This is the blog of Beatrice Alleyne. I was born in Barbados in the early 1940s. I have lived in the UK since the 1950s and did the last two years of primary school here. I went on to grammar school and then university. My adult working life has been spent in London.
I don’t remember when I learnt to read or a time when I didn’t dance. It feels as if I have always been able to do both of these. Education and religion were the lynchpins of our extended family ethos in Barbados. The formative influences in my life have been reading, writing, study, music and dance, and a search for meaning in life. Dance has played a vital role in my spiritual journey.
I had first-hand experience of racism in 1950s England, especially that suffered by my mother. My way of surviving this trauma led me, eventually, to therapy and work on internalised racism.
I’ve always enjoyed playing with words. I wrote long, chatty letters in the days before emails, tweets or blogs. I talk to myself on paper, especially when feeling anxious or upset. I wrote my fearful way to Kenya on my first long haul flight. Writing became part of my therapy. My therapist was so struck by my description of how free and authentic I felt when I dance that she recommended an ecstatic dance practise she’d heard of called The Wave (aka 5Rhythms). This resulted in an important step along my spiritual path as I combined talk therapy with dance. Since 1997 ecstatic, creative dance practise has become an integral part of my life.
Another important strand has been Julia Cameron’s The Artist Way and her recommendation of daily morning pages. Many years ago, I considered writing an account of how I’d combined talk and dance therapy but could not find a way to get started on it. Morning pages practice has kept my writing skills and ambitions alive.
During my search for meaningful living I became interested in Buddhism, particularly Zen Buddhism. That path seemed too esoteric to follow in the UK, so I simply embraced basic Buddhist principles. Ten years before my involvement with ecstatic dance I was introduced to Nichiren Buddhism which, for me, was more accessible than Zen practices. I have continued to do a daily ritual I learnt at that time.
I’ve danced and reflected on my life story in many creative workshops over the 22 years since I started ecstatic dancing.
I’m now in my late 70s. How did I move through intense fear, depression, internalised racism; from always feeling different, the outsider; from suffering low self-worth and shame at not having achieved my full potential: from all that to my current state of acceptance of life as it unfolds from moment to moment.
This blog is a vehicle to explore my progress from there to here. I envisage producing brief snapshots whenever a topic pops into my consciousness. I intend to create this blog the way I dance, and the way I’ve always strived to live: intuitively, instinctively, authentically.