Helpful Beauty or Shit You Can Check Out to Stop Feeling Insane

We need beauty more than ever right now and so I thought I’d share a list of links for you to peruse and you know… ignore for a few moments that the world feels like it’s falling apart.

Cherry blossoms have to be one of my favorite harbingers of later spring and no one, of course, does them like Japan (photo above). Just looking at photos of Japanese gardens and architecture tends to calm me. So much so that I have a Pinterest board dedicated to it.

And if gardens on the dramatic cliffs of the coast of France are your thing ((ha)), here is a great selection of photos that just made me swoon.

If you’re a rock and gem and crystal nerd like me, you should join this public Facebook group because holy cow!

Need a sound bath, even the LIGHTING of this guy’s videos is soothing. (And remember that you can get distance work done by Nancy Bowden. You can do skype, phone, whatever.)

If you need some new music to dance to or to keep you motivated, check out my Spotify and especially look at my “liked songs.” Play it on shuffle.

If you are interested in the Enneagram and want to laugh and learn simultaneously, check out Abby Howe’s channel. (I’m a 4 and wow… SO FUNNY!)

This doesn’t get old. It made me snort yet again when I got the clip for you. AND his voice is just so damn…soothing.

Oh, my! Everything from Frida Kahlo to Pompeii is covered in some amazing online free virtual tours of current exhibits that none of us can get to. This collection is such a gift of options!

Furthermore, some of the biggest and best museums from all over the planet are offering virtual tours of their collections. I could get lost in these.

Here you can find links to opera, theatre, musicals, KABUKI, and more online for free!

The MoMA is offering free online classes.

And here’s a list of FIVE HUNDRED courses being offered for free by Ivy League schools.

On my YouTube channel (which you could subscribe to), I have a Dance Inspiration playlist. I’ve been collecting these for years now and it’s interesting to see what i used to find compelling compared to now.

Okay… that seems like a good start. ((HA)) This could actually keep you focused on good and beautiful things for a long time to come.

Is there anything you’ve found that you would add?

And don’t forget that you can ask me to add you to my Facebook private group, Embodiment Sanctuary, where we support one another in a private and safe space and where I share ways to deal with all the ick via body and breath practices and JOY.

Also I want to add… all of this is free. IF you are able, please support artists and solo-preneurs whom you know. A lot of us are not eligible for business loans or help (not that there’s a lot out there), and though we’re home, there are ways for us to continue to do our work if we continue to have students and supporters.

A Positive Practice for Difficult Times

I feel like, if we took this quote seriously, if we really dug into what this quote is asking of us… I know this will sound like hyperbole but it’s not… I believe this could heal the whole damn world.

We need a change in perspective, or when this virus crisis is over, we will simply fall back to the way things were. And the way things were was not working.

But we can’t make external, societal changes without changing how we work on the inside.

We need a change in perspective.

Changing the way we work on the inside is the only way we’ll have a clue as to how we can change the outside.

Otherwise we are lost.

For now, let’s focus on what we love about ourselves and let’s follow that trail of bread crumbs.

The main thing I love about myself is my ability to be totally and completely FASCINATED by and in awe of life and learning.

So for right now, I’m going to deep dive back into my tantra studies that I lost track of in all the world-level anxiety. I’m also going to deep dive even more into my movement work which is somehow the one thing that has been really GOOD right now… at a time when it feels difficult to do much of anything.

How about you?

This Time is What You Practice For

Now we cannot distract ourselves and it might be proving difficult. But this is an opportunity to notice your pain, your grief, your challenges... all the things that have been asking for your attention but have been easier to ignore until this.

This is the practice. This is what we do every time we stand vulnerable to a piece of music or to the silence and we breathe and we wait. We wait for the body to speak; we wait for a truthful expression; we wait for the uncomfortable impulse and then we follow it, with fascination, to see where it might lead us.

It will always be to somewhere more interesting than where comfort takes us. Always.

Life is Change (said the control freak)

“Start by doing what is necessary, then what is possible, and suddenly you’re doing the impossible.”

— St. Francis

My view while I’m teaching via Skype and Facebook Live.

I’ve been offering things online — even live streaming — probably for almost 8 years, so that part of what’s happening was pretty easy for me to adjust to. And I don’t mind teaching online. I get to stay home in my little space and the overhead is, well, nothing.

It’s not been as easy for my local students who were used to being in the same room with each other. But they have learned/noticed rather quickly that community is community whether it’s 3D or not. The energy of our work is not dependent on proximity. It’s dependent upon trust and vulnerability.

But this is not to say I have not been challenged. I have been… BIG TIME.

This change has sent me (as I’m sure it has many) into a time of profound questioning.

What do I want to do in this world and why and how do I want to do it?

Am I spending my time well?

What if every moment of our time here really really matters (it does) and what it we treated it that way (we don’t)?

Recently, I had made some decisions about the “branding” of my work. (Branding is the word that works but it’s not my favorite.)

I’ve come to realize that those decisions were based in a fear about my own vulnerability.

I freaking TEACH people to allow vulnerability, to feel it, to know that it’s the only path to our truest expressions.

