And the concept of devotion can come from the most unexpected places

It’s not that I don’t expect the idea of or a demonstration of devotion to pop up from just about any human, but it still can surprise me where and through whom these messages can come at me.

This week I started teaching again at the residential addiction facility in my neighborhood. I had stopped for a wee bit, because their census was down and there were some fears around the current federal government cutting them off because the program is a welfare based one.

But alas, their census is back up and they seem okay (for now), so I am back, teaching my wacky (as you know) blend of all things yoga, breath, primal movement, and somatic dance (basic principles sort of stuff).

And we chat a bit, because it’s important for community, for them to feel they can trust me, and for me to suss out what they really need (as opposed to just giving them prepackaged yoga like the teacher before me).

Some of these men have been kicked down by life over and over again and they keep getting up and they keep trying and for that reason I find them a source of true inspiration.

They own their mistakes; they face their demons; they are working so hard with the intention of becoming the best versions of themselves. And they take beautiful emotional care of each other. I get to witness that fact time after time.

There are a lot of people in this world that are “functional” addicts of one kind or another and they float through life never facing themselves like these men do.

But there was one new student in particular who really demonstrates what hard work looks like.

Besides the daily schedule of meetings and therapy and work that they all are put on, he gets up every day between 4:30 and 5 so that he can spend time in prayer and then spiritual reading. He then goes outside and does stretching and body weight work for an hour before entering into the house’s daily schedule. He also gets outside around lunch and dinner to do some more of the same.

He understands the inextricable link between how he treats his body and how his mind is going to function or not in the world. And he is living that understanding.

I see my previous self in him. The depth of understanding of the need for this work plus the fear of what would happen if we were to stop and so the doing.

But I did stop. And my fears were warranted.

I still am only really moving when I teach. Luckily I teach enough to maintain a baseline of okay-ness but it’s not even good much less great… like I used to feel.

And of course the external circumstances of our lives right now could drive even the most mentally healthy into depression and anxiety. If you’re paying attention at all to the horrors of what’s happening, no matter your own stability, there is so much energy that needs to be spent every day just to survive this.

So again, for those of us who already struggle with our mental health, things are definitely bad. Really bad. There’s much that is simply out of our hands.

But I think this new student of mine would say that even then… even when there’s a lot that’s out of your hands… there’s still so much that is. There’s still so much that we can control, that we can work with.

I’m not going to suddenly revert to my most healthy self after this wee interaction with this human, but it’s one more bit of… inspiration, one more bit of hope, one more breadcrumb to follow.

You have to move to feel

This is not a metaphor.

Think about it this way first:

Lay a hand on a cat and it's soft, but keep it lying there and you stop feeling the soft. Or at least, not with the same intensity as when you pet the cat.

Same with water... Get into the Lake (if you’re in Erie or near any lake) and walk through the water, feeling the softness of the water. Stand still. Less input, less sensation.

Go another step and realize that you only really feel wet relative to dry. Or relative to your wet swim suit as you try to peel it off.

(Before we go any further, as always, there are different levels of and ways of moving, but there is always movement of one kind or another, even just the breath and how it moves the chest and back. Or the movement of the eyes. Or the the tongue as it tastes.)

Stand still. Less input, less sensation.

We know that to be still in the body during and/or right after a traumatic event is to get stuck in that moment. (Here for more on that.) The feelings of that moment are then not moved through… or we do not move through them.

This is not a one time thing, of course, and that’s why somatic movement — movement married to intention and awareness and breath — is needed every day in one way or another, because every day brings us more to move through.

This is even obvious in our language. We say we are “stuck,” meaning we can’t seem to “get over” something or move forward in our lives.

Move. More input, more sensation.

Go back to the cat and the water. We experience the world through external sensation entering our nervous systems via our senses.

Same for our emotional lives.

For example, we think we are “intuiting” something about someone else or a situation, but it’s just our senses capturing information so quickly that we don’t notice.

This is also related to your “gut feelings.” That’s your vagus nerve relaying information to you that you might not have noticed consciously.

Move to feel to move.

We take in the world, our lives, the traumas, and then what? We can lock them up and let them gather dust and mold or we can move to feel them fully so that we might move more.

And here is the beauty of somatic dance: we can do all of this with joy in community. (You can check out the basic parts of a Peony Somatic Dance class here.) And over time, we can build our capacity to go through the cycles quicker. This is not so we can develop a method of bypassing. Not at all.

This is a spiritual practice of the most real variety: we honestly look at ourselves and our experiences and we digest them and use that digested material to build the life we really want — rather than the life that just happens to us.

An unexpected difficulty of aging

It’s hard to pull all of this apart and see what’s actually what in the context of the last 9 years we’ve had. Regardless, we are living through/in these times and we’re aging . And I know to age is to live, so please don’t come at me with the basics. It’s like telling an anxious person to “calm down” or a depressed person “to do something fun.”

