Wonder, Whimsy, & Winter Curriculums

I wasn’t really thinking about the whole word of the year thing and then…

Over the weekend I had a delightful conversation with a long time friend/student from long ago, and she said some things that helped ideas in my own head that had been floating around for months to finally coalesce.

Word(s) of the year for 2026

Then my phrase of the year just became obvious. Like, I didn't have to think about it at all. It was just THERE... like something that grew out of the earth:

WONDER AND WHIMSY

So first question: Are you doing a word or phrase? Do you have it yet?

At the same time as I’ve been thinking about things that that conversation helped me to solidify, I’ve also been contemplating the idea of creating personal curriculums. It’s a cool thing going around on TikTok right now.

Personal Curriculum: What and How

We all consume a lot of media — whether online or via books or streaming... We take in a lot, but do we engage with the material?

Obviously some of it is just meant to kinda… pass through us. But there’s a lot that we take in and release that’s deserving of more of our time and attention and thought.

I miss this aspect of college and graduate school: reading literature and then sitting in a room of people who are also interested in literature and we’re dissecting and diving deep and extracting. We’re talking; we’re arguing; we’re writing papers.

And then those works really become a part of us. They inform our identity and how we view the world.

So for this personal curriculum idea, there are a few important components:

1. Pick questions to ask yourself. I saw one person working on the idea of good and evil, for example. Another was investigating how authoritarianism develops. But it doesn’t have to be that serious. I’m looking into redeveloping some sense of my original wonder and whimsy.

2. Put together a course and a time limit. I’ll be working from January through mid May. Like a college’s winter/spring semester.

3. Your course can have books, articles, movies. Whatever you want. You’re the professor here and the student. My course is the stack of books in the photo but I’m still developing it so that might change. (Or I should say, one of my courses.)

4. Have a notebook or some sort of cataloging/writing/thinking process in order before you start. I’ll be using a journal for the most part.

5. Bonus: have some people who are also doing this. Check in with each other. Maybe even have chats now and then to share what you’re excited about or stuck on.

And keep in mind, as I hinted at, you don’t have to stick to one curriculum. I’m developing this one, plus another designed to reignite my geek brain around movement and dance, and a third that is purely physical.

Furthermore, this personal curriculum is just one aspect of how I’ll be playing with and exploring the ideas of wonder and whimsy in 2026, and of course, I’ll keep you up to date now and then about what’s happening.

(May 2026 be better than this terrible year.)

"Breathe and wait" meets its perfect time of year

I’ve been yelling/teaching/prompting “breathe and wait” in classes since the earliest days of Girl on Fire Movement Studio (RIP beautiful studio). Now I tend not to say it enough (and I’ll be changing that). But also? I myself do not always really hear it even as it comes out of my own damn mouth.

And of course, this prompt is not just for movement class but it’s meant to — via movement classes — become so engrained in us that it leads in our wider lives.

Right now? This season of anticipation (advent, the coming solstice, all of it…) and this season of endings (calendars might be made up but they’re based on real things like the sun’s travels and the moon’s cycles)… it seems like the perfect season to really practice breathe and wait in our daily lives and rituals.

Instead of hustling more or seeing how much you can get done in these last days of this year (and how do we continue to hear that advice from the whole coaching community still???)… instead of hustling, let’s just stop.

Let’s breathe and wait.

Breathe and wait to see what peace we can find in these quiet darker days.

Breathe and wait to discern what’s working in our lives — from relationships to routines to work to practices of all kinds.

Breathe and wait.

Pause. Observe. Feel. Listen. Just wait.

Breathe and wait is always followed by allow but we’ll let that off to the side for now.

I felt myself going into hustle mode about halfway through November. I was freaking out about projects I didn’t accomplish this year and I was looking for ways to squeeze them in and luckily I noticed and I stopped.

These last days as we wind down are just not the time for that.

I’m going to focus on connection, rest, and simmering.

I’ll be breathing and waiting as I:

• Get back into paper based journaling and planners and what a joy this has been. Slowing down enough to write slowly instead of hammering away at a computer has been both difficult and delightful.

