Stargazing and other apathy antidotes: How toddler me is teaching me about delight, curiosity, and mental health

NOTE: This was originally posted on my Substack and I will only occasionally repeat those pieces over here. PLEASE be reminded that my Substack is free and you can access it via your browser, no need to download an app. If you have a moment and could go over there and engage with some of my material, I would appreciate it.

I have this memory of myself around the age of three and a half, and I think residing inside this memory is the blueprint for my happiness. I might even assert that it’s the blueprint for any human’s happiness.

I am outside, by myself, standing under the night sky. (It was the early 1970s… kids were free range… perhaps to the extreme but it was what it was.) The full moon is sitting high over a field across the street. It sits nestled in a blanket of stars. And I am just, well, star struck. I am in awe. I can feel this feeling in my body to this day.

I am still that little girl every single time I see the moon. Maybe you feel the same. It’s like the moon is new to us every night. (Side note: If you do feel the same, you might be shocked to find out that not everyone feels like this. There are people who barely notice the moon. I know! It’s really quite terrible.)

Fast forward and I am 11 years old and I’ve saved up all of my birthday money and allowances to buy my very own telescope. Seeing the moon’s surface, I am speechless.

Fast forward again and I am in my 30s and I own the house outside of which I sit on a stoop in snow pants in the middle of winter so I can gaze up at the moon and Orion (my fave).

Now I live in a city with too much light pollution and I am sad. These things are not unrelated.

We are going to be changing our circumstances soon, but it has taken me about six years of living here to understand all of the ways I have cut myself off from my toddler self and her connection to the moon and the natural world and what that cutting off has meant for my mental health.

My mental health (and probably yours) is complicated, of course, by our current political situation, but really… I know I would be handling even that much better if this toddler self were being taken care of.

She lives off of awe and fascination and curiosity and intense noticing.

And that… that right there is the blueprint.

The disease of apathy

I’ve written about the part that despair was playing in my depression, and I am relieved that I am no longer that stuck, but I am still somewhat stuck. Like before I was in quicksand (and hello!? Where is all the quicksand Gen X was warned about!?), and now I am in some regular old mud… maybe to just below the knees.

That mud is my apathy.

I am doing things but I’m not feeling great about those things.

I am doing things but I’m doing the bare minimum.

I am doing things but I’m no longer dreaming.

And that right there is awful. My dreaming muscles used to be so strong, and they were strong enough that they led to actions and to the building of those dreams.

I used to believe in the beauty of life and in my capacity to create beautiful things.

But the last decade has been so hard. There is the political reality we’ve all been living within, but on a micro/personal level, I’ve gone into full menopause (anyone else?); I’ve lost my soul cat at the age of 9 (far too young and it was sudden and traumatic); I went through two years of living with, treating, and healing two frozen shoulders (yep, one after the other) so my overall movement got smaller and smaller, and there was more, but you get the idea.

The depression cycle was bad.

There are remnants and bad habits left behind.

The biggest remnant and bad habit is the apathy.

How I noticed it

I hadn’t really… noticed it, that is. It had/has become such a regular feeling and state in my life.

I have started to wonder, is this it? Is this how life gets as we age?

I recoil from those questions. I refuse those questions even as I find myself constructing them.

None of my old tricks were helping. None of the old routines were kicking in. Nothing I was doing was working, until I started to pay attention to someone whom I’ve known of since I was writing my Blisschick blog about 20 years ago ((what!??!)): Andrea Schroeder of Creative Dream Incubator.

As a teacher, I often find myself lacking mentors because I’m so focused on self directed learning and the creation of my classes and methods for my students.

But as they say, when the student is ready, the teacher will appear.

I finally signed up for one of her smaller courses, Project Miracle. I ran through the material faster than the 30 days it’s intended for but I couldn’t help it. I could feel the energy building and I was… what is that feeling???… excited!

The miracle I was working on was simply wanting more positive energy in all its forms — physical, emotional, and spiritual. That’s how deep my apathy had become — that positive energy would feel like a miracle.

