How some Jesuits are helping me deal with the mean and the stupid

Though I still do not believe in any sort of active deity beyond the fact that the universe itself is a creative/destructive engine, oddly, it’s Jesuits who are bringing me the most comfort — or more accurately, keeping me sane in light of the stupidity and meanness that now predominate our government.

Jesuits have long been known as the academics of the Catholic Church, from theology, of course, but also into the hard sciences.

And in light of the ignorance of much of our population right now, a marriage of (true) Christian philosophy and actual science seems like the medicine we need.

Jesuits were some of the earliest astronomers, for one example. I won’t venture any further into this because my knowledge is limited but here’s an article about why Jesuit spirituality gives rise to scientists. (And actually I could come up with more reasons off the top of my head as I sit here but that’s not the point of what I’m writing and well, let’s limit the SQUIRRELS!!, shall we?)

Today I’m thinking about a famous Jesuit geologist you might know, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. How much more “hard science” can you get than rocks and all the actual stuff of this planet? It would seem this would take you far from the higher level air of Catholic mysticism but that’s exactly where rocks took Teilhard.

This morning, as part of my morning, routine, I started to again read this book written by a Franciscan (another of my favorite groups of thinkers who are also profoundly connected to the material world, to the joy and suffering of the human body). And I came upon this about Teilhard:

“(He) described the human species in evolution toward the fullness of unity in love... In his view, neither escapism nor existential despair can further the evolutionary process. Rather, the way forward is a new spirituality by which humans around the globe can unite to become one mind and one heart in love...”

— Compassion, Ilia Delio, OSF

Doesn’t that just pretty much sum it up?

To evolve, humans must evolve toward love. Away from the idea of us and them. Away from the idea of rich and poor. Away from have and have not, which implies a deserve and deserve not, which the philosophy of Christ finds repugnant.

To evolve, we must love more. And love is not just tolerance. Tolerance is just another word for “love the sinner and hate the sin.” Love is bigger than that.

When Christ said to love your enemy, he was not just saying to tolerate people different than you. He was literally saying to love them. But I also believe he was saying something more esoteric — that we should love the enemy within, which is jealousy and hate and judgment. Face and love those parts of ourselves so directly that we no longer have any left to point toward others.

That's love (r)evolution right there.

if you need more from Jesuits, I highly recommend following Fr. James Martin on Facebook. Here. He just posted a loving message to the trans community and their families.

And here’s a great post/short video quoting what many popes have said about immigrants and how very wrong the GOP has this (as they have most things morally wrong).

So yeah… this is a sampling of some things that are bringing me peace of mind. When we’re surrounded by such vitriol and such vile deformation of these teachings it can be easy to just let it all go… let them have it. But no, I won’t.

There are a lot of reasons that I think the core of these teachings are valuable and unique in the world of spirituality and religion and this isn’t the space to go into that. But for a while, I was more than happy to say GOOD BYE to the entire body if that meant I severed my connection to the gangrene limb of what I call evangelical catholicism.

But here I am, in these dark days, returning to some of my roots. To use yet another metaphor: just because part of the bush is dead doesn’t mean it’s all dead and it certainly doesn’t mean the roots are.

Dancing through fascism

I liked that quicker, shorter title, but it could also read, Dancing, writing, painting, sculpting, making music, and generally just art-ing through fascism.

Back in 1991, I was living in Chicago, attending grad school at DuPaul. My area of expertise was shaping up to be American literature that arose out of the Holocaust. And it just so happened that the Art Institute of Chicago, late that summer, was putting on a giant exhibition called Degenerate Art.

With a quick search, you can read more deeply about all of this, but I’ll give you a quick overview.

Nazis, of whatever time, are not fans of any art but classical art that supports their idea of culture. So you know, nothing imaginative and certainly nothing that promotes anything but hetero normative ideals. Oh… and white supremacy ideals, of course.

Modern art, in particular, which was on the rise at the same time as naziism, was extra targeted.