• Read more and more and more. And read more deeply. I’m planning a personal curriculum for the winter semester and I’ll be writing about that some time soon.

• Turn on twinkle lights and light candles and stretch in the evening on the floor with cats milling about.

• Dream about what’s possible without laying down any really solid plans.

• Connect to my loves and my inner circle of peeps.

What about you?

Special Event at OSU Open to the Public

That was a strange headline to write for this Penn State girl, that’s for sure! I almost couldn’t! HA

But I do live in enemy territory, I mean, Columbus… mere blocks from the campus. And I’ve been invited to lead a really cool somatic break during finals week that is also open to the wider public. Free. Just register here. (Make sure to register soon because we’re limiting the number and it’s filling.)

The super cool part of this is that I’m leading it in a great black box theatre space inside the Wexner Center for the Arts.

Craig and I attended a dance piece here about three years ago and I told him it was a space like I DREAM of teaching and working in and so here we are (photo from that time).

More steps to recovering my healthy brain: my algorithms

I’ve been taking a lot more steps beyond all of my movement to recover my healthier brain. So I’ll be writing about this much more over the coming months.

I had such a great experience of how much we control our algorithms this weekend. We know this, but a lot of the time we're not really owning the responsibility and we blame the platforms but they're just tools. (Please keep in mind that this isn’t about TikTok. That’s just my example.)

So my TikTok started out all fun and dance. I got it right after January 6th to deal with the stress. Over time, it become super politicized and I've been kinda drowning in that every time I go over there... but again... that's because THAT is what *I* was watching and engaging with.

Well, this weekend, I suddenly got obsessed with Journal Tok. This has been slowly seeping into my FYP (for you page/discover space) for some time, but this weekend, I stayed with the videos (and they can be longer form) and I engaged.

About the same time, some literary and philosophy academics had been hanging around my edges too so I started to really watch those. And then the witchy stuff. And some super liberal Catholic peeps.

So now?!?! My TikTok is like some fucking cozy cottage of all of my favorite things.

IT ACTUALLY SOOTHES MY NERVOUS SYSTEM. Yep.

I have more to say about those topics that I'm diving into specifically but this is a reminder that you are in charge of everything you put into your brain and body. (As Thich Nhat Hanh would say.)

I'm not suddenly taking some privileged road and not paying attention to the wider world. I still know all the things that are going on, BUT I have this little space where I can swim in dreams. (And intentionality but more on that soon.)

Only the real me here, no AI

I just added this note to the pop up that new readers get, inviting them to subscribe to the newsletter that will bring them my blogs:

A PROMISE: I will avoid all Generative AI and will never use it for writing, images, or design. You get only the real me here.

This is important to me. As a writer, it’s important that my words are my words, as imperfect as they may be. It’s important that my voice is mine and not filtered in any way.

If you’re using any generative AI, I ask you to take some time to research all the reasons you shouldn’t be, including but not limited to:

• what it’s doing to the environment.

• how it steals from artists, writers, and other creatives. When you use it, you’re using a plagiarism machine.

• how it’s inherently racist and misogynistic.

And, of course, using Generative AI is just putting more money in the pockets of the uber wealthy, who benefit greatly by getting rid of actual humans who need to be paid and given health insurance.

So yeah… NEVER HERE.

Artifacts as motivation

Though I’ve been really low on motivation the last two weeks due to a stupid slip back into eating gluten (and I’m starting to emerge from it but oy…), I’ve been thinking about sharing this particular idea for some time.

A lot of people write about the idea of legacy. What is the legacy you wish to leave behind you in the world? For some of our brains, that’s a pretty abstract concept that doesn’t lead to much past understanding. Meaning, for me, it doesn’t lead to action. Not so much.

But then I ran into the idea of artifacts as it relates to us personally and I can’t remember where but it stuck.

This isn’t about all the stuff in your house. I mean, I really wish more people would take Swedish Death Cleaning more seriously, because yeah, we don’t want your tchotchke and you’re basically asking others to clean up after you. (This doesn’t mean you should live with nothing but maybe, just maybe, if your house and garage and shed are packed to the gills, you could get rid of half of it. I know from experience that it won’t only NOT kill you to have an empty closet or even just some empty shelves, but it will make space in your life to breathe more deeply. For reals.)

