Pain is all around us. We can't avoid it. And for some reason, even if we don't notice it most of our lives, it is an aspect of being. We feel physical pain if we injure ourselves, chronic pain if the injury or illness does not heal, and emotional pain when we lose what we love or life serves us disappointments.
Pain accompanies a woman's monthly cycle as her body works to renew itself. And pain, ironically, is also present at one of life's most miraculous moments - at the time of giving birth. Most women who have passed the experience through natural childbirth attest that it is, without a doubt, the most painful event that they have passed in their lives.
There must be a purpose for pain, I reason with myself.
Pain can be a warning, a sign for us to take heed as we push our bodies to their limits, but it can also be a vehicle for growth as we reach to overcome it. That's what I learned through meeting Loolwa Khazzoom - a woman who has looked pain straight in the eye and decided to work with it - through dance.
Meeting Loolwa
When I first met Loolwa, she was pacing around her apartment in Tel Aviv speaking with an editor from a highly-acclaimed women's glossy magazine. In her apartment, were all the tools of the reporter's trade: a stock of magazines, filing cabinets, a fax and printer beside the desk; but there were other things - unexpected things - such as an electric guitar and strangely-shaped yoga stretching tools which made me understand that Loolwa is a woman doing many different activities.
Then I was shocked to discover that Loolwa's accomplishments were not made with the ease that she transmitted - that Loolwa even on better days, was experiencing chronic pain - a result of a hit-and-run head-on collision ten years before. A self-proclaimed feminist, a self-taught journalist, and an exceptional teacher and musician, Loolwa was not about to let pain take away the best parts of her life.
"Back in the day," says Loolwa, "I was an über athletic chick: an avid cyclist, swimmer, and jogger, a women's self-defense instructor, and most importantly, a dance fiend. On any given night of the week, you could catch me at the local clubs, euphorically dancing the night away."
But after the accident, all that changed. Loolwa (her name means pearl in a million in Arabic) spent years working with a traditional healthcare system and a maze of health care professionals to help alleviate her pain. By 2004, says Loolwa, she had sunk so low that "contemplating suicide became as much a part of my morning routine as drinking a cup of coffee."
Healing In The Desert
That same year, Loolwa's friend dragged her out of the apartment, which she had become afraid to leave, and took her to a retreat in the middle of the desert.
She recalls, "On the first night, I cried bitterly while watching an electrifying dance troupe perform in the white desert sand. Barely able to walk, I knew I had forever lost the ability to move so passionately and vigorously. After the dancers and audience members left, however, as the music blared over the loudspeakers and tears streamed down my face, I raised my arms - the only body part not in pain - and began moving them to the music. And so I began to dance again."
Later on during the retreat, Loolwa discovered that her pain had boundaries, which she describes as 'an edge.' By pressing on the limits of her pain, Loolwa eventually found, that like stretching exercises in yoga practice, after some time she could widen her limits. Four days into the workshop, " I was magically able to tear up the dance floor as in years past. Tears, this time of rapture and gratitude, streamed down my cheeks once again," she remembers.
Since that experience, Loolwa has explored what she calls "the magic and spirit of dance as a powerful and innovative tool for healing chronic pain."
She has used dance to help heal herself and over the past few years has developed her own methods and workshops, to help others heal.
She says, "I have used Dancing with Pain as a metaphor for creating a dynamic emotional and spiritual relationship to pain - so that patients are no longer victims of depression, anxiety, and fear, but rather powerful dance partners with these illnesses. Lastly, I have used the Dancing with Pain model as an educational tool in guiding health care practitioners - so that they understand how to work effectively and caringly with chronic pain patients."
Loolwa's Program
As part of her program, Loolwa gives a one-hour movement workshop where participants learn to dialogue with and soften their feelings of pain; they learn how to distill and channel the raw energy of pain and eventually 'recycle' it to transform it from fear, anger, and frustration.
Probably one of the most special things about dance that I learned from Loolwa is that she taught me that dance does not have to be a whole body experience, as we see in movies or on TV, in order to make it legitimate.
The fact that some of us may be wheelchair-bound, paralyzed or simply not willing to move in public does not mean that we lose the right to stop dancing.
We were sitting in a café and Loolwa explained to me with movement: "See" said Loolwa, while holding her fingers in the air and making them bounce about, "dancing when I have pain, might mean just dancing with my fingers," she declared.
At that moment, it was as though all the preconceptions that I had learned about dance (that it should be aesthetic, in rhythm, and with all my body parts engaged), were cast aside with the wave of her finger. Although at that time I wasn't suffering from pain, Loolwa had just made the limits of my world that much bigger.