Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now

Stuff gets done here

recent posts

  • Spirit flower

    Day 51 of 52 Nia dance

    Pineapple sage (salvia elegans) is a perennial (in Oregon) and part of the mint family. It doesn’t start blooming in my garden until mid September. Then it kind of loses its mind with these spikes of brilliant red. The neighborhood hummingbirds love it.

    I do too. It will keep blossoming like this until we get some freezing weather and that could be well into December. Enjoying it this morning right before I started Nia, I decided that salvia elegans is my spirit flower, blooming spectacularly but late in the season when many other flowering plants have wrapped up the show.

    Today I did a repeat of the moving to heal routine “Selfless,” which I tried for the first time on Sunday and found quite emotionally cathartic. Today’s experience was less fraught, more just enjoying the routines and the music.

  • Mind’s eye

    Day 50 of 52 Nia dance

    Whenever our Nia instructor Dael Parsons brings Linaia — the 2-foot tall model skeleton — to class, I know I’ll learn something. Often it’s about our joints, maybe range of motion, or about gaps I didn’t know existed, say in the lower pelvis. (Really, where those two big scoopy meet.) But today, she was there as inspiration. Dael asked us to imagine our heads attached to a star. It’s so interesting how that mental image brings my body upright, how my bones all feel aligned, and also, how there’s a greater sense of space. It’s the same way I feel when I take in a good breath, my diaphragm drops and I feel like my rib cage opens up a bit.

    This imagining served me nicely as we danced “U.” Highlight of this great routine for me was dancing to the song “U R the Answer” by Michael Bernard Beckwith. The song leads with the line “Something wonderful is always on the verge of happening,” and it’s backed by a pulsing dance-club beat. So energizing, inspiring and fun.

  • Science of dance

    Artist Patricio González, from Pixabay

    Day 49 of 52 Nia dance

    A great New York Times article last summer explored some current research on the neuroscience of dance. It’s worth a read, but requires a subscription.

    To summarize the findings of researchers tracking what happen in the brains of dancers: Dance activates multiple areas of the brain: sensory, motor, cognitive, social, emotional, rhythmic, creative. But there’s more. Researchers think these distinct brain areas aren’t only activated, they are interactive with each other.

     Julia Basso, the director of Virginia Tech’s Embodied Brain Laboratory called it “intra-brain synchrony.”

    I like looking at the actual research, so here’s a link to a piece she co-authored in Frontiers in Human NeuroScience in 2021. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7832346/

    There’s a lot to unpack in her research, but I really like the focus on shared experience: “Consciousness can be redefined not just as an individual process but a shared experience and we as individuals can influence the consciousness of others through our shared experiences.”

    For me, dancing today with the wonderful dancers out in Pleasant Hill, it’s a compelling idea.