Anyway…

What are these artifacts?

You know how on social media there are people who only ever share other people’s stuff (including fucking AI generated crap but that’s another post)? They never share any of their own thoughts, their own photos, their own art, nothing generated from their own minds and hearts.

It reminds me of a lot of those homes I just wrote about above. They are leaving behind bought stuff… nothing from their own hands or minds.

And that’s the artifacts we’re talking about: bits of you. Evidence of you having lived your life.

Not everyone is going to leave behind beautiful paintings like my husband or piles of published books like some of my friends.

But we can still leave behind bits of us… that journal you kept of the seasons? Priceless. Those pieces of art that you labored over out of pure joy? Priceless.

These are the things that matter. Not your freaking figurines.

How this can be motivating

For me, when I think about leaving behind artifacts of my life, it motivates me to make those videos (and build my YouTube so it’s full of my somatic dance principles). It motivates me to actually get writing, whether here or on socials or on the book files I have started. It motivates me to work on my teacher training manual.

It motivates me to plan the next choreography challenge. To build deeper community. To get out in the world and show my damn self.

So… thinking of the artifacts you’d like to leave behind, how could this motivate you?

The idea of joybody arose from a lifetime of painbody

It’s been rainy here after many weeks of drought, and suddenly, my body is one big bag of aches. Dry weather is best (cold or warm/hot) and cold wet is the worst.

I’ve been thinking about this blog for some time, but the idea of trying to write out all the ways my body is a literal pain was just overwhelming.

I won’t be including the ways my brain causes me pain. Most of you know at least a bit about my history of depression and anxiety and there’s some of that in my about me. (And I also won’t be including anything here about a couple of chronic issues, including lifelong migraine.)

And I wanted to write about my chronic pain issues so that it makes more sense when I write about the idea of joybody.

My Original PainBody

When you live with pain from a young age, you don’t notice that you live with pain. It’s just always there. It’s the water you swim in.

Even just a couple of years ago, I saw a meme about a doctor asking a patient where their pain level was and the patient said it was about a four… you know… normal. And the doc said, well, no pain is what’s normal.

WHAT?!

I remember from a very early age waking up and pressing all of my fingers into the wall to “wake them.” They were stiff from the get go. As was a lot of my body.

There were times when getting out of a chair, it would take me a few steps to feel like my legs were “ready.” (This still happens.)

And don’t even get me started on my low back. Or my shoulders which started getting bursitis in my early teens. (I now know what it was. Then I wouldn’t have had that word and I wouldn’t have even complained. It just was what it was.)

The Weirds of My Body

I’m pretty sure I could get a fibromyalgia diagnosis. My pain points are that widespread.

But here are a collection of things that are actually wrong with my body. (And if you’ve been in class with me, you know I say, “I’ve never seen your actual skeleton so I don’t know your body enough to tell you what you can or should/not do.”

Well, I’ve seen plenty of my skeleton:

• I have congenital hip dysplasia on my left side. As a dancer, I used this for extreme flexibility tricks. Someone should have told me to stop. (This hip dysplasia will come up later in a significant way.)

• My right tibia is twisted inward.

• Which makes my right knee only point forward if my right foot is out a bit.

• The last vertebra on my right side overgrew and connect to the top of my pelvis.

• And all of my joints are hypermobile. Again, this was something that dance took advantage of and praised… oy…

Stepping on Nails

I lived with all of this pretty quietly. And it got worse over time as I got depressed and moved less and less. It got so bad that…

I was coming down the stairs in my house and I took a step and was 100% convinced I had stepped on a nail. I was convinced that when I looked down, I would see TONS OF BLOOD. But of course, that wasn’t what had happened. From this moment for the next couple of years, it would just randomly happen and I would spend too much time on the couch. I started to actually look into canes. In my mid 30s.

It would also get so bad that I would do the stairs on my butt… yep.

