Force versus joyful challenge

A little backstory

You know I started going to Orange Theory because I needed a serious kick in the ass when it came to my commitment/devotion to movement. I needed something outside my usual box. I needed an environment that helped me to do the thing, and Orange Theory covered all the bases.

If I signed up for a class and missed it, it cost me money, so I was always motivated to get out of bed and freaking go. When I got there, the music was fun and I didn’t need to think about anything because the coaches just tell you want to do. It was the perfect blend to keep me working harder than I had in a couple of years.

Let me emphasize this: I did need this to get me moving in the right direction.

And enter: Force

But one of my defaults is to push too hard. I have to watch for it, because it can happen so easily and so suddenly and I can justify it to the moon and back.

Eventually I was going to Orange Theory four times a week. On top of teaching a lot and doing other classes for my Yoga Teacher Training and playing tennis.

I was exhausted all of the time and “couldn’t figure out why.” ((hahahahaha))

I can be slow. ((even bigger laughter))

Eventually I figured it out. I cut my Orange Theory back to twice (and often once) a week. I almost quit altogether but I really do like the community there and have made some friends, and I figure in the winter, I’ll go more.

But that’s not the point of this post.

What’s wrong with force?

Isn’t force just big willpower? Lots of trying? It can be… I guess.

I think force comes into positive play when, for example, I’m deep in depression. If I can manage to force myself to do the things I do not want to do, well, it’s really a sign of hope, right? That kind of force shows that my willpower brain isn’t totally broken yet by the depression and that I am going to be able to drag my ass out of it (yet again).

But often force is just a sort of self inflicted violence.

When we work with force in our bodies, we’re definitely (most often) disconnected from our bodies. They’re a thing that we’re trying to change or contort. A lot of times, movement in this context is pure punishment.

This creates a toxic internal environment on the chemical level.

When we approach change from this kind of force, we’re stressing the nervous system, releasing cortisol, and keeping the body in a dysregulated state.

Change will not come in this state.

Your body is going to work against you, mistaking you for the enemy. Or not mistaking you… because when you’re treating yourself like this, you actually kinda are the enemy.

So what about joyful challenge?

The body knows the difference. Period. Your state of mind is different and so you’re more likely to create the joyful chemical stew in the brain that your body needs for healthy change.

If you approach your movement from a place of play and curiosity and experimentation, you are not working from punishment.

This is the state that regulates the nervous system. It’s from this state, that you’re clear on your motivations and they’re of the healthy variety.

When I’m working with force, my motivations are definitely aesthetic. That’s poison for me.

When I’m working from joy, my motivations are all about my mental health. That is my sweet spot. And most humans’, for that matter.

When we work from joy, compassion, and care, we’re not not challenging ourselves. It just is healthy challenge. It’s sustainable challenge.

The results

Since I’ve recalibrated my movement practices back to joyful and devoted, I already have noticed the kinds of changes I really need:

• I have more energy, of course. Because I’m not killing myself in the name of, again, aesthetics.

• I am getting stronger and more balanced by the day because I have more energy to work harder when I am working. I’m not just dragging myself through my practices and hoping for the end.

• I am happier. This is the big one. This is why I do the work I do — for myself and for others. It’s always been about mental health for me.

I’ve worked really hard to overcome disordered eating and body hatred from my youth but they can still pop up. It takes constant vigilance, and even then, it can be so easy to slip back into old habits.

We teach what we need. I learn that over and over and over.

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…)

A few announcements!

First, as always, there’s a new session of classes starting the week of March 11th. Go here for information about quickie yoga and Peony Somatic Dance classes that are online.

Second, if you know Helen Yee (perhaps you’ve been in a class with her), you might not know that she’s an amazing violinist and composer, AND she just released a solo album that I’m currently playing on repeat. I think my students will love it for movement practice.

Go here to support her work. You can purchase the CD (which comes with digital download) or you can just do digital.

(And hey, if you have anything you’re releasing out into the world, please send me a message so I can highlight you in my/our spaces.)

Speaking of spaces, the third announcement comes with a lot of mixed emotions, but my overriding emotion is excitement and so I know this is the right choice: I’m shutting down the JoyBody Sanctuary after 12 years of running free, private Facebook groups. I need a break and I need that time and energy to work on other projects and writing.

