Unpacking the word "embodiment"

New studio means new logo and wow… this one is PACKED. It feels just right to me… on the deepest levels.

Each and every single word and bit of this logo has meaning that is like a little Russian doll... it can be opened and there's more and then opened and there's more...

Let's look at the word "embodiment," which is getting kinda popular lately but which has always been a word I use to describe what I do.

I mean it way beyond "the body in which you experience this life."

There's the physical body, for sure, and then the emotional, mental, spiritual, and energy. All of those things are Russian dolls in and of themselves.

But I still mean MORE...

I mean the body of the community.

The communal body is really the whole entire point of the work on the individual body.

We work on the micro to affect the macro.

We are all truly one and each part being most fulfilled, functioning most effectively, and experiencing its true self is important to the integrity of the whole.

FINALLY... but not really...

I also mean the body of your life.

What you do and make in this world. How you walk in and take up space. The voice that comes from your heart.

If you're not embodied in the first way, you'll never be embodied this way.

So join us for far more than postures and mechanics. We've got that part nailed down, for sure, with our combined experiences of well over 40 years.

But the ritual and the sacred and the transformative aspects of this work? That's where we ROCK.

New, FREE Circle of Trees Monthly Global Intention Dance

This new project is FREE and open to anyone anywhere on this beautiful planet, and I’m super excited for it to begin TUESDAY, MAY 7th. Please follow instructions below for joining.

When we dance together, there is an instant sacred connection created. We all feel it — whether in a club or a studio or a friend’s living room.

It makes sense since dancing, after all, along with lighting a fire and drumming, was the first way we created ritual.

It’s in our genes; it swims in and around our cells. It travels forth on our breath and soaks earth with out sweat.

From running online projects for many years now, though, I know that you don’t have to even be in the same room — or the same town or even on the same continent for this connection to occur and be palpable, to have full effect.

To have full effect all there needs to be is shared awareness and intention and group directed action.

So once a month, I’ll lead a global intention dance.

HOW: You have to be in the Facebook group, Circle of Trees. Period. This is where the event will be initiated. I won’t be replicating it anywhere else. Just tell me to add you by going to my Facebook page and saying, HEY! ADD ME TO THE TREES! (If you’re not my friend yet, start by friending me there.)

WHEN: I’ll start the process in the Circle of Trees on the first Tuesday of every month.

WHAT: I’ll start by asking an intention based question. Answer. The more people who answer, the more the thread of intention will connect all of us and the more we can each become part of the awareness web that will support those intentions.

I’ll also provide music AND A TIME for us all to try to participate.

PLEASE NOTE: I’ll alter the time month to month, considering we all live in different zones all over the world.

ALSO: If you can’t participate because the time ends up being the middle of the night for you, do it the following day at that time. Just focus your awareness. You’re still with us.

That’s it. It’s that easy.

On Vulnerability

Recently I watched this documentary (that’s available right now on Netflix) and I think about it every day. I’ll probably have to watch it again.

At first, I couldn’t understand this dancer’s appeal to anyone. Ohad Naharin adored her… took her to Israel out of university so that she could learn from him and be a central dancer in his company. OHAD! The dude I adore.

And then… then… she does her first solo piece. It’s in the nude. I’ve never seen a reason for the nude thing until this moment. It had to be in the nude. There was no other way for the piece to make sense, and within moments of watching her, you’re so captivated by her body’s ability to be truthful, that you stop noticing the nude aspect.

She is freaking amazing.

But one quote caught me:

“I wanna get to that place where I have no strength to hide anything.”

— Bobbi Jene Smith, Choreographer

The level of vulnerability… what a warrior she is.

What a warrior we are all called to be.

Have you ever gotten near to this idea in your own life?

Are you willing to get near to this idea in your own life?

I’m sharing this and hoping it brings about a conversation because my mind is still spinning from it.

This, too, is a dancer's body

From a demonstration years ago in our city arboretum. Betty was almost 80 in this photo.

This, too, is a dancer’s body, because all bodies that dance are dancer’s bodies, and all bodies are meant to dance; it’s in your genetic coding. Dancing is an expression of being human, no more and no less.

I got to teach Betty for a couple of years before she passed away. That’s the very happy part of our story together.

The sad part is that it was only during these couple of years with me that Betty felt like she was truly embodied, that she felt her feelings deeply, that she got to know her body. This is not my story of Betty; this is what she said over and over again.