I’ve told this story a million times but in my late 30s, I met a PT at a party. I was talking a lot about my love of martial arts films, and she said, “Do you want to do martial arts?” And I said, “OH! I can’t… not with my hip!” And she said, “Yeah… I’ve been watching how you walk… I could fix that…”

I went to Cleveland to see her for three hours and it cost more money than I had and was worth ten times as much.

She taught me how to access my core while walking. I walked over and over again, slowly, around the small park in my neighborhood to retrain my body. It worked.

Until… it all started up again…

The Magical Doc

By this time, I was dancing many hours a day every day and teaching what would become Peony Somatic Dance. So when it started to happen again, I was devastated. I asked around and found a musculoskeletal doc.

And finally! He figured out my hip dysplasia was some of the worst he’d ever seen and that it was shortening my psoas muscles. He said he usually only saw it that bad in ultra runner types and that dancers usually had the opposite problem but thanks to my skeleton… again, ugh.

He believed that once I was armed with the diagnosis that I could figure out what to do. And I did. And I did the tings I needed to do every single day, multiple times a day, and if it even feels a teensy bit like that to this day, I go right back to those basics.

And finally tennis

I still have pain. I have days and weeks and months where I’m never pain free but I’m not in the kind of pain I used to be because of how much I move.

The more I move, the more I can move and the better my body and mind feel. There’s no stopping. (Except when there is and then the whole depression cycle starts up again.)

One thing, though, that I’d been avoiding for all these years was tennis.

I was afraid of getting hurt, because if I’m hurt and can’t dance, well, I’m screwed.

But after two frozen shoulders, I said, FUCK IT! I LOVE TENNIS! (And have since I was quite small.)

And that has been everything. It was the final key I needed for this body puzzle. I am as in love with tennis as I have ever been with dance, and it pushes me in ways that dance does not.

When I’m playing tennis, it is really clear to me that this body would have been so much happier in this world if I had not used my intellect as an escape pod from my life. My life would have been completely different if I had taken my physicality this seriously from the get go but alas… I am taking it seriously now and that matters.

My Point

I know pain. I know chronic pain. And I cannot overemphasize how much MORE important it is for those of us who suffer to find ways to move that are joyful.

We’ve been living, most likely, in a sort of fearful relationship with our body, which then affects our mind and the rest of our lives.

Gently and with patience we can come out of that fear relationship through play. Once we navigate through these early stages, we can start doing more challenging things.

But we must consciously take on this task. These choices we make right now will affect how we age.

I want to be one of those 90 somethings that is still playing tennis multiple times a week and of course creating dance. How about you?

The measure by which you know your true work

When I say the word work, I don’t necessarily mean your job. The two can be the same but are not always. I happen to have work that is also my job, and though some people idealize that, there are positives and negatives to both ways of being in the world.

And no matter how much you love your work, there are always parts that just suck. There are days that are exhausting. There are times when you think about quitting. That’s all normal.

With that out of the way…

What’s not normal is feeling that way all of the time. Walking around feeling nothing but drained and maybe even angry is a big red flag.

Here’s the thing: the work you’re meant to do in this world (whether your job or not) is something that feeds the world but also feeds you back. That’s the key right there.

There are days when I think about quitting this work/job I’ve been doing for 16 years, but I know I’m where I’m supposed to be because it brings something important to my communities just as it also brings so much to me. It’s as much my own happiness and sanity as it is any student’s.

So every time I’m feeling overwhelmed or disappointed or just grouchy, I go back to that and remember myself.

I also go back to this little story I read somewhere and I cannot remember where but I think the monk in it is David Steindl-Rast.

A man was feeling really exhausted and overwhelmed by his work/job (some sort of non profit) and he was complaining to his monk friend about this.

The monk friend said something along these lines: It’s not the work that is exhausting you but the fact that you are not giving yourself wholeheartedly to it. ((whoa))

This lack of wholeheartedness can show up for me in a bunch of ways: I focus on wrong things; I don’t take care of my own practices; I try to do too much: I succumb to comparison.

Wholehearted is the opposite of hustle, right?

It’s working from your open heart. And that work always includes self care, a human pace, and a constant return to the fundamentals of your what and why.