How small things can bring big results

An extra beautiful bouquet that Cat Daddy brought home a couple of weeks ago.

My new morning routine is to NOT lie in bed and drown in news, but instead, I listen to a Chani meditation or teaching (I have the paid app and it's super worth it, FYI), and then I get up, put on my damn leggings, and do a Japanese slow jog on my treadmill while I watch a podcast. (A little something about that technique.)

Here's the thing: I only do this for 10 minutes. It's all I can convince myself to do at this point. (And I do the jog thing because I have learned from SO LONG of trying that my body does not want to be creative first thing... it takes me a while to really wake up. I’ve tried waking and dancing first thing and it only leads to frustration.)

Here's the other thing: IT IS DOING THINGS TO MY BRAIN.

I've always preached that it can be as simple as one song. But the part that's left out with that is the sweat.

You have to sweat. One song can be enough to alter your brain chemistry a bit but you have to dance vigorously and get a bit of a sweat on. (And the more minutes, the better over time... that's just reality.)

OR you can dance to one song and SING LOUDLY and that will affect your brain without you needing to really sweat. That's why car singing on the way to work can make such a difference for people.

Why? THE BREATH. It's pretty much all about the breath and getting those lungs pumping -- sweating and/or singing will both do that.

And doing this first thing in the morning is, of course, setting me up for a bit of a better day.

It's not enough to totally deal with the intensity of my depression but it gives me the bit of chemistry to make better decisions later in the day. If I start my day with movement, I’m more likely to move more throughout the day. And then over time, cumulatively, my brain will get better and better.

But for now, ten minutes can have a domino effect. You can surely find ten minutes. We do all kinds of mind numbing things for ten minutes… watch TV, just sit and rot, scroll on our phones.

It’s hard, though, to make different choices. And it’s a bit of pain in the ass that making better choices leads to making more better choices. ((sigh))

As I’ve said before, there’s no magicks but in

The mystery of willpower and the battle of depression

Begonia Yuki is now three.

You get to a certain point in depression where your willpower switch actually gets flipped. I'm super simplifying but there's a neuro-chemical thing that happens and you literally stop having access to that "push yourself" thing that could be helpful.

This is where meds can be super helpful but alas I am medication resistant so...

I've been in that space of no “push” for quite some time. I do what needs to be done but that's it.

And I have no clue how to turn this around for anyone, including myself, but right now a turning is happening and I'm looking back trying to discern what it was for me (FOR ME).

First steps

I think it somehow goes back to tracking my food and realizing how much I was emotionally eating. Doing that was an interesting enough experiment that I was able to stick with it and I have kept going because it remains interesting. (Experiments are the nutrition of my brain and life... if I'm in that mode, I am at my best and happiest... curious and fascinated is my healthy spot.)

And something about THAT has led to some other small things...

And then suddenly! (Doesn't it always seem like that?) over the weekend, I could really feel the switch moving back to "on."

This morning I laid in bed and watched my asshole brain trying to convince me to stay in bed until the thing I HAD to do... and it was interesting because I could just watch it... as I got up and did the new things I've committed to.

Now sharing this feels scary, right? Depression brain tells me that this is just a blip...

OH! I remember now! A huge part of this was me announcing on Sunday evening that I was going to start really PUSHING HARD through the "I don't want to" ... that I could no longer be gentle with myself, because IN MY CASE, gentle is draining my life from me... slowly...

And there really is something magical in telling others "Hey! Can you check in once in a while? I'm trying to..."

We are communal.

The fight

This post is a bit all over the place but I want to emphasize something here that I didn’t when I first wrote most of this in the Circle of Trees: the fight.

Depression is a liar and a thief.

If a liar and a thief broke into your home, would you just sit there and rest?

Here’s the thing: if someone broke into my house that would mean my cats were in danger and you can bet you’d see proof that I am not a passifist.

So why when it comes to my own self do I allow this lying and thieving of my goodness, creativity, essence?

Of course, depression is complicated, and as I said at the top, we can lose motivation and I have no idea how to get it back.

