking a little nectar from this flower and a little nectar from that - aerobics, bio-energetics, martial arts, Feldenkrais, aikido, yoga, fitness training, basically taking from many disciplines and synthesizing it into what I call a dance of the being.
I was already hungry in that quest, but the accident was the actual click.
I was in India, and the bus crashed and broke my spine - I was unconscious and I saw myself at the scene of the accident from a place outside, up above the bus. You've heard stories of out-of-the-body experiences - it was like that.
Suddenly, I knew that my being and my body are separate - I'd received the gift of non-attachment. I saw that I was not my body.
But there was also compassion. When I looked down at my body I felt a love for that body - that was another gift.
My spiritual master once said that when somebody leaves the body and comes back, they experience freedom from the body. And, it's true, this freedom is always with me now. It's clear that consciousness lives in the body but I am not the body. But it took me months to be able to put this understanding into words.
The healing journey that followed my accident shifted my focus towards gratitude for life. Since then there has been a continual teaching from existence reminding me to reconnect with this space inside that is not my body. This is not about any technique; it's understanding that when I stay connected to the source, what is needed for healing comes along of its own accord.
There were seven major operations - and each one was a powerful experience. There was an incredible amount of pain. Even so I remember being grateful for the life force that I recognized. By learning to watch pain and not fight it, the pain actually turned out to be a gift which strengthened the watcher in me and gave me the distance from all my identifications with the body.
For the year after the accident, I had to be 100% present, or I would have either ended up in a wheel chair or had a limp and probably never have danced again. My focus was on healing, and the healing was existential - being whole and attuned to existence was what healed me. The word grace comes in here too. For the first time I loved the embodiment of the meditator in me who was clear that, for example, she wasn't going to give energy to mind games and self- pitying thoughts. All the energy I had was needed to heal. I didn't really know what that meant, but I knew I was going into the unknown with trust. The courage to watch the physical pain made it possible for me to allow feelings that before I'd labeled "painful". This was not about trying to fight or fix the pain, but about letting it be. By giving painful feelings space, the energy involved in resisting them was freed up. I'd found the key, and what had been heavy became light.
In my present life, this allowing also means accepting my ego, my personality, all the roles I play in life - the image I have created to protect myself. For example: owning it when I've made a mistake. It's important for me to be real, and that may mean that sometimes difficult things in myself are mirrored back at me. When that happens, I look. I may need support to look, but then I ask for help. The ego plays its games, the personality might say: "Oh, I get off on you noticing me; please look at me!" Then it's important just to see it going on inside me. This is what I call "watching".
What it means to live love is still a learning process - now and again I feel really vulnerable with it. But the focus is always on allowing it: seeing, for example, that my intuition is really beautiful, yet recognizing it's not mine but a gift given by existence to be shared with other people. This is humbling.
Oh yes. My sense of humour was very important. Without a quality of playfulness I wouldn't have survived.
While I was in hospital, I could often laugh in unexpected situations - like whenever I saw how my suffering was only a movie.
Laughter comes from an inner freedom. When I connect with that kind of spaciousness, it's always joy for me. And it releases a kind of energy of its own.
Joy is energy! - energy is also joy. The life force flowing freely! You don't even have to learn it. Like with children, it's a returning to innocence: remembering it, forgetting it and remembering it again. When you tap that energy, it's a very powerful way to connect with the essence - and suddenly there is joy. Joy is like a fuelling system, on its own it radiates out to all the cells in your body and fills you with healing force.
I know how valuable it is not to take yourself seriously; to be able to watch the personality and know that that's not you. And being able to laugh at the assumptions that come from your mind. When you put the focus on lightness, something takes you and expands on its own.
It's important to point out that playfulness doesn't mean being shallow or silly - there's a sincerity to it. When I need to go into a strong situation, I go there. And I am not going to laugh my way out of something to cover it up.
The breath supports the inner spaciousness. There are millions of cells in the lungs, but most people only use one-third of them. That doesn't leave much space for existence, or the Life Force, to come in.
They go together - the dance helps the breathing, and the breathing helps the dance. Also I love the breath as a teaching. What it tells us is that everything expands and everything contracts -- neither is right nor wrong.
It is beautiful to remember that life's dance is like the breath. We move between being wide open and being contracted - which is not necessarily negative. It's just a gathering back home of the body's resources, and connecting with the stillness. Like the ocean - the wave comes up and the wave goes down, yet the wave is still part of the ocean.