That said, you should be seeing me here more.

You can go here to read what I wrote about the closing of the group. I’ll be archiving the group at some point on Monday, March 4th so until then you can comment and leave responses.

And finally, a short video from a class with Linda Soto. It’s blurry but I found this so beautiful that it’s worth the blur.

Joy and Grief Live Side by Side in Memory

We had a beautiful wedding to attend this past Saturday in Erie, and I also made sure that our schedule allowed for a couple of hours at the beach, rather than the five minutes that that important part of myself usually gets allotted.

Craig went running with his brother, and so I had about 45 minutes of that time just for me, my iced latte, chocolate croissant, and a bit of journaling and reading.

I started to read a Virginia Woolf I’ve somehow not read (Between the Acts), and the morning was perfection. There’s something about me and Woolf and water. When I first moved to Chicago for grad school at the age of 23, I sat on the edge of that lake and read Mrs. Dalloway and that memory will forever beckon me.

That memory will forever beckon me… That sentence is filled with nostalgia and sentimentality and joy and grief, isn’t it?

When we left Erie, I, as usual, felt a mixture of sadness and anger. I love that lake and am linked to it forever. And yet that town, that small city, does not seem to be able to recover itself from its identity of “GE town,” and I fear that that inability to move on will be its death. Every time we go home, it seems a little more critical in terms of its health.

Remember I lived in the actual CITY — not out in some suburb — for well over 20 years. I lived in a realm of hope that turned into delusion that turned into bitterness, until I realized that I was becoming some sort of toxic version of myself and needed to move on… needed to MOVE, period. I could no longer tolerate the constant talk of “any day now” for which there was never any real evidence. (Entrenched politicians are greatly to blame for what’s happening in Erie but that’s another blog post and not my point here.)

I was born on the edge of the bay in the old Hamot Hospital.

We soon moved away and then moved back. My entire childhood would be a series of moving away and returning, over and over, as my father pursued higher and higher education.

Every time we moved away, we knew it was temporary. We would lament not being in Erie. We would look forward to the year or month or day that we got to move back.

In every school I went to in all the different places we lived, I would be that little girl, red in the face, defending her beloved home against the taunts of “dreary Erie, the mistake on the lake.”

The ache for a return to Erie was born and bred into me.

I myself have tried to move away a few times, and each time, like some migrating bird, I end up back there, unable to resist the pull… the very magnetism of that lake, my true north.

But this time is different.

We are in Columbus, and though I love it here and I love our house, this too might not be permanent. I don’t think I can live the rest of my life without big water, but I will not return to Erie.

We will find a place to put roots that has big water but that does not break my heart with its stilted ways and cliquey groups of humans that seem to be stuck in high school concepts of relationship. (I think that’s an inevitable sort of outcome in a very small city where people can’t let go of the ideas that they have of others from when they were teenagers.)

Where we are right now is growing, and that matters… An environment of growth and change that is future oriented allows for humans to grow and change and evolve into new and exciting versions of themselves.

But with all of the good of this place, it is not the place to which I am tethered. The sense of tugging can be very subtle most days and other days it’s quite painful. Visiting Erie brings all of this up for me every single time, and for many days after, the pain of the loss returns full force.

Home is where the heart is and yet sometimes home is where there is too much pain so we must do our best and find new, fertile ground (and water) that allows our hearts to heal and expand.

Re/Joy in this shitty time

Name one era when you think things were better, and I’ll be 100% correct that it wasn’t, no matter what time you name. History repeats itself, for sure. If one group isn’t marginalized, a whole host of others are.

When I was in college in the late 80’s/early 90s, things did feel like they were somehow shifting. Yet even that was an illusion: the economy was tanking, poverty was rising, homelessness was worse than ever (thanks, Reagan), incarcerations were on the rise and wouldn’t stop (and won’t stop), the war on drugs was targeting the wrong thing and the wrong people (for the most part), people were banning music (remember that?), the excess of the few was the leap off of the cliff that would start the real climate spiral, and I could go on.

Today things feel worse because they’re so much more on the surface and in our face pretty much 24/7. We had a toxic idiot of a President that made all hate acceptable in a very public way. (Some would argue we needed to see that … that too many of us were still living in denial… I kinda agree.)