But once you feel even just a bit of that motivation… even just a shadow of it, it’s time to start fighting. And you must fight hard.

You have to dig in. And you have to focus on the things around you — cats, people you love, work that matters — and promise those things that you will continue to fight.

That’s where I am… I’ve got my boxing gloves on and I’m trying to beat the crap out of that intruder.

My depression makes sense and yours probably does too

“It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

— Krishnamurti (or not...)

That quote goes around all the time because it speaks to so many of us, but according to the Krishnamurit Foundation Trust, there’s no actual evidence that he ever said it. He did say things that boil down to this, though, including:

Is society healthy, that an individual should return to it? Has not society itself helped to make the individual unhealthy? Of course, the unhealthy must be made healthy, that goes without saying; but why should the individual adjust himself to an unhealthy society? If he is healthy, he will not be a part of it. Without first questioning the health of society, what is the good of helping misfits to conform to society?

And Henry Miller, who said he was very inspired by Krishnamurti, put it this way:

There is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy.

Now that all of that nerd stuff is out of the way… ((ha))

The title of this piece came to me early Wednesday morning this week, as I awoke to another day feeling deep despair about the world and my place in it.

You know… those days when even the blue sky and sun and warm temperatures do not beckon. Those days when your body feels as though it’s made of lead and even the cat can tell so she settles on you for a long nap, purring and doing her best to help.

I have been limiting my news a bit. But it feels irresponsible to completely limit it. There are people suffering and there will be more.

The cruelty of this administration is breath-taking. The people who support it even more so.

It’s one thing for sociopaths to sociopath but to watch others cheer them on…

And so I wake up under the weight of that and then the rumination starts: how is there any space for the work I bring to this world in this particular world? How is it that every single thing that means anything to me and that I am good at — writing, poetry, singing, dancing, teaching somatic dance, creating art — how is it that in this world they are building, there really is so very little space for me?

And when I ask that question I am asking as a person who has paid her bills with those things that she loves for a very long time now. I am not a hobbyist. This is my Work, in that spiritual, capital W way and in the way of making money to help with the life Craig and I are building.

To feel this sense that my work will slowly slip away (as it has already started to do to some degree)… the despair over this is profound.

So my own loss plus the vile news that comes day after day after day, wave after wave, with no end in sight, and yes, I am depressed.

And see how it makes sense?

I’ve written about this before: if you already have a propensity toward depression from early life trauma, well, you’re pretty sure to be sinking into depression now as we are triggered by a cruel and punishing administration. Punishing in that anything not to their specific liking is designated as “bad.” (Familiar?)

I know that in order to fight back against all of this, we must maintain our hopeful energy and we must be able to fuel ourselves through love and beauty and joy.

But, my god… right now that feels like a lot to ask. So I have no answers and will continue to ask the questions.

What is my part in this? How can I maintain the work that’s important to me and others? What role can I play in the larger pictures? How can I fuel my own self in a way that allows me to continue?

I do not want to give the authoritarian/schnazis the “sad bodies” that French philosopher Deleuze speaks of but I also do not know how not to.

Uncovering a layer of privilege and the shame of it...

I can’t remember if it was right after the election or right after the inauguration, but I was, as many of us were, feeling terrible. And I had a meeting with the owner of the studio where I teach in Columbus. Heartfelt is queer owned and committed to elevating the experiences of marginalized humans.

Vinny, the owner, is a freaking unicorn, and I mean that on an emotional, spiritual, and mental level. He’s worked hard to build a beautiful life filled with joy. And he personifies it: the first meeting I ever had with him, he came into the coffee shop in a long, bright pink, faux fur. He fuels himself with bags of skittles. And I think, really, he probably passes rainbows. ((laughing))

He is not a caricature, don’t get me wrong. As I said, he’s worked hard and the glitter coating you see on the outside is over a depth that comes from profound challenges met with curiosity and grace.

Back to our meeting after the orange menace took over.

I asked Vinny how he was doing, expecting him to say something like “devastated” or “scared”… you know, something more along the lines that I, existing in so many safe roles, was feeling. (Besides being a woman, of course, which has never been safe in this country.)

