ARTIST LETTER NO. 18
When Time Disappears
What happens when attention finds its home.
Hi there,
Before I ever called myself a dance alchemist, I spent years as a healing arts practitioner — studying and practicing shiatsu, bodywork, subtle energy.
One of the things I love most about that work is the way time behaves differently inside it.
When I'm giving or receiving a session, the clock becomes almost irrelevant. An hour can feel like fifteen minutes. Or like no time at all. Not because I'm distracted, but because I'm so fully IN the experience that the usual markers dissolve.
I remember the first time this happened to me.
I was in my twenties, receiving shiatsu for the first time. I lay on the mat expecting something like massage. What I got was completely different — a kind of presence and pressure that spoke directly to my body, bypassing my mind entirely.
When the session ended, I would have believed you if you told me it had been fifteen minutes or two hours. Something else had taken over.
That experience changed me. It was my first taste of what I now understand as a different kind of attention — one that doesn't measure, doesn't rush, doesn't track what's next.
You've probably felt this too.
A song you love comes on unexpectedly, one you haven't heard in years, and suddenly you're not in the car or the kitchen anymore. You're somewhere else entirely.
Or you're watching a sunset and the colors shift so slowly that you forget you were ever in a hurry.
Or you're in conversation with someone and the quality of listening is so real that an hour passes like a single breath.
These moments have something in common: attention has found its home.
It's no longer scanning, managing, or bracing. It's simply HERE.
And when that happens, time changes shape.
I think this is one of the things we're most hungry for right now.
Not more time. A different relationship to it.
One where we're not always watching the clock or racing toward the next thing.
One where we can actually land inside the moment we're living.
This is exactly what I'm creating space for next week.
Making Space for the Transcendent
A Dance Alchemy Evening
Wednesday, July 29 | 7pm
ZenSpace Studios, Hoboken NJ
No experience necessary. No choreography. Just guided movement, presence, and permission to let time soften for an evening.
If you've been craving that feeling of being fully IN something — not performing, not producing, just being — I'd love to have you in the room.
With love,
Kristen
The Dance Alchemist
P.S. When does time disappear for you? What draws your attention so completely that the clock becomes irrelevant? I'd love to hear — hit reply.