Sound and movement together, yes - but at the right moment. Then sound expands the dance. We don't use it in the beginning, though, because I feel people have powerful conditionings around sound and singing. They've been told that their voice is not okay, or that they mustn't make so much noise, and I don't want people to go into their fear in the beginning.
So first I create a safe space, which doesn't use sound, and then slowly, slowly I bring sound in. And then we begin by simply listening. You can start listening to the sound you make, witnessing the sound, rather than forcing the sound out of yourself. When you bring a quality of witnessing to the sound, it's ecstatic - it's truly a wonder where it can take you. And then I make the connection between sound and movement. We bring musical instruments into it so we can experiment with how sound touches the body from the inside. This is were the dance and movement follow on from listening with the whole body and allowing the body to respond.
The gift of witnessing - I really understand now how powerful it is to "watch", to allow whatever is going on and not try to change it. Trusting and responding to the moment.
I'd been lucky because when I was about twenty I suddenly understood that the body speaks: In the relaxation phase of stretch yoga, I asked the body a question, and the answer came! Then more questions came and there was an understanding that the answers were all inside.
I continued with this meditation for many years, so when the accident happened, the body communicated clearly, precisely, and as if present on that night. The trust that I have in this meditation of listening to the wisdom of the body is something I share. I don't teach it as a technique, I teach it as something I know in my bones and live out.
I was really touched by the last meditation my teacher Osho created. It was called Reminding Yourself of the Forgotten Language of Talking to Your Mind and Body. When I was trained to lead this I got the feeling that he was trying to find out how best to teach us. He was so available to suggestions, he even experimented on some people quite directly, to see whether it worked this way or that way - the very last stages of this meditation were still being polished when he died.
So for me my bus accident was like an intense training in trusting, listening and talking to my body. And I understood that directly experiencing the body meant moving it also. So even when the rest of my body couldn't move, my toes danced continuously. And that was a huge resource point for me. I could acknowledge that something was dancing, even if it was only my toes. It meant: I'm alive.
And then I began talking to the body by physically tensing and relaxing parts of myself to help the body-mind system to relax.
Then came dance, learning slowly - like with latihan *- a very gentle way of unwinding tensions. And experimenting slowly, slowly, as I started to move again, asking my body what it needed to connect with that healing power inside.
For me it's been a gentle process - discovering that through opening this door to whatever is happening, a wonderful surprise is waiting. Normally, we think that if we connect with what we're feeling, it's going to hurt like hell. So we stop ourselves because of some past memory that feeling means hurting. So better to protect and stay safe and not open this door. But when we get little tastes that are anchored in a good feeling, things start to feel great. Then healing happens and this gives us the courage to give space to pain also.
When you allow yourself to feel the pain, things heal on their own. Basically we bring what's been hidden away in the dark into the light, but before you bring anything into the light, you need to have the connection to your source.
So in my courses in the beginning a lot of energy goes into making sure the participants feel secure in the room, so they can access that source. And I can be quite protective, like a mother. If somebody hurts somebody else unconsciously, I'm right there to keep the space safe.
Yes, from teaching in many different countries I've had to find different ways of talking about this to suit different kinds of backgrounds. For example, in Italy with the Catholic conditioning the unconscious collective is against the body. So I had to design dances that go step by step, at each stage phoning into the body's cells, telling them, layer by layer, "you're welcome."
Energetically people defend themselves against enjoying their bodies because somehow they feel it's not allowed. When that happens I need to find a way to enter into the process so it is safe enough, so the body feels welcomed. This can be explored through touch, trance work or guided relaxation, or even writing stories, drawing pictures or singing songs - whatever helps.
It's about conscious meditation techniques. My focus is not so much on positions and methods, but on communing with the body to help it open and expand and relax. It's about noticing what tension is and what relaxation is - and that both are ok. When we become conscious of tension, it starts to melt on its own.
We just made a promotional video called "Step by Step Into Now," in which I speak about my work - and there are dancers there demonstrating. You'll see in the dancing that quality of innocence. It also expresses how powerful dance is as a meditation. This is important - I often hear people talk about dance as a way of expressing their creativity, or people who dance "to get out of it". This is not my focus.
We dance to get into it! This is what the video shows.
Yes it does! And I just feel grateful to be doing what I love so much. This work continually helps me deepen the spaciousness inside. And if I keep on listening to my inner guidance, then as soon as it's time to change I'll know.
But for now, this is my great joy!