She was a nun for a lot of her life, left that, and became a nurse practitioner. When she came to this work, it was not something she ever thought she'd be doing, but she'd tell you that it's never too late and then she'd add with great passion and seriousness that IT'S NEVER TOO SOON!

So much of Betty’s life, like a lot of women her age, like too many women to this day, was in her head. She walked through most of her life as if just a head or as if the body were just a vehicle for the head.

I spent a great deal of my life there, thanks to chronic depression. I know how easy it is to stay there, how “comfortable” it can be — it you think it’s comfortable to only be partly human, to only know a tiny bit of yourself and this great experiment of life.

For the first time in her life, she FELT HER BODY. And she learned that she loved The White Stripes. 

I Thought I Knew the Difference: Thriving versus Surviving

I THOUGHT I knew what thriving was when I really was just at another, perhaps a bit “higher,” level of surviving. (I wrote about this a little bit in a post about managing depression, right here.)

At that time, now that I can look back with a clearer mind, I was mistaking not being suicidal with thriving. I thought because I wasn’t 24/7 thinking about death or passive relief that I was doing as good as I could. I thought the health I had gotten to was the best I could expect after so long of such darkness.

Here’s an important point that I want all people suffering to read a few times:

Because I was still actively depressed, I also thought it was the best I deserved.

I didn’t think I was worthy of true, deep, abiding, peaceful happiness. I thought I was broken, that something was wrong with me, that I had made such bad choices in life that I could only expect so much goodness to come my way. I was constantly expecting something bad to happen to prove that I deserved to be punished. I saw my depression as part of that punishment and so thought a mild form, at the very least, was always going to be with me.

This is a core lie of depression and I want you to know that you can stop believing it. I want you to know that you can stop hearing it.

That’s the part that I still can’t get over: I no longer hear this shit in my head. It’s just gone. POOF.

I keep saying to my doctor, to loved ones… to anyone … HOW was this CHEMICALS? However it was, it was. And that’s that.

But I digress…

Here’s a paradox for you…

Now that I have my brain chemistry issue on the mend, I’m downright confused what to do with it…. how the heck to live with this level of health that I’ve not known since I was very small?!

The vast majority of my life has been about surviving, so it’s been about hyper vigilance, awareness of symptoms, care-taking, watching everything I do, eat, watch, see, read… This kept me very busy with lists and tasks and efforts and plans and research and and and…

My life has revolved around this illness. How could it not? This illness threatened my life. I’m lucky to be here.

Without this project, what now?

Furthermore, a lot of the things that I love in this world — dance, chanting, yoga, writing, art of all kinds — those things were drafted into the service of this project. They became “medicine” to the nth degree. They were no longer for creativity or expression but simply for my survival.

What were those things now? WHY were those things now?

I sat in front of my yoga class recently talking a bit about this. We do that at the beginning of class; we have a true sangha — awareness circle — and I am not above it or outside of it but in it and so I talk about my own challenges as much as anyone else.

I asked them about this what now.

A few of them answered all at once and said just about the same thing:

“You do things for FUN, for joy, for fulfillment, for peace…”

WHAT?!? For FUN? For JOY? For…fulfillment and peace…?

I squinted and then I laughed at myself for this was truly confusing to me. I could cry and be sad about this but my new brain chemistry is like, “what’s the point of that!?”

So I giggle instead and answer, “How delightful! A new sort of project!”

That’s where I’m at: watching for opportunities to redefine experiences, reframing, and simply allowing things to be what they are. I’m doing the reps, if you will… strengthening muscles that had been atrophied.

A Bit of a Movement Manifesto

The only thing we know for sure is that we have a body. That's it. We have a body. For whatever reason (or for no reason), we are here having an experience through these bodies.

And we know these bodies are meant to move, not just carry around our brains. This truth is contained in our very cells and demonstrated by the action of those cells.

These bodies are meant to move a LOT and in the widest variety of ways possible.

Movement is LIFE. That is not a metaphor and it IS a metaphor.

We must, first and foremost, bring CURIOSITY to these bodies. Then we must bring AWE and GRATITUDE.

When we carry those three things within us, we'll move more from those places.

I constantly talk about how we canNOT move from a sense of punishment or negative consequence -- as in, I ate cake, therefore I must exercise.

EAT THE CAKE.