Instead he said something more along the lines of “great! Excited about (fill in the blank)!”

I was stunned.

And this was the start of a huge realization that has taken me until the last week or so to really articulate.

I have never been someone who had to be told she was privileged. I understand the layers and layers of my personal privilege.

But this particular piece of privilege was so deep… it’s really a core privilege and I think we can be most ignorant of those.

Over these first few months of 2025, I hear myself constantly saying to loved ones and trusted confidants that I do not have the tools to live in this world that they are building. I am devastated. I am in a deep, drowning sea of despair. I feel a level of powerlessness that I have never felt before.

My depression is the worst it’s been in over 20 years.

On top of that is a red hot rage and hate that I’ve never felt before.

I am afraid for all of us.

And that all makes sense.

But it’s the lack of tools that has completely stunned me. I do not have the right tools to meet this moment. I mean psychologically, of course.

Nothing is working.

Vinny has the tools. Other marginalized humans have the tools. They are, somehow, being angry and still also finding their joy and living their lives.

You know why?

Because this unsafe world is the world they have always lived in. They have had to develop these tools from day one. (Again, as a woman, there is definitely a lack of safety but as a whyte woman… it’s, well, a bit safer.)

My. God. When I realized this!

THIS is the depth of our privilege. We have not needed these particular tools*.

(*These tools are distinctly different from the tools a lot of us have created in response to personal traumas that are not relative to being marginalized by the wider culture.)

And now we do need them and you can’t just snap your fingers to conjure them and you can’t just sit in meditation for a few days and they suddenly appear.

These are tools that are forged in pain and challenge that has been in people’s lives for decades. These are tools that marginalized communities share with one another and teach each other.

And there’s the other key… communities.

I have communities of which I am a part, but I do not know how to deepen these communities in the way that, for example, the trans community has always had to do. Or the black community. Or any religion that is not freaking Christian in this country.

I think my communities are exceptional. I love the humans who are in the many circles of which I am a part. But for the most part, the communities themselves are also part of the privilege issue in that the people in them tend to all look like me and have the same sorts of backgrounds. So there’s no new information being brought in (and we all work hard to learn but it’s second hand, for the most part, isn’t it?).

I don’t have some sort of revelatory conclusion to bring here.

I am just noticing the depth of the problem.

And it’s really scary to notice this when we need to be able to hit the ground running. People are suffering and they need us.

But it we are struggling ourselves just to maintain an okay mindset, to be able to do the bare minimum, to simply live from day to day, we are really of very little help.

Because one of the key ingredients in this coming revolution/resistance is the ability to move forward from joy and love and compassion. Or we’ll build something that looks like all the old things and those old things helped to get us to this terrible place.

We need new ideas and better ideas and more beauty and laughter and playfulness so that we can conjure and create something brand new that makes space for each of us in our unique beauty.

So that’s where I am… contemplating my privilege, my lack of tools, the layer of shame that comes with that, and what I need to do to build the right muscles for the work ahead.

And the concept of devotion can come from the most unexpected places

It’s not that I don’t expect the idea of or a demonstration of devotion to pop up from just about any human, but it still can surprise me where and through whom these messages can come at me.

This week I started teaching again at the residential addiction facility in my neighborhood. I had stopped for a wee bit, because their census was down and there were some fears around the current federal government cutting them off because the program is a welfare based one.

But alas, their census is back up and they seem okay (for now), so I am back, teaching my wacky (as you know) blend of all things yoga, breath, primal movement, and somatic dance (basic principles sort of stuff).

And we chat a bit, because it’s important for community, for them to feel they can trust me, and for me to suss out what they really need (as opposed to just giving them prepackaged yoga like the teacher before me).

Some of these men have been kicked down by life over and over again and they keep getting up and they keep trying and for that reason I find them a source of true inspiration.

They own their mistakes; they face their demons; they are working so hard with the intention of becoming the best versions of themselves. And they take beautiful emotional care of each other. I get to witness that fact time after time.

There are a lot of people in this world that are “functional” addicts of one kind or another and they float through life never facing themselves like these men do.

