“ Life is the flower for which love is the honey.”

 ~ Victor Hugo

What would you like to see more of in the New Year? Why is love perhaps the most misunderstood human capacity? How can we raise our collective level of consciousness to love or above in the year to come?

It turns out that I’ve been writing a ‘love-themed’ newsletter every Monday for nearly eight years now, in fact, this first edition of Monday Love for the year 2021 happens to be Number 400 in the series. As Jimmy Page once said, that’s a “Whole Lotta Love”!

“Love” is a somewhat slippery topic. In the English language, you see the word bandied about in so many different ways. You might ‘love’ croissants or your favorite flavor of kombucha. You may be falling ‘in’ or ‘out’ of it like one of the protagonists in any given romantic comedy film.

It’s the glue that binds you to your family, even when you’re at odds with some of them. Almost every parent knows it as the force that would send you diving in front of a bus to save your child. Generations of perplexed teens have tried to understand their parent’s actions that are done ‘out of love’.

Without love, where would the music industry be? For that matter, films, books, or Netflix series’? What was once the province of poets penning odes of love has evolved through the days of mixtape cassettes to the modern era of emoji mastery.

The idea of love supports all sorts of livelihoods; in fact, one could say it’s a major underpinning of the economy. The Romantic-Industrial-Complex is vast; every aspect of relationship forming, maintaining, and dissolving has its share of professionals, services, and products attached.

And then there are our affinities that rise to the level of love. All the things that make life worth living that touch our hearts in some special personal way. The flora and fauna of the natural world, for instance. Cuisine, culture, community. Dedication and devotion to our art, craft, or a particular type of work. A record collection!

Love is like quicksilver, we’re surrounded by it, immersed in it, we stumble over it at every turn, and yet the slightest focus on the lack of it can eclipse every other good thing in our world. If it’s not right there under our nose and we start to grasp for it, it slips away like mercury into the sand.

Perhaps no other human ‘feeling’ exemplifies the relationship between our internal metaphysical state of being and the results in our three-dimensional external world quite as well as the concept of love. Our culture is geared to the idea that image is everything, shallow as that may seem. What’s going on beneath the surface is of secondary importance.

And yet what really matters is the internal energetic signature of the person in question. It’s no secret that we are electromagnetic beings inhabiting our own supposedly toroid-shaped bubble. According to research reported by the Heartmath Institute, our heart has 500 times more electromagnetic energy than our brain.

So while our brains are good at thinking about things, weighing facts, and processing data, it’s our heart that feels into our intuition and gives us the oh-so-important ‘gut-feelings’. It’s why first impressions are so often correct.

Which leads us, of course, to dance. Probably no activity closes the gap between mind and body as good old-fashioned abandoned freestyle dancing. When your mind takes a backseat and your body becomes one with the music, it’s as if your inner child comes out to play.

When you catch a glimpse of someone else’s inner child, you cut right through all of their external trappings. Clothes, companions, the car they arrived in all fall by the wayside if their moves have a magnetic mojo for you. Is great dancing a reliable indicator for love-at-first-sight? No, but it has been known to happen!

(Case in point, Isabelle and I. Way back in the summer of 2019 she appeared in front of my turntables at Dance Jam, we caught each other’s eyes, and we’ve been dancing together ever since!)

The other thing about dancing is that when you really let yourself go, your mind has a way of getting out of your body’s way and allowing real wisdom to bubble to the surface. Insights, inspirations, and ideas that can change your life are only a good dance session away.

Of the many places you might learn how to better love yourself, dance has got to be right up there at the top of the list. Deep in the dance is where you can discard that which is no longer serving you. It’s the playground where your current self can be at peace with your inner child.

A peaceful soul naturally operates at love-or-above. Appreciation and gratitude for all of love’s various forms of manifestation come easy when you are willing to let go of your internal conflicts. Dance is a dependable place to let it happen.

May your year be filled with music, mojo, and movement and your heart be full of light, levity, and love!

M+

Mark Metz
Director of the Dance First Association
Publisher of Conscious Dancer Magazine