How the energy showed up

It’s always in some unexpected way, right? We ask for one thing but get something that seems to be not it and then it turns out to be exactly what we needed.

For quite a while now, I’ve been trying to get movement in first thing in the morning. I got to the point where I gave up because nothing I tried was sticking. I just couldn’t. It started to feel like I was bullying myself. The resistance was that bad. Staying in bed later than I wanted to, cuddling with Begonia cat, happened every day no matter the systems I set up.

Then a little over a week ago, Andrea asked this question in one of the Project Miracle units: what are you willing to change to get what you want?

I kept reading/hearing it as: what are you willing to give up?

Finally, from deep inside me, I got a very clear and loud answer: APATHY.

I called myself out.

I don’t know what was different about this time… not exactly. I know that I had done a lot of introspective work with Project Miracle but the miracle of it all was the way it just suddenly! Poof! Change!

I got up easily the first Monday after that and walked almost four miles right off the bat.

Crazily, I immediately could feel how cemented in the change was.

The results of this “small” thing keep accumulating: my brain is clearer; I’m giggling more; I want to move more (which is more normal for me); life feels… good.

More anti-apathy work to be done

But I also know this is just the beginning and I’m working another course with Andrea to keep my mind focused in the right direction.

And I’m looking for other anti-apathy tools. So let’s start a list, shall we? I would love for you to add to it, but here’s the beginning:

• Notice a time in your life when you were young and you were so full of yourself, meaning you were who you were born to be. Notice what she loved. Notice what sparked her joy. Is there a blueprint in all of that for you?

• Start doing the things little you loved to do, no matter how ridiculous you may feel. Like me getting roller skates a few years back. I sucked but I did it anyway. (Then the frozen shoulders happened.)

• Add in little things like checking the moon every night. Put reminders on your phone if you need them. It can be hard to remember on our own when we’ve not been doing these things.

• Make lists of things you love. Do this every day. For example, I’ve restarted the practice of a joy/sanity list on my socials every morning. I used to do bliss lists long ago and people would comment how much they meant to them. This has started to happen again. (Ripples!)

• Go outside more.

• Go look at art wherever and whenever you can.

• Listen to more music. Listen to favorites from times in your life when you felt good but also find new things. (Each of those approaches does amazing and different things for your brain.)

• Ride a bike. Really. Find a hill and go down as fast as you can. (Or find another equivalent of this type of activity.)

• Sit by water as much as you can. (There’s too much research on the efficacy of this to ignore it.)

• Look around at the people in your life and do not be afraid to notice who is bringing nothing but negativity to your spaces. Clean house. (I don’t mean to sound cruel there but life is short and we know it’s important who we allow in to our inner circles.)

• Be cautious of what you’re watching and reading. Feed your brain and heart with things that grow the states of being you want to experience. I’ve written about Japanese healing fiction and now I’m into my third novel of that nature and I am more in love than I thought I would be.

• Pick something small to focus on learning. I was just reminded the other day of a summer that I spent in my backyard in Erie learning all the different sparrows. There are so many and there are often very small differences. But this seemingly tedious differentiation task made me feel connected at a new level.

For now, that’s enough from me. Like I said, I’d love to hear from you. And I’m sure I’ll be writing more about this soon.

How YTT is awakening parts of me that I thought were just gone

Have I written about doing a Yoga Teacher Training here? I got an opportunity to do a sort of trade because the training is at the studio where I now teach Peony Somatic Dance and the owner very much believes in staff development.

And I knew when the opportunity came that it was the right thing for me, not even necessarily as a teacher but as a human. I needed something to help with the rut I was in.

I have, over my life, gone through many cycles of depression and a good number of those come along with a friend named atheism and a side buddy called cynicism. Not even just skepticism, which is okay in my book and healthy, but the toxic cousin cynicism which shuts down our capacities for awe and curiosity and wonder.

This last cycle, someone wise pointed out, really started with the death of Peony. At that point, something in me just froze.

And then the atheism just stuck around. I’ve never had it last over a year. This time, it was probably about 3 years.