Then go and PLAY.

Balance is not about evenness... it's about containing opposites.

We can't "balance" 8 hours in a chair with 30 to 60 minutes of "fitness."

Imagine being angry and violent for 8 hours and thinking your nervous system will be completely okay with that as long as you are calm for 30 minutes.

Movement is NOT exercise.

Movement is being in your body and USING IT.

Movement ART is being conscious of your body's ability to express something truthful and then doing that.

When will you start giving this body its due? Will it take a catastrophe or a loss of some sort to convince you that this body is worth your time?

Let's all dig a little deeper, shall we?

COMMIT. DEVOTE. LOVE.

Here's what my digging deeper will look like: I am 50. I'm not "supposed" to take myself seriously as a dancer. It's time.

And you?

Embattled No More: The Invisible Exhaustion of Depression

And now quotes like this no longer feel like these unattainable wishes but instead feel like a call that I can answer.

Since starting on this new anti-depressant, I feel… capable.

For the first time, I think maybe ever, I feel what people have told me about myself for my whole life: that I am someone who creates stuff out of thin air, that I get an idea and then I act on it, that I walk into visions.

I never believed those words, or more accurately, I felt like a fraud who was pulling wool over the eyes of the speakers. Like, if they only knew all the things I was NOT doing, all the hours wasted in self-doubt and self-hatred, all the time spent thinking but not doing, all the days paralyzed in my bed or on the couch or staring off into space.

Even at my most productive, I never ever felt productive.

I felt embattled.

How could people not see that I was suffocating and drowning and that I was barely surviving, much less thriving? I would think this not in judgment of them but in judgment of myself. How could I pull off FOOLING so many?

Because you see, no matter how much I might have managed to do, there was one thing that I was doing 24/7, and because my brain has been like this for so long, I no longer saw this thing as unusual or “extra.”

I was fighting for my life. Fighting for every square inch of it. Fighting every second of every day.

I was fighting, as I’ve mentioned before, the Asshole in My Brain, and that Asshole was a NINJA.

I was convinced simultaneously that I was ill AND that my brain was normal, therefore this internal fight was normal and why couldn’t I get my shit together!? (Try untying THAT knot. It has everything to do with shaming my own spirit rather than acknowledging my biology.)

I was so used to living like this that I didn’t notice the energy it took. I would judge myself for not getting enough done from day to day, not noticing this huge thing I was accomplishing every single day — not defeating the Asshole outright, but winning each day’s battles so that I could live to fight again.

Back to this idea then that I wasn’t ever accomplishing what I knew I COULD deep down: perhaps, um, it was because I was using most of my fuel, most of my energy, for this war.

I was exhausted before I got out of bed.

I was done before I started on the lists of things that mattered to me.

This is the part of depression that those who don’t suffer can’t understand or see. It’s the part that is invisible to everyone around us because we might appear somewhat functional, but it’s also dangerously invisible to the person suffering, so no matter what we do or don’t do, we’re damned… by ourselves as ineffective, weak, soft-willed, disappointing.

This is the underbelly of an extreme cultural belief in self-sufficiency added to a multi-billion dollar industry called self-help.

Why can’t I fix myself? becomes part of the Asshole’s arsenal, really a nuclear-level weapon, which leads to a cycle of shame that leaves us attempting to hide our illness even more vigorously. Asshole wins.

And each day looks like this: I’m exhausted and so very close to the edge but somehow I function at a bare minimum level. It’s enough for people to remind me of “all the good work I do” when I say I am suffering from a crisis of meaning and purpose. Their cheering only adds to Assholes bullets of “see? they believe in you…but you’re nothing… you can’t even finish your basic to-do list… you can’t even ((insert the thing you want the most here))…” Shame. More shame. More hiding. Not getting the help you need because this is obviously not a “real illness” but something wrong with your character so I dive deeper into spiritual practices and exercise and wonder why the things I do help others but not me…

Rinse and repeat ad nauseam for the next couple of decades.

Somehow… SOMEHOW… I listened to my husband and got the help I’ve needed all along.

It’s taken until today for me to notice my increased energy.

Huh… isn’t that funny? No longer fighting an Asshole 24/7 means I have energy for other stuff.

It’s taken until today for me to notice that those spiritual practices weren’t a waste except for the fact that my brain was TOO TIRED to take it all in and that’s why I couldn’t seem to remember, couldn’t seem to keep doing it all, couldn’t seem to “ever freaking learn.”

