Dance, Identity and Buddhist non-self.
One of my teachers, Michele McDonald, really meant it…
When the heart is open it is open to a wide range of joy and sorrow. We cannot pick and choose what the heart is opening to…
As I started my gender affirming hormone therapy, my heart was open all right — a roller coaster with hormone balance changing. I take this as a heart opening because I am accepting the formally repressed desire to transition. I was willing to do something that I would have never done or imagined before. I felt the body changing as if I was in my 2nd puberty. My body shape changed not to mention the emotion rushing over me out of blue. I would be crying without much conceptual reasons, sometimes joyful, the other sorrowful. There are often times with much restlessness or sleepiness.
It has gotten noticeably harder and harder to practice formally. This is not the first time I could not sit or practice formally. The last time was tremendous aversion from my perfectionist tendencies about practice itself after my first 3 week silent retreat and ordination in Burma. I did more walking meditation then. For this time, I instead leaned onto the aspiration to be aware from the moment I woke up till I fell asleep with a light and relaxed attitude. That was what Steven said during the retreat. Continuity of practice. Of course, it has a different flavor outside of the retreat setting. Busier to put it simply, especially in NYC. I might sit for 1 min, 45 min, or 10 sec. It is difficult to be ok with not meeting my own expectations, but I knew that if I push, I’d be cultivating aversion. I was not going to add the fuel to the surfacing internalized transphobia. All of this resulted in low energy, both mentally and physically without much testosterone in my body. I just could not do much.
Transitioning during lockdown was one thing but I had to eventually get outside. And the shit got real like the next level with socializing in person. Not being able to see myself good or beautiful sprung up when I danced with my friend in a studio, and it strongly hindered my learning skill. There were 8-10 other dancers, BIPOC, friendly and queer. When she divided the group into men and women, she asked me which group I wanted to be in — that was the first time anyone asked me that. I picked the women's side. As we learned the choreography, my mind was occupied by thoughts about how fake I was and I didn’t belong in the group. Every time I looked in the mirror, I wondered why I was so unattractive. They were the real women and not me. I was clearly not picking up choreography because I was preoccupied by self-doubts, judgements, jealousy, fear, and hatred.
The doll test originally conducted by psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark in the 1940s hovered over me as I saw myself judge harshly myself and other trans femme folks. And there's the “Blue eyes/Brown eyes" exercise by Jane Elliot. How dominant culture influences our perception of ourselves is scary especially when I am clearly not White, cishet, upper-middle class, person… I acknowledge that everyone no matter their social location goes through hell in this world because oppression oppresses both the oppressor and oppressed, as Paulo Freire explained, but people in the dominant group do not go through the same oppression as the oppressed.
As a yogi and professional dancer, I was able to recognize the pain in the studio because dancing brought in general awareness and concentration. Dance enhances the connection between the body and mind for me. It can definitely be a form of concentration practice if done in a certain way. It would keep the mental discomfort at bay or magnify it. At this time, it was going back and forth between both. After the studio time was over, I cried my guts out on my friend’s shoulder outside on the street. I felt like shit and ugly. One thing I was good at, dance, stopped offering me self-confidence. There was no way to offer myself loving-kindness or compassion. Instead my friend was there holding me. This was not fun, but I would have never known my deep identification as a man.
I did not know how much of how I moved was oriented towards masculinity. It’s understandable that Asian men in the US struggle with their masculinity because Asian men are often biased as not masculine in the sense of White centric world. I remember the owner of a prestigious dance studio in L.A., White, cis and gay, telling me that I was great and I needed to dance more masculine. That was the reason I did not get their scholarship. When I started to learn how to move with masculinity, I booked jobs at the Met Opera, dance companies, on Broadway… My internalized homophobia and transphobia were rewarded. Without my transition, I would have said something like “movement is genderless.” In the studio, I tried to convince myself of that, but it really was not possible. I noticed that even taking a step had the imprint of binary gender. We all might be dictated by binary gender more than we know.
“Be whoever you are!” “Be yourself!” “You can be whoever you want to be!” These are not wrong. They are partially correct and can be inspiring in some cases. But what if whoever I am was not accepted in transphobic society. What if people mocked, bullied, discriminated, and erased who I am knowingly or unknowingly. How can I exist as whoever I am? Don’t get me wrong. I still do exist and propel forward. BUT these naïve “ultimate truth” without considering the actual social complexity in 2021 is harmful and cruel AF.
On the other note, the sense of overriding doubts and overwhelming pain is sometimes necessary, especially in meditation practice by anchoring or loving-kindness and compassion practice to build stability and safety. AND I must say that overriding unpleasant or neutral things like that comes with an aspect of aversion and delusion. What was happening to me in the studio was resisting the resistance against my own internalized transphobia.
I hated how I felt in the femme centered space.
I noticed my internalized transphobia.
I hated that I still had this sense of shame for my femininity.
Usually in meditation practice, I touched the surface of pain, and I retreated from it. For example, sensing the tightness and swirl of overwhelm for 3 seconds, and direct attention to hearing or sending loving-kindness to the overwhelm itself. I do this over and over. I was doing this back and forth while dancing. I can gear myself toward retreating more with an itch when I’m meditating in a contained environment, but this was out in the open with other people. The intensity started to build and I went into the classic aversion spiral — resisting the resistance. What was happening was resisting. Those judgemental transphobic thoughts and their unpleasantness had already passed.
It’s not like I can face the resistance fully during meditation, and that is ok. I just switch out by carrying on with daily life: work, errands, eating, Instagram… by doing so I learned to appreciate how my system tries to protect myself from vulnerability even when the protection is addictive, controlling, and distractive; that was the only form of protection I had until I learned to meditate. One of the biggest learnings from Jesse has been that human experience through 6 sense-doors (5 bodily senses and mind) is bonkers and overwhelming. How could I face the destabilizing reality of there’s no core sense of who I am without care!? This kind of realization happened in the retreat setting, but it started to happen in daily life with my transition. Many of my identities with manhood (son, husband, brother, uncle, dog dad, boyfriend, gay…) just dissolved. This definitely was not what I expected. It’s fucking unnerving. Being able to avoid it is a privilege because the sense of dissolving my identity has been very shitty, rarely liberating. There’s something liberating to it for sure, but it’s scary for me.
