Music Matters: The After Party

Art Direction: The Magazine of Yoga; Photo: Britney Spears CC U.S. Navy Chief Warrant Officer 4 Seth Rossman (Go Seth!)

Intense work with total strangers? It’s time for music, finding connection, and singing at the top of your lungs.

BY MAGAZINE COLUMNIST EMMANUELLE LAMBERT

I am just back from four days of an intense course. Four days, where I shared, connected, activated chakras (honest), found my fuel, expanded my comfort zone, identified my ego and became conscious. Four days, the first step to become a certified coach, because I am crazy like that.

Starting at 9 am, finished at 9:30 pm at the earliest. A whole team of trainers, an even bigger group of trainees, most of us staying together at the venue, seeing each other from breakfast to the last bathroom trip of the day. It almost felt like a self-development retreat, a very empowering challenging inspiring moving touching retreat for that matter.

Every day, at the end of the day, the trainers would play some music, thus marking the closing of the day and signalling very gently that we had to leave the room.

And we did.

Except on day 3

On day 3, a very emotional day, a large group of trainees, including yours truly, stayed in that room. We stayed and we started dancing and partying like crazy.

Now imagine, you are with a group of people you have known for at most 2 days, and still you share this moment. The most beautiful part of it was when the trainers got loose and started dancing with us, forgetting for a moment that they were supposed to keep a distance between them and us.

From this moment we were in this together. They were reliving the training they had taken years or months ago, having fun with us and actually sharing more than what they had shared before.

From this moment, they were not only our trainers, they were also human beings, smiling, laughing, drinking (water only, it was a course, not a 4-day orgy at Charlie Sheen’s. At least there was sparkling water too), waving and throwing their arms in the air just like we did.

Lighten up to go deeper

No, no boundaries were crossed, it never came to mind. It was just a collective moment of releasing emotions, of feeling joy, of sharing without talking, if you don’t count the silly singing at the top of our lungs.

Music was the catalyst for that moment, we needed it, this is what I truly realized there and then. We needed a bit of lightness, and something we could all connect to, not to mention connect together to, besides the training.

Something proving we had more in common than sitting in a room for four days all day long.

And nothing tops popular music from all kinds of eras to create this kind of bond between people who, had it not been for this particular occasion, would never have met.

When I hear the word “music,” what immediately starts playing in my head is Madonna’s Music. Music does make the people come together, and we did celebrate our last evening and release the day’s emotions together.

Secret pop humming

There will always be gems in pop music, and in this context by “pop music” I mean popular music playing endlessly on mainstream radios, i.e., the music you officially love to hate because you’ve heard so much of it but secretly hums to when you hear it. I acknowledged my own fondness of Britney Spears, and I am sure you know what I am talking about because you have a Pop Shame Secret too.

This kind of music and songs, as light as it seems, has an advantage on other, more underground styles: everyone knows them. Everyone can relate to them, can remember a certain period of their lives when these tunes were a hit, when they were happy or unhappy, when they were young, so when they come back in a setting like the one I was in, they immediately strike a chord and get everyone around dancing.

Groove is in the anahata

Now I have to say that one of my own favorites of all time popped up at some point, one of my cherished pop tunes as it is, coming fully charged with teenage memories, joys and pains, a song I will always get up and sing along to : Deee-lite’s Groove in the Heart.

How can you not groove to that one?

This truly marked the end of the party. Then music started to take a more new agey turn, I guess that was the cooling down of the music vinyasa krama. Which is why I figure one of us – not me ! – decided to take sirsasana right there where we danced and had me as his partner for a bout of partner yoga.

Because that’s what we do when music inspires us. I mean, who doesn’t ?

Find Emmanuelle here on The Magazine every month in Music Matters. But don’t lose touch with her great style of living real – read her smart, hip and honest blog Plans on a Comet.

© 2011, The Magazine of Yoga, LLC.