It’s one thing to be looking in the mirror and noticing a drooping eye lid, a softening neck, lines here and there. But lately what’s really getting to me is a deep sense of failure and a lack of time to really do anything about it.

I’ve spent too much of my life (and I know many who can relate to this) fighting depression and anxiety and trauma. So much of my energy has been stolen by trying to survive those things. And if you think of money in terms of not just the dollars spent on therapy and interventions but money not made because of illness, well, it’s also cost me a small fortune and therefore a sense of stability as I age.

I’m feeling a lot of rage over that lately. But there’s more.

I’m feeling so much rage and grief over missed opportunities. Avenues not taken because I was just trying to live. Talents not fully explored. Potential not fully known.

Dance not danced. Books not written. And so much more. All because I had so many years during which I could barely function much less thrive.

I’m angry, indeed. I did not choose this brain nor early experiences that exacerbated the tendencies of this brain. And many things did not just happen but were done. (More anger.)

And now at the age of 56, I am still fighting this fight that should not be any of ours. I am not as stuck and struck down as I was during most of my 30s, but I am not in the healthy place I was in my middle to late 40s.

During that breathing space of years, all the work I had done was finally paying off.

Then we entered the years of hate and vile government and sickness and cruelty exposed in people around us and my brain, prone to deep grief and sadness from early on, did not have the tools some have. The old coping mechanisms — the unhealthy coping mechanisms of staying still and drowning in despair over things I cannot change — all reemerged with a vigor I never thought I would see or experience again in myself.

The devastation of that alone… the thought that I had healed or gotten to a place of high level management of my chronic illnesses and then to backslide as the world got (and continues to get) uglier and uglier.

I am enraged and I am sad and I am at a loss for words to explain this feeling of utterly being let down by the world and by myself.

I have no answers, so if you’re reading this thinking you recognize what I’m writing about and wondering what conclusions I’ve come to, I apologize. I have nothing. Not yet.

Though I will keep fucking trying… as annoying as I find that sometimes about myself… I will not give up, and I will not stay silent about this, sitting in some sort of shame that makes me feel I am alone when I know full well I am not alone and maybe, just maybe, in community, we can figure this shit out.

An invitation to a 40 day sadhana

You know I'm no longer a "practicing Catholic," nor am I really any kind of practicing anything at this point. But Lent has always spoken to me DEEPLY.

And through some conversations with a dear friend from Chicago, we came to agree that going into Lent consciously and with open hearts was something we both needed.

And I thought maybe others would need it to.

I see Lent as a period of entering the dark spaces in our own minds and hearts. Not to immediately get rid of that darkness but to be with it... to ask it questions... to learn from it... to simply sit with it and allow those spaces of fear and sadness and rage and grief to simply have safe space to BE.

So I will have my Fat Tuesday donut later today and then I will enter into this journey.

I am open to being surprised. I am open to the idea of feeling some sort of faith again.

I will be reading the two books (see photo) during my morning tarot and intention/contemplation time.

And I will do periodic check-ins in the Circle of Trees to see how everyone is. (If you’re not in the Trees, just go to that link and ask to be added.)

And perhaps you would like to share an intention for this 40 day sadhana via email or in the Trees.

Creating softness to do the challenging things

If you’ve been in class with me, you know we end with a “show me.” I observe as you allow your body to express what needs to be expressed. The whole class leads to this moment of deep honesty, and it can be revealing in unexpected ways. Truths can be felt and seen by both the movers and the observer.

Sometimes it’s just a bit of relief in beginning to access some larger truths that will take longer to allow. But sometimes these moments are full of big ideas and revelations that lead all of us to say AH-HA!

These moments can be profoundly impactful. They can be those sorts of “turn on a dime” life changing, mind changing eurekas.

This week during one of my online Peony classes, something of that big sort was revealed.

I was watching Linda Soto move. She started with soft, water like movement that felt soothing even just to observe. The energy was safe and felt healing.

This went on for a few minutes until suddenly she broke into childlike playful movement that was full of joy and strength.

AH-HA! Right?

It struck me how much we want to go right for that latter sort of movement — whether on the dance floor or in our lives — without first taking care of ourselves.

It struck me how childlike wonder, awe, curiosity, playfulness, and joy really need safety in order to emerge. That childlike part of you needs to know it’s okay to come out, that there will be no judgment, that there will be no harshness of any kind.

But often, even when we’re doing these somatic dance practices that are meant to bring us to our own original totality, we go at them so hard. We try so hard. We work so hard.

If we’re not trying and working hard, we might even feel like we’re “lazy” or “not deserving.” Old stories overcome our original loving intentions.

The reality is that we deserve to be safe. We deserve to feel safe. We deserve communities that are safe for this work.

The child in us who might not have gotten enough of that safety deserves it from us now.

So let’s practice — in all things — first creating softness and offering a soothing environment — and then like I always say, breathing and waiting and allowing.

What part of you life can you imagine playing with this idea in? Where will you take it first?

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.