Eventually, the man himself (a frustrated artist and small man… like so many fascists) gathered all the modern art they could get their hands on and put together a show of over 600 works.

In order to, well, make people feel angry about the art, they did a couple of things. First, they crowded the walls with it, creating a sort of sight chaos.

Second, they let in too many people at once, herding them through tight lines. And third, they cranked up the heat.

When the Art Institute decided to put on this show, they found as many pieces as they could from the original. They didn’t overcrowd the people or turn up the heat, of course, but they did display them more like the original show so we could get an idea of what it was really like.

And to this day, there’s rarely a month that goes by that I don’t think of that exhibit. And now especially, there’s rarely a week.

It can feel like the arts need to take a backseat during times like we’re living through.

But if you look at history, it begs to differ.

If art weren’t fundamentally important to the human soul, would H1tler and his crew have gone to all of this trouble to degrade it?

No. Of course not.

All of the arts have the potential to expand our minds and hearts and to, most importantly, expand our empathy toward those not experiencing life like our own. Art teaches us about our humanity. Art teaches us about the beauty of diversity. Art teaches us that complexity is a gift.

And therein lies the danger.

As one of the sickest humans ever to be quoted just recently said (and I won’t name him), don’t get caught by “the sin of empathy.”

I am familiar with the mind gymnastics that people will go through to make that make sense for themselves, but they are wrong, period. It is an immoral sentiment. They are taking all that is good about Christianity and deforming it in the name of their own fears and their own small hearts and minds.

Art challenges us and it calls out parts of us that need to be worked on. It forces us to face our shadows so that we might fully delight in our joys.

So yes, we must dance through fascism.

And dancing, in particular, is extra important in that it keeps us grounded in these bodies and in this world right here and right now, rather than committing the grave error of thinking that we should be focusing on something that (might/maybe) come after we die.

That’s what it comes down to: fascism is death and art is life.

The purpose of anger

I’m still feeling rather mute after yesterday. I didn’t watch the news, but I did stay a bit in touch with what was happening via some trusted (and non-dramatic) sources.

We knew this was coming, and as I’ve written about before somewhere (where???), I realized a couple of weeks ago that I’ve been living in a state of high alert and trauma response since the election itself. And since the holidays ended (a sort of marker in my mind that I was waiting for), I’ve basically been counting down the days until yesterday.

It’s as if I were standing and watching a very large monster coming toward me for many hours and I was under the illusion that because I could see him, that once he got to me, it wouldn’t be quite so bad.

Um… nope. The monster is terrifying.

Yesterday I got to the point of freeze. Utter despair. My heart felt like it was breaking. I told Craig that “I don’t know how to live in this world…”

I got up this morning, knowing I had to start teaching online again. “Had to…” More like “got to.”

I wasn’t sure how I could show up. But as always, the strength of our community held me and allowed me to be human as I did the same for them.

So as the day goes on, I am feeling little cracks appear in that despair.

Then someone in the Circle of Trees shared a video and the creator said something that really stood out for me (and I am paraphrasing):

ANGER IS MEANT TO GET US THROUGH FEAR. (Read that a few times.)

It’s meant to carry us across a seemingly uncrossable river of anxiety and fear and terror and the feeling that we can’t possibly.

But we can.

Feeling that anger, the energy of it, eventually carries us over all of that.

When we get to the other side, we might still feel a bit of fear and lingering rage, but we are on the shores of possibility, imagination, and action.

It is not our singular job to save the world. We can’t.

But with little tiny actions of our own unique sort (we all have a different purpose in this), it’s as if we are filling a well of goodness. A well others can drink from.

And the only way we can consistently and over the long haul continue to take any actions is by taking care of ourselves, by remembering that we’re not only allowed to but must feel and experience and build joy in our lives. We are not just here for the bad stuff. We’re here to be in awe, to be curious, to be playful, to be in healthy relationship, to hold others’ hands, to have our hands held, to be love and compassion for those in pain and for ourselves.