But there was one new student in particular who really demonstrates what hard work looks like.

Besides the daily schedule of meetings and therapy and work that they all are put on, he gets up every day between 4:30 and 5 so that he can spend time in prayer and then spiritual reading. He then goes outside and does stretching and body weight work for an hour before entering into the house’s daily schedule. He also gets outside around lunch and dinner to do some more of the same.

He understands the inextricable link between how he treats his body and how his mind is going to function or not in the world. And he is living that understanding.

I see my previous self in him. The depth of understanding of the need for this work plus the fear of what would happen if we were to stop and so the doing.

But I did stop. And my fears were warranted.

I still am only really moving when I teach. Luckily I teach enough to maintain a baseline of okay-ness but it’s not even good much less great… like I used to feel.

And of course the external circumstances of our lives right now could drive even the most mentally healthy into depression and anxiety. If you’re paying attention at all to the horrors of what’s happening, no matter your own stability, there is so much energy that needs to be spent every day just to survive this.

So again, for those of us who already struggle with our mental health, things are definitely bad. Really bad. There’s much that is simply out of our hands.

But I think this new student of mine would say that even then… even when there’s a lot that’s out of your hands… there’s still so much that is. There’s still so much that we can control, that we can work with.

I’m not going to suddenly revert to my most healthy self after this wee interaction with this human, but it’s one more bit of… inspiration, one more bit of hope, one more breadcrumb to follow.

When early chronic dieting has broken your eating intuition

Intuitive eating is great if you can actually feel when you’re hungry and feel when you’ve had enough. But those mechanisms aren’t always that clear cut or working for a wide variety of reasons, not the least of which is that we’re all different. Our brains are all different. Our reactions to food are all different.

And our eating backgrounds are all different.

If you were a girl growing up in the 1980s, you were likely constantly being put on diets. And that very much damages your relationship to food and your body.

Even when I was a size zero I was not small enough.

Only when I started to dance again in my 40s did my relationship to food and body finally become neutral, which I think is actually the healthiest relationship you can have to those things.

But over the last few years, as depression has eaten away at my healthy mindsets, it has also brought up old patterns around food and body.

And because I can’t simply intuit about food, I end up eating things that do not feel good in my body and I end up eating too much — to the point of discomfort.

Something had to change. Body and mind are one and I know from experience that to get my body back to more comfortable and more active is to then heal my mind.

So I’ve started to track my food again because of that lack of intuition.

And whoa… it’s freaking surprising.

First, I don’t ever think of myself as an emotional eater. As a matter of fact, if I’m super stressed I don’t eat.

But… I am a bored eater. I am a depressed eater.

I am constantly thinking about what food I could be putting into my mouth.

Second, the amount of food that I thought was necessary to make me feel full was way off. I knew this, as I said, because I was uncomfortable, but the amount I needed to feel full and comfortable was a lot different than I anticipated.

(I’m using this macro counter and a food scale. TO BE CLEAR: NOT to deprive myself but to recalibrate my understanding of food.)

So this is part of my journey right now. And if you need to talk about it, you can always email me or ask to be added to my group on Facebook.

And if you need to move more, I start a new 4 week session of Stim Yoga and Peony Somatic Dance online classes next week.

You have to move to feel

This is not a metaphor.

Think about it this way first:

Lay a hand on a cat and it's soft, but keep it lying there and you stop feeling the soft. Or at least, not with the same intensity as when you pet the cat.

Same with water... Get into the Lake (if you’re in Erie or near any lake) and walk through the water, feeling the softness of the water. Stand still. Less input, less sensation.

Go another step and realize that you only really feel wet relative to dry. Or relative to your wet swim suit as you try to peel it off.

(Before we go any further, as always, there are different levels of and ways of moving, but there is always movement of one kind or another, even just the breath and how it moves the chest and back. Or the movement of the eyes. Or the the tongue as it tastes.)

Stand still. Less input, less sensation.

We know that to be still in the body during and/or right after a traumatic event is to get stuck in that moment. (Here for more on that.) The feelings of that moment are then not moved through… or we do not move through them.

