Local/hybrid evening Peony Somatic Dance and local evening kundalini!

As I said previously, I’ll be adding more and more classes and workshops and opportunities to move in community over the coming weeks and months.

For October

Peony Somatic Dance will be offered locally (and you’ll get the address once you register; it’s near Liberty Plaza) but you can also take it online — live or via recording as usual.

This class will run on Thursdays from 5:45 to 6:45 PM starting on October 8th for four weeks.

More details (about arrival times whether on zoom or in person and everything else) and registration here.

And starting Monday, October 5th (4:30 to 5:30 PM) and Wednesday, October 7th (5:30 to 6:45 PM) you can now take Kundalini Yoga at Studio Surrender in downtown Erie!

The studio is BEAUTIFUL and large and just perfect. It will be my usual method of synthesizing other movement and yoga work into the Kundalini along with all the usual and wonderful breath work and great playlists of course.

A wee story about kundalini's relationship to my somatic dance and some new videos

I’m going to say something that is not said enough: all of this stuff is made up. All of it. Someone moved around a bit and “found” these movements. These are not handed down to us from some god or found in some ancient manuscript. (And why are older things equated with “better” anyway?) So when we find out some random man (always a man) was actually a total dork (to put it kindly) that doesn’t mean the movements aren’t still effective. (I’m speaking here to some annoying crap that came out about the people who brought kundalini to the west.)

So here we are: my love of kundalini goes way back and I think it was the door that led to me returning to dance. (And a side note for those who might know what this means: I have never been a student of “kundalini yoga as taught by Yogi Bhajan.” I am not someone who likes prescribed sets that are treated as if they are magical or medical. I like to play. And I was lucky enough to find some teachers who were the same.)

My yoga journey told super fast

I started studying yoga for the same reason a lot of people did in the late 1990s: I was stressed and anxious and depressed and thought it might help. I saw it as a physical practice as most did at that time. (Eventually I dove into the spiritual and philosophical aspects and those have been more influential to my current work than any of the physical stuff.)

My very first yoga VHS (yes, I said that… VHS TAPE) was with Erich Schiffman. The one with Ali McGraw that I believe set the aesthetic for yoga videos for a long time to come. You can actually see it here.

I was in my late 20s when I started and ended up studying a wide variety of lineages, starting with Iyengar and then Integral, Kripalu, and Vinyasa, until I somehow, in my early 30s, found Kundalini yoga.

And that changed everything.

I would finish up a practice and actually feel like my mind was not the enemy. I would feel… elated. It didn’t last more than a few hours but that taste was enough to keep me going back for more.

The breathwork is so important in this practice that I tell new students, you can always stop the movement if you envision it and continue the breath practice. (Again, this is foundational to Peony Somatic Dance and shows up in every single class to this day.)

Kundalini has a dancerly feel to it and it gave me a sense of the possible joy of my body after decades of living detached from my body. It was enough that I was open to dancing when the moment finally presented itself.

These moments that save us? They can easily be missed if the ground has not been prepared.

Kundalini is a gateway or so I hope

I love kundalini for itself, but I have also always held this hope that people would do kundalini and then want more… more freedom, more self expression, more movement unique to their unique bodies.

It doesn’t always work that way and that’s okay. It’s okay to just love your kundalini practice (even though, if you take classes with me, I’ll sneak in a bunch of other stuff).

And for that reason, I’ve finally decided to offer more of this practice I love to the wider world and not just the students in my classes.

I’m starting a section on my YouTube channel that will be focused on this.

To begin, I’m sharing shorts that demonstrate the most essential kundalini movements — the ones that I think you could do every day for just a few minutes and you’d get a lot out of them.

Keep in mind, that an “advanced” kundalini practice is more about length spent practicing than some contortionist or gymnastics level postures. Though there aren’t really “postures” in this practice because it’s almost always moving.

I’m sharing one video right here but you can go to my YouTube channel and get more (and maybe subscribe so you get an alert when I post new things).

In the coming months, I’ll share breath practices and a series for each chakra. I’ll also be adding videos of chair based versions.

Volume up to hear the breath. This movement has made my core and back so strong. Just a minute of this a day will create changes.

Some recent writing

A few recent articles you might be interested in:

Playing tennis with my husband: how other men assume he humiliates me & how they... love that

This seems like it's about tennis but it's not really about tennis. Of course.

Body trauma showing up decades later in unexpected ways

My left eye vision loss and playing tennis

Why and how to ritualize your movement practice

Using meaning and devotion instead of willpower and discipline

And this recent Movement Mantra:

I mean this no matter what. I've worked with people in their 80s, post stroke patients, young people who have been through things you can't possibly imagine, and on and on... And often they are the people who understand this sentiment the most.

"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?

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.)

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?

Call for ideas

I’m going to start using my YouTube channel to create weekly movement challenges, and each month will have a different main theme. For example, September will be all about balance. And of course, I’ll be bringing my unique blend of science and woo and dance to each topic.

What would you love to see in this series? What things are creating challenges for you lately?

If you have never responded to one of these blogs, maybe now is the time. ((smile)) Let me know what you need and want.

Another important lesson from the court

I’ve written about a huge insight I had about the importance of positive self talk while I was on the tennis court, but believe it or not, I think this thing I realized just the other day while playing is even more significant.

Craig and I were playing for only about ten minutes and I felt completely and utterly frustrated and defeated. To the point of almost crying. I told him I did not understand how I could play so well for days and days of practice and then suddenly look like I had barely ever picked up a racket (probably an exaggeration but not by as much as I would like).

He knew not to say a lot — or really anything. Platitudes can make me just melt down, and anything resembling even decent advice when I’m in that mindset, well, it just makes things worse. He knows I have to work it out myself.

I tried the positive self talk but it wasn’t helping as much this time. A little but it wasn’t turning my game around.

Then I remembered seeing something about watching only the ball.

You might think, Christine! Weren’t you watching the ball!?!?!?

And duh. Yes, of course I was, but “watch only the ball” is actually different.

I keep my eye on the ball. I’ve been taught that since I was little. Basic. But I realized I am also at the same time, watching the other player, watching my own self in my mind, watching the court. That’s a lot of watching. That’s too many focal points.

So I WATCHED ONLY THE BALL.

Suddenly it was like there was nothing else there to see. Everything else just kinda blurred.

From the moment the ball hit Craig’s racket, that was it.

Only. The. Ball.

INSTANTLY my game changed. It felt almost mystical. Zen like.

And it is, right?

This is the practice. Because after a couple of super focused ONLY the ball rallies, I could tell my focus would try — out of habit — to include all those other things. I would have to force myself to go back to ONLY the ball.

Each time I lost that, I started making mistakes. Each time I got back to that level of extreme focus, I was hitting wonderfully.

And of course, tennis — like dance — like anything that we dive deeply into and explore ourselves through — is a metaphor for the rest of our lives.

Watch ONLY the ball.

Where do you need that in your life?