So I started to think, Okay, this is it. This is me now and forward.

I dove into it like I do anything. I studied and read and thought and wrote.

Atheist eventually became an identity that I was even somewhat comfortable with.

Then I started this YTT. Months before, I had started with a really excellent therapist, and I was also finally back to journaling thanks to this app.

I’m not sure exactly when it happened, but I left a weekend of YTT (and I’m just over halfway through now) and I knew I had to start chanting again. Specifically to Ganesh. This chant.

Within days of starting that, I don’t know… a big old iceberg in the center of my being started to melt.

And out popped belief. ((ha))

It was that sudden. But not sudden at all, right? Since I had been carrying that iceberg around for almost 3 years.

And it’s melting faster by the day. Every few days, I get this butterfly feeling in the pit of me and I can tell there’s been another layer released, and with that, more emerging of the parts of me that I thought were just gone..

I thought that Ganesh and some tantric philosophy would be it. I assumed that would be enough.

But we are born into certain cultures and those cultures run in our very blood.

I found myself ordering some Thomas Merton. Then another. I just did it… didn’t stop to question it… followed the impulse that was definitely coming from a body level.

So I’m reading Merton outside in our wee backyard every morning with the birds.

I’m as stunned as maybe you are (or aren’t).

(I’m thinking a lot of us are in need of that Camus quote on my photo right there…)

Re/Joy: Slow Summer Update

As I wrote yesterday, I’ll be creating daily categories for the blog, and Tuesdays are about a process that I, quite a while ago, named the Re/Joy Project. There will be a lot more about this in the near future, including a podcast, but for now a brief explanation:

The concept of the Re/Joy Project is simply that we can create a process (one I’ll share over time) to reintroduce deep joy into our lives regardless of what’s happening. We’re big enough internally to do this sort of process even in the midst of grief.

The process is based in noticing and naming.

For this summer, I’m re/joy-ing by exploring the idea of Slow Summer.

I’ve always had a difficult time transitioning from the quiet of winter into the louder and more frenetic energies of late spring and summer. Suddenly everything is just SO MUCH! And most humans seem to think that we must fit in ALL THE THINGS in this bit of time when our bodies really want to be slow and languid. I mean, there’s freaking HEAT… stop moving around so much ((ha)).

Besides the sticky expenditure of energy, I feel like we miss a lot running from one activity to the next, running to “vacation,” running to another picnic or party. People seem so damned stressed in the summer and it seems like it should really be the opposite of that.

Thus, Slow Summer 2023.

For starters, I’ve made sure to make more time to sit in the backyard under the trees and with our new baby gardens and read. I also just sit and breathe and listen to the birds.

And though it might sound intrusive, there is a very large construction site about a block behind us… I can see it through a space between the houses behind us… anyway, the smell of cut wood drifts to me and that brings to mind my paternal papa who was a finish carpenter.

It’s all utterly delightful.

What ways could you create slow in your summer?

December Focus: Slow Joy

Slow and joy are both favorite things around JoyBody Studio, as you all know. But as we have entered the holiday season, I notice the same old frenetic energy mindlessly taking over. And even when we try to resist, it can feel like we’re caught up in a tsunami of to do lists and shopping and cooking and baking and well… people-ing.

And we’re supposed to feel all fa-la-la-la-la about it but that just feels like yet another added pressure.

On top of that, if you’re into Christmas and advent, it’s supposed to be a deeply spiritual season of entering into your own fecundity and seeing what is there, waiting to be born into the world when the light returns. So hurry up so you can get to your meditation/prayers/mass/whatevers.

AND one more … on top of THAT, so many people are pushing year end workshops or certifications or specials on their products/classes, etc., and the idea that if we really hustle, we can make some freaking magic in our work or our small businesses before we get to breathe for a few days around the year change. At which point, you BETTER have some damn good ideas about your goals for NEXT year because it’s COMING IN HOT!

My god. That exhausted me just writing it.

So here’s another idea: SLOW JOY.

Stop the madness. Put down the pen and paper (unless you’re journaling or writing poetry but if you’re making yet another freaking list… put it down and walk away!).

