Origin of Instill Movement

Moving With The Clouds

This is a story about beginnings, mine, and this work, about an initiation and a heart-opening, it is about soul and its retrieval after perceived loss. It is a story about an expansion, of mind and life, that allowed me to be bigger than the little personality of Suzanne Weiner Armistead, embracing the whole of life.

And it begins where I did. As a little girl, I took deepest pleasure in lying on my parents’ lawn, staring at clouds, lifting my awareness into the clouds, and moving with them, mimicking and responding to them. This brought connection to the infinite, a flow, reminding me that we are all something much larger than a body with limits. These moments of staring at the clouds were not out-of-body experiences, but rather deeply in-body, through the portal of the body to the infinite.

In Midland, Texas, little girls went to ballet, and so did I. And through the form of ballet I learned to interface with others through movement. I also learned to interface with fear when my first recital was accompanied by profound and crippling stage-fright. I saw fear then for what it was, after the fact, as a thing generated by, and transcend-able by, my mind. These experiences further strengthened my connection to the infinite through body. And so I kept moving with the clouds.

My failure to engage with the traditional educational system as a youth took me out of my growing capacity to transcend fear and to connect with kinesthetic experience, resulting in a perceptible loss of my ability to experience life truthfully through my own natural expression. It would take some time, and more perceived loss, to recover, rebound, transcend.

I stopped dancing. But I would re-learn to dance. And when I did, the dancing would save my life over and over. And the dancing in between then and now has saved my life over and over. Dance saved me.

Motherhood

Being a mother to my son Davis connected me to what I thought I had lost; connection with the divine. Motherhood re-formed this connection. My time with him has brought inspiration and grace. I played and danced with him.

When Davis’ time in a body came to an abrupt end, I felt an emptiness that stripped me of everything. Everything except motherhood’s divine connection.

Moving Into Stillness

In the moment of Davis’ death, I called on the Divine, to help me live. I feel closer to God and Davis every day (and so, even as i write this now, how I perceive all of this changes daily as a result of that connection). What this closeness means to me is to face the challenge of living the impossible, as best I can on a daily basis.

Living the impossible has come to me by moving into stillness. Moving into stillness is re-connecting, through movement and dance, with spiritual awareness to something larger than you and me.

And this is Instill Movement’s purpose. We create a place where we move through the portal of body into a deeper, richer experience of who we are: pure spirit, infinite, limitless love. Come join us, and move with the clouds, re-finding that sense, that we have as children, of our divine connection.

“Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit,
not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.”
– Kahlil Gibran “The Prophet”

Once there is a certain degree of Presence, of still and alert attention in human beings’ perceptions, they can sense the divine life essence, the one indwelling consciousness or spirit in every creature, every life-form, recognize it as one with their own essence and so love it as themselves.
-Eckhart Tolle