So all times have, technically, been shitty times. For someone. For groups of someones.

And yet humanity keeps trying to move forward. Honorable or stupid? Some days I go back and forth depending on how exhausted and angry I’m feeling.

Most days… most days, I feel like we’re to be admired for a seemingly bottomless well of hope and effort and optimism.

Most days, I understand that those of us with access to hope and effort and optimism have to hold on to those things, if not for ourselves then for those who just can’t anymore.

To do this requires a certain kind of mental, emotional, and spiritual musculature. It’s easy, in this world, to allow that to atrophy, and then when we need it, to act surprised by its weakness.

In other words, we have to use some of our effort muscle to keep our hope, effort, and optimism muscles in shape. The world needs them.

How do we do this? What is the “gym” of this sort of workout?

It’s the very world that we can find so utterly reprehensible.

But we need to take that world in our hands and turn it every so slightly so we’re looking at it from a different angle: we need to look at it in better lighting so that we can see the beauty and love there. There are days that no matter how much we adjust the angle or the lighting that the beauty and love we find feels just about… microscopic. But that doesn’t matter.

It’s in this noticing and then in the naming that we work out. This is our gym. These are the weights we lift over and over for strength. The treadmills we walk and run for stamina. The stretches we use to maintain mobility.

And these sorts of workouts for emotional, mental, and spiritual musculature need to be as consistent as any we do for our bodies. You know full well that you can’t run a marathon if you’ve been sitting on the couch for the entire year leading up to it. You’re not surprised that you can’t deadlift some crazy amount if you’ve never picked up anything heavier than a soup can.

But we act surprised by our own exhaustion over the work of the world when we’ve done very little to maintain our healthy connection to that same world. We wonder at our anger and our rage that is paralyzing when we’ve done nothing to feed our joy that is mobilizing.

Start small, just like you would with any exercise program. Small steps, small amounts, build slowly but be mindful and intentional and persistent to the point of stubborn.

Start today: go outside with a small notebook and just make lists of everything you see that you love. Do this for… five minutes. Then do it tomorrow and the day after and the day after…

A good death

Cat Daddy and his Mr. Handsome

When I met Craig, I thought he might not stick around because of all of the cats! He even said at one point, “Oh… I don’t really like cats. I’m a dog person.”

Then he met Toby and Cat Daddy was born. He pretty quickly nicknamed him Mr. Handsome, and weirdly, the second Craig’s brother met Toby, not knowing anything about him, he said, “Well, hello, Mr. Handsome!”

Toby was that kind of cat. He was social and loved humans. He loved when I taught out of the house because he got to see “his ladies” many times a week, which meant many times a week, he was flattered and petted and loved more than usual. As he deserved. He was definitely the STAR.

But he also was the most nurturing cat I’ve ever met. He guided three of my previous elder cats to their deaths while he was a kitten. He would lay with them, warming them, and give them baths, which they no longer could do for themselves.

So when his own death came, it made perfect sense that he kept taking care of all of us.

He gave us time to get used to (not really but you know…) the idea that he was leaving. He eased into his final days with quiet and dignity and still cuddling.

And the night he transitioned out of his fur suit, he somehow let Cat Daddy know it was happening. Cat Daddy said, “let’s check on Toby” out of the blue. (Toby was right there with us but under a blanket. He had requested to be under that blanket about two hours before (very clearly to Craig) so I knew things were coming soon.)

Craig lifted the blanket, and I said, “Toby, I love you!” He lifted his head, tried to squint at me, and took his last breath.

It was night time so Craig positioned his little body with care, and we eventually went to bed. The next day, we laid Toby on the floor for a while so that the others could visit. We wanted to be sure they understood. (They did. They’ve all been really good.)

And then we finally took him to the funeral home to be cremated. We’re lucky to have a funeral home in this city that has an actual separate animal space. (It’s amazing.)

I wanted to write about this for a few reasons.

First, so many of you who have taken classes with me loved Toby too. Everyone who met him did.