Sitting and watching that monster come toward me… that is not what I’m here for. And it’s not what you’re here for.

I don’t have answers but I’m coming up for air.

Growing our community muscles has to be a priority

From a recent local class.

Let me start by saying that a lot of us have grown, over our lives, complacent about community building. We tend to participate in communities that are convenient and easy.

This has been especially true since the pandemic, from which we learned to isolate more and more. Of course, this was necessary in terms of 3D human encounters to protect us all, but many of us gave up altogether even in the face of tools that could have kept our community muscles a bit more healthy.

So we enter into next week, into a new and potentially damaging paradigm, leaning again into isolation.

This won’t do.

Not if we want the coming years to be at all safe for women and marginalized humans. We can’t just sink into our aloneness and stay at home watching television and judge the world as it burns from our comfortable front windows.

We must commune with likeminded humans. We must build trust and companionship because that’s the foundation of the work that will call to us.

We must build this trust and companionship via shared story (and truth) telling.

We must embody this trust and companionship.

I’m convinced that this cannot only all be done in 3D but also if we are far away from one another via the very tools that many want to use to hurt us.

Tools are only as good as their users… whether this be the maps of religions or tech tools or hammers or communication.

And we must not desert these very powerful tools to those who would use them for evil. (Yes, evil.)

I will be staying, for example, on Facebook because it has a free private group function that no one else offers. I can use that to grow community.

But beyond that, I am staying because I will not let these spaces be taken over by hateful voices. I will be a compassionate voice. I will fight for the space that has given me so much.

And I will, of course, continue to teach online via zoom. The community that has grown in those classes since the start of the pandemic is as beautiful and deep and solid as any community in 3D that I am a part of. To say otherwise is to demean our basic, DNA level need and capacity to connect to one another regardless of circumstances.

So I come to you with two things.

If you’re not in the Circle of Trees on Facebook, ask me to add you.

Here’s a quick take on what goes on in there: It's a space where people feel really safe to share challenges -- and joys. We talk a lot about neurodivergence/neurospicy brains, and mental health, and of course. somatic/healing movement. The support in this space and the kindness and compassion are indescribable.

And as always, I have classes starting. They start next week, the week of the inauguration.

I, like most of you I assume, am grieving that inauguration, but I know, too, that I can’t stay stuck in grief, and being in somatic dance spaces with other humans is how I take care of my emotional and mental health so that I can be strong for myself and everyone around me.

You can register for Peony Somatic Dance classes right now.

Don’t hide. Don’t disappear. We need every single one of our voices out in this world. Now more than ever.

Bodies change...

These two photos are about 9 years apart. The black and white photo is the older photo and the newer photo was taken in the studio where I teach here in Columbus, OH.

I’m 46 in the first one and 55 in the second. Though this has nothing to do with age.

It has to do with time passing, yes, but it has to do with life experiences over that time passing.

During that first photo, I was in the best fitness of my life, and I was on fire with ideas and passion and energy. I hadn’t met Craig; the pandemic hadn’t happened; so much hadn’t happened. And I was in a “flying high” sort of phase of my life. I felt completely healed of any and all mental health challenges. (Yes, I was a bit naive.)

Come to the second photo and those nine years between the two feel more like a few decades. And I’m betting that most of you reading this don’t just understand that but feel much the same about this chunk of time.

My point here is that our physical bodies end up reflecting the life we’ve lived through and our internal landscape. (Stick with me.)

It’s basic cause and effect.

There were dozens of reasons, but over those nine years, I slowly stopped moving as much. I slowly stopped engaging with life in the same joyful way.

It was so very slow… like a titration of making me and my life smaller and smaller. Again, there were a lot of external reasons for this, but those reasons then fed into old internal crap, and eventually the existential depression monster took hold and would not let go.

Until maybe a year ago. And I think it was almost harder this time through than previous times because I felt such a profound sense of loss this time. Before my depression had developed in micro-bits over decades and it felt like that was simply the water I swam in.