Part of this practice will be the act of saying no.

Take a moment and look around and decide what actually really truly matters.

Get rid of the rest.

Then for the rest of the month, it’s SLOW JOY time.

Every day, moment to moment, just notice the little things. Just notice. You don’t have to write them down or make art from them or wax poetic … unless you want to and it feels like it’s part of the slow joy.

I want you to notice, too, the easeful things, or more like… what would the easeful thing be? And then do that.

Notice the soft and kind things. Take them in and also create them.

And notice the giggling things. We don’t do this even a fraction enough. Seek out laughter. But also? LET YOURSELF LAUGH. I see too many people stopping their laughter.

And spoiler: I think we should continue this, like, for the rest of time.

The Scent of the Past

Me with Nana and Pap in Florida

When we’re little, adults often tell us how much we will miss certain people or times when they are gone, and of course, we can’t possibly understand what they mean even when we are a tad bit more introspective than the average child.

We just can’t.

Until we do.

And then it’s heartbreaking.

There are moments in the last few years in particular (is it something about turning 50?) that it hits me (really HITS me) that I will never see or be around my nana, for example, ever again. That that was it. I can’t sit with these feelings for very long. They could easily become overwhelming in a negative way.

For me, a lot of these realizations come with a deep desire to smell something again. Weird, right? But then so much of our memory is tied to smell.

My Great Aunt Ardelle’s house smelled a very specific way. When I used to have a bricks and mortar studio in Erie, it was mere feet from where her house once stood, and once in a while, that scent would be on the wind. It would take my breath away — the flood of memory and the longing.

My papa smelled of fresh cut wood and coffee made in a percolator. My nana smelled of bread, sticky buns, fresh squeezed orange juice, and too many others to list. Together they smelled of Florida to me (even though they lived in Erie for a very long time) and sometimes the weather even in Ohio will make me say to Craig, “It smells like Florida after a brief rain…” and he says, Huh, not really understanding.

My grandmother on the other side smelled of church basements and gladiolas and a scent I can’t name that floated around anything she sewed.

Back to my Great Aunt, she smelled of the old school Oil of Olay which you can’t get anymore… I’ve tried. They’ve changed it too much. And she smelled of Mr. Bubble bubble bath which my sister and I would take in her giant clawfoot tub.

My Great Aunt and Nana both smelled of Christmas… well, the way I want Christmas to smell anyway and a way that it will never again. (And just writing that made me cry.)

There are other scents tied to grade school, especially the little round school I went to in State College for 2nd grade. There’s the smell of waxy crayons and sand from when we’d make those bizarre bits of art with colored sand in baby food jars. (Do you remember those?)

There’s the smell of fresh fallen leaves that every October takes me back to early grade school and certain long ago friends.

There’s the smell of plastic barbie dolls and Christmas gift baby dolls that came every year.

There’s the smell of the cheap paperbacks from Scholastic books and the newsprint that was the order form.

But mostly, to my point, it’s the smells around those people who were our whole worlds when we were little, so many of whom we’ve already said goodbye to.

When we’re little, we just can’t know. I think we’re built that way on purpose. The knowledge of so much coming heartache could easily steal joy from the little people we were … as yet unequipped to process that kind of loss and still so full of trust that it all will just go on and on…

Joy Gem in the City & The Function of Memory in a Happy Life

I’ve written about this idea that I use in movement classes called “joy gems,” in which I ask you to remember in great sensory detail a happy moment from any time in your life. This stuff is important for healing trauma on a neurological/biological level. You can read more details about how this works here.

This is a share of a joy gem of my own with some thoughts on memory…

Moving into this house in this part of this city has felt like a string of miracles or coincidences or whatever you want to call it.

So much had to go right, had to be just right.

Now if you weren’t around during this or if you just didn’t hear me talking about it, when we walked into this house, I knew it was for us. Immediately.

But later it struck me that I knew that because it had the energy of one of my favorite houses of my whole life — the house of my GreatAunt Ardelle in Erie.