And I have discovered that I myself was still shying away from it.

I don’t think I would have noticed this so quickly if it hadn’t been for what we are going through collectively. I think I could have continued to fool myself about myself for quite some time.

But here we are…

Having our protective layers forcibly removed by circumstances.

Every generation has defining moments like this, and if we are lucky and if we are already a bit awake (though groggy), we will notice and we will evolve.

I’m trying to focus on the truth of that.

Revolution through Body and Movement Subversion

From a remarkable student who understands this work so deeply, Donatella, speaking to me in a note and shared with her permission:

“What you do (movement art for the purpose of returning to the roots of movement as instinctive ritual, emotional catharsis, self exploration, physical improvements to biomechanical issues, and trauma bodily effects) is a complete subversion of the institutions and cultural ideas of “dance.” Especially considering your body and age inclusivity. By your nature, you are not a dancer; you are a movement artist, subverting everything wrong with the current culture around dance and women’s bodies. Your practices don’t damage the body, rather your practices heal the body. You teach the core essence of “dance” forms such as Butoh, Modern, etc., yet you don’t instruct people on rigid techniques and leave them to try to fit inside that. You don’t impose a body standard or an “ideal.” You don’t police the body of your artists. You embrace them and teach them that every single body is built to move and feel joy. You don’t kick people out after an imaginary age where they’re considered no longer palatable. You fight to keep people moving their whole damn lives so they can be in their bodies, experiencing physical life to the very end. You subvert everything about most of the things you were ever taught as a dancer, because fuck that.”

Reading that… it’s everything in my heart about this work and said in ways that I would never have been able to say it.

When I say this work is revolution, I am not speaking in hyperbole.

Daring to love ourselves just as we are? Daring to show ourselves when the culture says only certain types should be seen? Daring to take up all the damn space? Daring to do all of this in a community of women who only hold one another up, never acting toward one another in the ways we are taught from grade school?

When we dare in these ways, we come to know our full power.

And that scares the shit out of “them.”

Quiet...

I’ve always spent a lot of time at our Peninsula here on this Great Lake, and so going there to “blow the stink off,” as my Nana always said, is a natural reflex for me during this time of social isolation.

What’s surprising is the way we walk past each other with our guard up… swerving a bit as if to say, “there you go… there’s your six feet.”

We’re just generally… shyer with each other, aren’t we?

And because so many people are mainly staying at home, the other surprise is the QUIET. It’s that kind of quiet that you normally only hear on these paths during the winter months. Deep and thick with beauty and mystery. You hear your own breath and every sound that the trees and land around you have to offer, from subtle crackling of leaves to the bird calls beckoning from the summer that is still to come.

I don’t like why this gift has presented itself, but I will not turn this gift away.

When I’m walking along the lapping shore, I no longer bother with headphones and podcasts. When I’m walking, I’m no longer aiming to go faster and cover more ground.

When I’m walking, I’m just walking.

Do You Remember Why We Used to Blog?

I think I started blogging about 12 years ago or a bit more. It was when blogging was still all about writing and connecting and inspiring one another and creating community. It was exciting and new(ish) and it was before anyone was thinking about “monetizing.” Ads on blogs were barely ever seen and Amazon was only just about to create the affiliate program. (I may be off on some of these dates but this was my perception when I started.)

Some of you may still be around from when I started and you’ll remember that I began blogging under BlissChick. For the first year, I blogged seven days a week without missing, and then I transitioned to 5 days a week and stuck with that for some time. I had daily topics … you know, MusicBliss, BookBliss, InterviewBliss… you get it.

Blogging got me to love writing again, and the conversations that could ensue, even on a smallish blog like mine, were invigorating. We were making friends all over this globe. I loved watching my stats and seeing where my readers were coming from.

Some of the friends I made in those days are still friends to this day. Those friendships have deepened. I’ve met many of them in person. I was right about who they were every time but one! Pretty amazing stats.

Connections online are no less real than in 3D life. If you have shallow relationships in person, you’ll get the same virtually. If you’re a deep relationship person, the same will happen here. As I like to say, it’s all about the user, not at all about the tech.

Blogging like this changed my damn life and that is not hyperbole. I went to my very first dance based training at Kripalu because I felt a healthy and helpful obligation to my readers/friends to whom I had announced my intentions.

I would NOT have the life I have now had it not been for blogging.

So when someone I knew from way back when, Mindy Tsonas, announced she was going to start blogging again in this “old” way, I was immediately on board.

We need this now more than ever.

At the beginning of this year, I decided 2020 would be my year of beauty. Creating it, cultivating it, curating it.

If that sounds at all trite to you, then you don’t know beauty. Beauty is truth, vulnerability, passion. It has very little to do with aesthetics though there’s also that. The aesthetics, if it is true beauty, though, will always point to those deeper things…be merely a signpost pointing to something much more important.

And that is what Mindy intends to focus on… that sort of beauty… the kind that, again, creates connections and helps us to inspire one another and to be inspired … to be inspired, most importantly, to something MORE.

Thanks to Mindy, then, I’ll be here much more often again. I might even be setting up daily categories of content. For old time’s sake.