When I got healthy, I didn’t realize what healthy could be like. It was so new to me. To have that suddenly snatched away again felt like a cruel joke.

And so with that existential depression, my already diminishing movement practices got pretty much gobbled up. I got to the point where the only time I was moving was when I was teaching. And it was easy when I was teaching to not move in new ways because I was paying attention to others.

You can see the spiral here.

And it’s really the same for most humans. Except that we don’t look to see the connections.

We blame our bad back on our age and not on the fact that we stopped moving very much decades before.

We blame our bad relationship on the other person and not on the fact that we also disengaged and stopped trying.

We hate seeing cause and effect because it leads to responsibility.

Eventually, our bodies will change, and that change will reflect so many little choices along so many years and so many unexpressed and unprocessed griefs and traumas and so many experiences that are uncountable.

The point is to notice and to understand that bodies change is not just a negative statement.

Bodies change. When I took that new photo of myself, it kinda startled me that to make that shape was kinda... difficult. It took a bunch of tries. It was frustrating. I expected to just replicate it the first try and with ease because it’s my damn body.

But bodies change. And I had not really noticed. Even though that’s my work in this world.

Bodies change. And it's often because we've changed how we are in these bodies.

Bodies can change again.

So I'll be adding a LOT more floor play into my movement work. It was a huge part of my practice back then but it hasn't been as much lately so I can't be surprised that my body has changed in this particular way.

When I started to dance again at the age of 40, my body and mind both changed COMPLETELY in nine months. I’m gonna do that again. Starting right now.

Watch me.

The Unique Movement of Different Bodies

So that you can see the work of the Peony Method on DIFFERENT BODIES, I'm starting a series with long time students, Jillian Hynes and Linda L Soto where we'll demo the fundamental parts of a Peony Method class, starting, of course with the always present seated circles. (For a breakdown of the basics of this movement, see this previous video.)

The first person who watched this new video had a lot of things to say:

1. She thought she would hate hearing the breath and she LOVED it. So volume up. She said she was so used to hearing MY breath that she didn't realize how different it could be and now she feels like "oh! I could do this!"

2. She was so used to seeing ME do the movements that she wasn't sure they were for her, but after watching how different they look in different bodies, again, she feels like "oh! I could do this!"

Which is the whole point of this type of demo... to underscore what I am constantly saying: THIS IS DIFFERENT FOR EVERY SINGLE BODY and DIFFERENT IS BEAUTIFUL.

I am demoing in a chair to remind people that that too is possible.

Go here to see what else is on my YouTube channel, and don’t forget to like, comment, and subscribe to help get this work to more people who need it.

JoyBody: The Efficacy of Tummy Circles

I’ve had this post in mind for months, but every time I go to write it, I get totally overwhelmed because I think that this topic is rather huge. Like, I could write a short book about tummy circles. They’re that important and that effective.

So today as you read this, imagine I’m just getting started, that this is the tip of the iceberg. Part of the iceberg that’s underwater is all the stories I could tell you about how students’ bodies (and minds and spirits) have changed over time doing tummy circles fairly consistently.

Fairly consistently means many times a week, but it doesn’t necessarily mean a LOT of time. I tell people that even just one minute in each direction will create changes. And that’s the truth.

(Side note: I’m having a bit of anxiety about this even now… I KNOW after I release this out into the world, that I’ll think of tons of things that I missed. AND if you, as a practitioner, think of anything I missed, please let me know!)

I’ll be looking at this from the perspective of three of your main bodies or sheaths: physical, emotional/mental, and spiritual/woo.

The Physical Stuff

To start, tummy circles do all kinds of magic to your physical body.

• Because we do the circles in sync with the breath, they make us immediately aware of how we’ve been breathing and what we need to do to improve our breathing.

• In a more abstract way but still powerfully physical, tummy circles immediately drop us into our bodies. There are days when they actually remind us that we freaking have bodies.

• They’re great for warming up as they create some heat in the torso and get the muscles ready.