She was a special human. (Some day, she deserves a book (or two) written about how special and all the things she taught me, whether knowingly or unknowingly.)

One of my favorite things when I was very little was getting to spend the night at Ardelle’s. I would sleep on her davenport right off of her bedroom. The front of the house was visible as the whole thing was quite open and the front big window opened onto what was one of the busier roads in Erie.

I would lie there, not sleeping, watching the lights drift across the ceiling as cars drove by.

When I was little, there was something so very thrilling and also so very soothing about this.

The other night, here, in Columbus, 52 year old me could not sleep, so I made my way to our front room and laid on the couch, facing the big window that looks out toward the street.

Suddenly, the car lights were washing across the ceiling…

I had not noticed this before. I hadn’t thought about it as a possibility.

And there it was… like a beacon from little, 4 year old me…

As I was getting ready to write about this, I decided to look for a quote about memory and one of the first to pop up was this, by one of my favorite authors:

“I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never
realises an emotion at the time.
It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about
the present, only about the past.”
― Virginia Woolf

There is so much truth in what she says.

If you doubt, just think back to a day that was uber special — a wedding, a birth, anything of great significance — and think about how difficult it can feel to be truly present to it. How it’s so very overwhelmingly wonderful that it can almost feel like you are missing it as it is happening.

But later, LATER, looking back… there it is.

It’s this looking back at these sorts of moments that can heal us. And I think it’s a large piece of the puzzle of healing that can be missing, as we take so much time to “unearth” and “understand” and “process” the difficult things that have happened to us, which is important, but not more important than this… the work of constructing a memory edifice of light and love.

#BeautyGazing: A Catalog

Every now and then I’ll share a post of a collection of things I’ve been sharing across a bunch of platforms for #BeautyGazing. These are meant to act as Micro Meditations through the senses. Take a moment and breathe and just be. I’ve described this idea over here.

Ballerina Anna Pavlova by Ira L. Hill Studio, 1914

First, if you’ve not done so, check out my TikTok. I know, it might seem redonk to some of you… TIKTOK!? But I find a lot of joy and peace over there and I’m curating my own page to be nothing but these micro meditations.

If you love tarot and fashion, oh, my, are you in luck! This mini film by Dior is breathtakingly beautiful.

This one is under two minutes: Colorized film of 1920's Paris. We can’t travel and this felt like a moment of bliss.

Did you see that a teen intern at NASA discovered a new planet!?!? And it looks like freaking CANDY!

If you’ve never seen skies filled like RIVERS with monarch butterflies… I could watch this over and over and over. It’s only a couple of minutes.

This shaman video on Facebook about our interconnectedness with nature… it says everything.

And some of my recent photos from my beauty seeking in this new and interesting home city…

#BeautyGazing and the surprise of tiktok as a spiritual practice

Yep. I said that. Tiktok as part of my spiritual practice? Have I lost my mind? Nope. Hear me out…

My niece kept telling me that I needed to be on tiktok and I was like, whatev. When I see what’s going on there with dance, it’s fun but it’s not something I felt the need to contribute to. So I started by just observing. For over a month now. I’ve just been watching and getting some much needed humor and inspiration and peace from it. Imagine that! From a social platform! We’ve all grown so accustomed to being agitated and made angry when we’re online.

Once I realized it was making me… dare I say, happy!?… I started paying even more attention.

Then quite suddenly I realized HOW I wanted to use it.

TikTok + #beautygazing = my little way of bringing some goodness to the world via another channel.

I was excited to get started. But something unexpected has happened:

This has totally refueled me. I needed this.

It gives me some focus. It pushes me to create in a new way. It makes me see the world differently. Now I’m just so excited to find the beauty and joy and to somehow create an artifact from it.

If you’re not over there, you don’t need an account to just look around. I’m sharing the micro video I made for Imbolc.

And here’s my profile.

@joybodystudio

My mixed path #beautygazing #joybody #tarot #starmantarot #bowie #imbolc #tantricyoga #devotion #oracle

♬ Sparkles - Raccoon With a Groovebox