Link round-up: Dancing (and posing) into each other's hearts
Hello again! I hope your holidays were fulfilling and refueling for you. I'm back with a very brief "link round-up" to help me get back into the swing of blogging as my pregnancy nears its end (!).
Both of these links are relatively old by now, in internet terms, but they have stuck with me as having potent characteristics of how I have experienced the Nurtured Heart Approach.
Flash Mob in the Operating Room:
This first video was featured in the Huffington Post (check it out here), documenting the contagious and loving energy of double mastectomy patient Deborah Cohan. Cohan was about to go into surgery, but not before recruiting her medical team into a 6-minute Beyonce-fueled dance party -- I was so drawn to her complete joy, abandon, courage, and fierce welcoming.
She "hijacked" her medical providers into a moment of connection, just as the Nurtured Heart Approach equips us to "hijack" others into similar opportunities to challenge our typical roles and step into a new way of seeing ourselves and each other. Check out the dance party here:
A Strange Way to Stop Being a Stranger:
That same dynamic was at work in this second link, wherein photographer Richard Renaldi approaches strangers on NYC streets in order to pose them together as though they are intimate acquaintances or even family. As Sean Levinson wrote at Elite Daily, "The subjects are only asked to look like they are showing a brief amount of affection, but the facial expressions and body language within the photos make it seem like these strangers not only know each other, but also share some sort of genuine bond. This unorthodox recipe for truly magical moments speaks volumes about both art and humanity."
See the CBS piece about the project here:
I was moved by the moment in the accompanying video (above) in which one of the participants (well, several, actually) noted that by adopting these poses they developed genuine feelings of good will and caring toward their photo partners.
I see that as similar to the way that Nurtured Heart has inspired me -- an introvert much of the time -- to step or leap out of my comfort zone and approach relative strangers in order to call out the greatness I've observed in their behavior, or to begin a sentence with "Let me tell you what I see in you" and not know ahead of time where it will end up because it comes from the heart. Leaps of faith that lead to genuine closeness; much more potent than either faking courtesy or remaining closed off.