Second, we were lucky enough to be able to do this for Toby… to give him this dignified end at home with everything and everyone he loved. If you are able, I highly recommend it. For a thousand reasons. And if you’ve never done this, please never hesitate to ask me questions because it can certainly feel scary. I’ve done it before so I was able to alert Craig to different phases we were entering so he wouldn’t be too very surprised.

But beyond that, I also want to say, if you couldn’t do this in the past or can’t do it now, please don’t judge yourself. We can only do what we are able.

Two Free Invites: Brains and Disco (It will make sense in a minute...)

Recently I’ve started two new habits/groups of sorts and I’ve started them small (and actually VERY small with the disco) so I could see how it would go and then open it up to more of you lovely humans.

First up, BRAINS! If you are a person with any kind of, what we call now, neurodivergence, we would love to have you in our private Facebook group, Beautiful Brains.

I realized I was constantly coming across information and videos and my own schtuff and I didn’t want it to overwhelm the JoyBody Sanctuary, so it definitely needed its own space. We have just under 40 members now, and the conversations are so helpful. It feels good to know we’re not alone in our different way of engaging with the world and the different ways our brains process.

This group would include anyone on any kind of spectrum, Autism, ADHD, OCD, C-PTSD, etc. And often, of course, with different brains, there’s lots of comorbidity.

Send me a note either here or on Facebook and tell me you want in and I’ll get you set up.

Second, DICSO! In order to get myself to move more on days I don’t teach, I knew I needed some body doubling help. I found a perfect companion and we got started and then we quite naturally added about 3 other people. Not everyone shows up each time but it’s enough to keep us going.

We only do this on Wednesdays and Fridays. We meet on zoom at 9 AM (Eastern) and we are each trying to stay on for about 30 minutes. We don’t talk. We just wave to each other and get started. (We all have video on because that’s part of the helpfulness but we’re all muted because we’re each doing our own music and our own movement.)

Again, let me know if you want to be included. This is a no pressure sort of group… both of them actually.

Stuckness and Grand Gestures

I was having a delightful as usual discussion with Deb Globus (you may know of her work with Storybeads), and we were discussing stuckness, and she said, “you need a grand gesture!”

What? Because that phrase instantly rang a bell for me. And over the coming days, it took me right back to the true start of my healing, when I started to dance again about 14 years ago. (And this is relevant to today but I’ll get there…)

Once I knew that dance was that important, I ordered my first pair of capezio ballet slippers in forever. They came and I didn’t like the feel, but I used them as a talisman (and still have them).

But I knew I needed to do something significant that would keep me on track, so I signed up for a training at Kripalu. I found something called YogaDance that seemed like a good fit.

This was about more than dance. I would have to TRAVEL. I would have to leave the cats and the almost agoraphobic love of my house and my very own spaces. It was a very, very, very big deal.

And to keep myself committed, I announced it on my then blog, BlissChick, which had a significant readership, full of humans who were more than willing to make sure my ass got in that seat on that bus and traveled to Massachusetts.

I followed through, as most of you know, and over the next few years actually went to Kripalu about ten times, gathering and synthesizing everything I could get my brain and hands and feet on until we’re in present day and all of that has become The Peony Method.

But back to now… and this feeling of stuck. I didn’t put it all together but within DAYS of talking to Deb, I signed up for that first private singing lesson.

And it took a couple more weeks to remember that discussion and see how it had worked its freaking magicks.

I’ve never doubted my ability to move/dance. I always feel confident and I don’t care who is in the room or space with me. I feel the same way about acting.

But singing is something so fragile to me…this is even bigger than that trip to Kripalu. Truly.

And it’s changing my life, because that’s what grand gestures do. I feel more focused. I feel more energetic.

I might still feel a wee bit stuck but I can feel the momentum coming back. I can feel my capacity for dreaming returning. I can feel words again. I am interested and curious in ways I was just… not. (That was the scariest thing to me… no curiosity.)

So I’m here to tell you that there’s nothing like this idea of grand gestures to get you out of even a very serious rut. When I started to dance again, I had been chronically depressed for a decade and at times it was life threatening. But something in me was still just ever so slightly open enough to allow for the tidal waves of changes that dance brought.

I’m certainly no less open to that idea now and I’m already feeling the rising, living waters that singing is bringing.

What grand gesture do YOU need?