On Devotion & Freedom

By Rebecca Boyes-Watson

My baby, Rafael Nuri, was born December 4. Before his birth, I felt like I was pregnant forever, and whenever I danced, so much of the experience was about feeling my pregnant body.

Returning to dance postpartum has been strange. My body feels confused about being far from my baby. I told some friends that the dance used to feel like “I’m pregnant, I’m pregnant,” and now it feels like “my baby, my baby.”

I notice moments of shapeshifting into him.

A facial expression he makes suddenly appears on my face.
The way he shakes his limbs enters mine.

I realize that I must be observing him constantly, and my body is learning him in ways that aren’t deliberate or intellectual. Something deeper is happening.

I spoke with my sister recently, who’s newly single and savoring the freedom of spontaneous plans and going out on a whim. I remember that life. Mine feels very different now. The word that came to me was devotion.

I study Rafa because, as his mother, one of my “shapes” is of devotion to him – bodily, spiritually, emotionally. It is focused, around-the-clock giving. Sometimes it’s frustrating. I often miss spontaneity. I miss the feeling of total self-direction. 

And yet, what I receive through this devotion is a different kind of freedom.

It’s the freedom that comes from having a very clear role. 

It’s the freedom of being claimed by love. 

In this freedom, my actions are not scattered by competing desires, but gathered into a steady current.

This type of freedom is adjacent to the “different kind of agency” that Nicole and I have talked about in relation to the dance. When you really surrender to the music, something else takes over. You might suddenly realize you’ve been moving without consciously directing yourself at all.

What is that “something else”?

It isn’t a loss of agency; it’s a different kind. It’s not our usual executive decision-making, but a certain agency that’s larger than us, moving through us. The paradox is that this agency is always flowing through us. Surrender simply allows us to feel it, to merge with it, to experience our inseparability from everything around us.

Devotion feels like that, too.

There are ways this postpartum time feels confined. Many of my actions are mundane and repetitive, and I’m home almost all the time. There are also ways it feels vaster than anything I’ve done before – because it’s less about my wants and needs, and more about who and what I serve.

In devotion, I study my son without fully realizing it. We are intertwined. We know each other in ways that are hard to articulate through language—but that pour forth when I dance.