I was not able to check in for a few days because I was staying with an observant cousin. Shabbat around here is a serious business, as it has not been in the US--at least not my little corner of the US-- for many years.
On top of that, it is also a holiday, Purim. As I write this, I can hear cheering outside. People dressed in all sorts of fanciful hats, masks and costumes are partying in the streets. It's considered a good thing to get as bombed as possible while celebrating this holiday. Consequently, as with an carnivalistic  atmosphere, people take every opportunity to transgress the usual social rules and expectations.
Perhaps with this in mind, I was able to let go of my lifelong inhibitions surrounding dancing on this trip. Though I grew up in the hub of cool street dancing,Philadelphia, I was a perpetual wallflower, hanging back, dressed in my finery, unwilling or unable to let go.
When I went to visit my cousin  Judy, who was a professional dancer in her youth, I thought this might come up, but it didn't till my last evening at Judy's home, when she invited. me to go to a belly-dancing lesson with her.
I thought it might be fun to dress up as a. belly dancer, in layers of diaphanous scarves, heavy with coins. And I also thought that perhaps I might learn a few steps. But I never thought I would actually be able to combine those few rudimentary movements into a free flowing dance, to say that I had actually taken the music into my own body and transformed it.
When I first arrived in the yurt at the end of a dark bumpy road, part of an ecological kibbutz where people lived as we had once imagined in the Whole Earth Catalog those many years ago, nothing had changed.
I had clearly carried my overly self-conscious self with me through space to arrive at this moment, frozen with fears and inhibitions.
When the dance instructor, a lithe and graceful woman of certain years, sidled into the circle of waiting women (and one man, owner of said space)and began to dance, I backed  quickly out of the circle while the others, practiced from other classes with the instructor, whirled and turned, lost in the music and the moment.
I watched for a while, until the instructor gently led me into the circle and began, step by step, to teach without words how I could move a hand, a leg, my hips and how these movements might be combined, as one might teach a student to write, sentence by sentence, to make a paragraph.
Nothing really worked until she had the idea to take a yogic turn, gazing intensely into my eyes, into the eyes of all present and asking gnomic questions we would have to answer about the nature of stillness within ourselves.
Soon we were all dancing with our eyes closed. Freed from the necessity of seeing my own clumsy and unresponsive body in the midst of these others, more practiced than myself, I began to combine the movements I had learned, to add others, despite myself.
I learned a lesson that day about the wisdom of the body, wisdom my body had though I didn't know it.