• If you have tight hips, over time tummy circles will start to naturally relax and elongate all the muscles creating the tightness. This includes and also goes for your psoas muscles.

• If you’ve never met any of the muscles in your torso (i.e., your “abs”), tummy circles plus focused breath will eventually introduce you.

• They also rock when it comes to helping with healthy digesting. If you’re feeling like you’re in a phase of hyper-digestion (to put it nicely), then simply do them much slower with much more shallow breath.

• And of course, these are great for your spinal health and mobility. In Chinese medicine, they say your true age is equal to your spinal flexibility and strength.

The Emotional/Mental Stuff

How the heck do tummy circles affect our mind and feelings? Well…

• Doing this repetitive movement with the breath quickly clears the mind. Or helps us to notice how messy it actually is up there.

• They always put us in touch with what we’re feeling. This part is extra powerful when we are first starting to do them and when we’re going through something extra challenging and have to do a bit of compartmentalizing to get through our days.

• Tummy circles are a great and gentle emotional release valve.

• They bring us right into the now. This is a big part of their magicks.

The Spiritual/Woo Stuff

Tummy circles are simultaneously working on three energy centers/chakras. Well, more like four or… all of them. ((ha))

• First chakra: of course, tummy circles ground us. Connecting us to the energy of earth and self (and when done with others, kinda plugging us into the circle, if you will).

• Second charka: the motion of the tummy circles and the breath are like water, connecting us to our inherent creativity and stirring it up. (I often get ideas during tummy circles.)

• Third chakra: when done correctly, they stoke our inner fire… the fire of will and the fire into which we can throw whatever we no longer need. (You can even imagine throwing crap into that fire as you do these.)

• Fourth chakra: they start to generate energy upward into the heart center.

• Fiftth chakra: audible breath and the motion continue to pull the energy up and into our throats.

• Sixth charka: doing tummy circles with the eyes closed, then allows the energy to be pulled up into our third eye area, stimulating the pituitary and pineal glads because…

• Seventh chakra: finally the energy reaches our crown, driving upward and connecting us to all that is before finally dipping back down into the ground and starting all over again.

The energy of the tummy circles, then, creates a multitude of differently planed spirals. You can visualize yourself sitting in the center of all of that as it emanates out from you in every direction and then gets fed back into you.

Like I said, powerful stuff.

And they are no less powerful if you do them in a chair. Over time, I would encourage you to slowly work your way toward the floor but in the meantime, the chair version is just as good.

The idea, as always, is to do old things in new ways… finding little bits of change to experiment with and to observe.

If you’re not seeing the videos in your email, here is the first and the second.

JoyList: Interesting research and other schtuff

I have a bunch of tabs open with research so here we go…

FIRST I will start with a request: any time you come across any kind of research or anything interesting about the body and movement, can you please email me a link? THANK YOU!

They’ve created vibrating haptic suits for deaf people to experience music on a new level, but I also want to try these! How amazing.

You know how I feel about the word exercise, but this article is certainly worth a read. Replace “exercise” with movement or play, and I think it makes the findings even more DUH. And I sure love the name they’ve given myokines — “hope molecules.” Perfect.

This study shows even more clearly that muscle weakness as we age is associated with all cause mortality. And they observed 1200 individuals over an 8 to 10 year period.

Remember that to get really strong you don’t need weights. You just need to use your own body weight really well, considering alignment, mobility, and chageability of task. (Which is a lot of what floor work is about in Peony Method classes.)

And this study looked at 80,000 people (yep… 80,000) and it shows that strength training is more effective than cardio in terms of cancer prevention.

If you’re not yet clear on this, the new Barbie film is not just some fluff piece but rather a strong feminist film. So maybe, if you’re thinking NAH…, consider going. In the meantime, the music lists are super fun. Here’s one.

An 11 minute butoh video that is recent. I think if you just jump around in this randomly, you’ll come upon some idea to work with in your own body.

This article about the neuroscience of dance is filled with links to other studies. This is a field that is not new to me and my students, but it’s finally getting the serious research it deserves.