This is not a one time thing, of course, and that’s why somatic movement — movement married to intention and awareness and breath — is needed every day in one way or another, because every day brings us more to move through.

This is even obvious in our language. We say we are “stuck,” meaning we can’t seem to “get over” something or move forward in our lives.

Move. More input, more sensation.

Go back to the cat and the water. We experience the world through external sensation entering our nervous systems via our senses.

Same for our emotional lives.

For example, we think we are “intuiting” something about someone else or a situation, but it’s just our senses capturing information so quickly that we don’t notice.

This is also related to your “gut feelings.” That’s your vagus nerve relaying information to you that you might not have noticed consciously.

Move to feel to move.

We take in the world, our lives, the traumas, and then what? We can lock them up and let them gather dust and mold or we can move to feel them fully so that we might move more.

And here is the beauty of somatic dance: we can do all of this with joy in community. (You can check out the basic parts of a Peony Somatic Dance class here.) And over time, we can build our capacity to go through the cycles quicker. This is not so we can develop a method of bypassing. Not at all.

This is a spiritual practice of the most real variety: we honestly look at ourselves and our experiences and we digest them and use that digested material to build the life we really want — rather than the life that just happens to us.

The problem of dissociation when "listening to the body"

When the body doesn’t feel safe

The ground of Peony Somatic Dance is breathe and wait. We focus on the breath first to drop into the now and center, and then we patiently listen for or pay attention to the messages of the body. Following that, honest expression can emerge.

But what if when we breathe and attempt to pay attention to the body, we simply can’t?

What if we have a history of dissociation and that is still triggered?

What if it just feels scary to enter the body in this way?

All of these things can drive us away from something like a somatic dance practice. It can keep us from simple exercise. It can prevent us from truly enjoying the sensual aspects of life, because the body does not feel like a safe space.

How do we develop the body as safe space without creating more shutdown and numbness?

How to deal with dissociatioN during movement

There are a bunch of ways to deal with this issue that are more gentle. Over time you can progress through them, but remember, it’s not a ladder. It’s a spiral.

It’s not a simple ladder because if we’ve had a lifetime of dissociative disorder, I don’t think it’s ever just gone. Extreme stress or vile political administrations can certainly bring it back. It’s so deeply embedded in our neurobiology and our body/mind revert to the oldest coping mechanisms because they’re the most “practiced.”

So these new somatic practices are never one and done.

All of this is also why it’s important to work with someone with deep experience. I can tell when a student is distressed even if they aren’t obviously freaking out, for example, and I have a tool box the size of a castle that I can pull from until we find the thing that helps or soothes, whatever is needed.

Peony Somatic Dance methods of the gentle variety

This is just s small example of the tools I would pull from, but it might give you an idea of where to start. (You could also take a class with me, of course, online if you’re not local to Columbus, OH, or you can contact me about possible one on one work if you don’t feel like you’re ready for a class.)

So here are some possible ways of approaching a body that is not feeling safe:

Put all of your attention on your environment. Externalize your awareness. You could put on some music and start to identify items in your space. If you’re alone, you could do this out loud. “Chair, photo, clock” etc. You could add lots of detail if that felt good. As you’re doing this, allow movement to happen but keep your attention outside of the body and the movement.

Touch and name your bodyparts as you move. This is exactly what it sounds like. Moving your right hand? Touch it with your left and say to yourself, this is my right hand.

Attention to body boundaries. Just notice where your body begins and the space outside of you starts. This could be as simple as focusing your movement in your feet and feeling the floor. Or you could get on the floor and move around gently, feeling the feedback from the floor into your body parts. There are a lot of other ways to get this same feedback but moving on…

Place your attention on another body. This is best done led in a class or you can do it with a loved one at home. You can try mirror movement: each of you taking a turn to lead. Keep things really simple. Another option is to start with super simple contact improv like you see in the photo above or as seen here.

Again, there are so many ways to deal with dissociation even when it can feel a bit scary. (And again, experienced guides are so very necessary.)

Let me know if you have any questions or insights!