Because now? My brain chemistry is being altered for the better and I can feel the power of that.

I can feel what “normal” really is and it’s NOT a daily battle for one’s life. It’s a sort of battling for a better life, for more art, for more love and friendship… but that’s not a battling of an asshole… that’s a battling for all that’s good and right and wonderful and beautiful in this world and that sort of battle feeds energy right back into us, invigorates us with meaning and purpose, and has us ready to get out of bed each day, grateful to be doing just that.

My Anti-Depressant Story, with Happy Ending (Middle...)

By the time I was in my early 30s, depression took pretty much everything from me.

It took my sense of self, a taking that started when the depression was really amping up to full-tilt in my mid/late 20s. It took my sense of self to the point where I started to walk a wrong path, be a wrong way, live a lie, and because of my stubborn nature, it would take well over a decade for me to admit this to myself. (My self was whispering the wrong of this immediately, and because depression taught me how to lie to myself, I shut it down.)

All of that self-denial eventually took me from my family, and every day now, I breathe a sigh of relief that that was not permanent, that I was able, somehow, to rectify that.

Depression took my passion, my fire, my loves, my likes, my curiosities, my will, my knowing, my moral center, my talents.

This is hard to write about and it’s even harder to look at — depression took the years of my life when I could have been building a family, when I could have been creating the kind of future I had dreamed of in my teens.

But regret is poison so let’s move on.

When depression first started to get bad, I went to a doctor and got some pills. They turned me into a zombie.

In my early 30s, I tried again. After 3 doses, I got very sick.

What I took from this: there is no help; you can only do this yourself. Pills are bad. I will never take another. (Please note: I always have believed in “experiment of one” and would never ever tell someone NOT to get help if they felt something could help them. I have even guided friends to physicians to get prescriptions and been there as they adjust. “NO PILLS” was a rule for ME ONLY.)

Needing to do this ourselves… What a LIE that is… it’s a core lie of our culture, whether you suffer from mental illness or not. It’s a core lie that keeps us all so much more separate than we are built to be, so lonely, so angry, so fearful.

Fast forward… SOMEHOW I get to a point where the lies are no longer sufferable. I get to a point of inner strength.

I get there thanks to dance and to a million other things I put together in my life. Thanks to the whole “design my life to elevate my mind” approach.

But then more things happen and depression lately has been something more acute for me. This was hard to admit after everything, after how far I had come.

It took me many months, but I found a PCP and then lo’ and behold, I liked and respected her so I opened up about all of this.

She prescribed another SSRI (which seems to be their favorite class), and as I have written about, I landed in the ER with a really bad reaction.

It felt like the same rollercoaster ride. I said NO MORE. NEVER AGAIN.

Then I was back in her office and we decided (due to some research I did) to try another class: SNDRI. (I won’t get into details but this drug works on a cluster of brain chemicals as opposed to one.)

No side effects. None. I breathed and waited.

Not only no side effects but within 10 days there were noticeable positive effects, and yes, this CAN happen. It makes me think that this is the exact right pill that my brain needed all along.

Here’s one of the positive effects: I’m not spending any time regretting not trying this sooner. I don’t have time for that. Depressed brain would have had time for that…

But here’s a little list of what’s going on:

The first thing I noticed (because my husband asked me how it was going and then I was like oh…): I have had a part of my brain for as long as I remember that I call ASSHOLE BRAIN. This asshole does exactly what an asshole does — talks down to me, loves to contemplate death, nihilism, and meaninglessness, and is generally cruel. I spend A TON OF ENERGY fighting this asshole Every. Single. Day. You can imagine that it’s tiring. But…suddenly… ASSHOLE WAS SITTING IN THE CORNER. Quiet. Not saying anything. I realized I could lie in bed at night and THINK POSITIVE THOUGHTS and NO ONE WAS INTERRUPTING ME. I cannot overemphasize the MIRACLE of this.

Then the other night, Craig and I were watching TV and I was LAUGHING AT EVERYTHING. ANYTHING that was remotely SILLY made me laugh.

I heard myself and was yet again amazed. My mother would tell you that when I was little, I laughed so easily. She would tell you that I would sit in front of the TV and just laugh and laugh at the littlest things.

This was that laugh.

Another: any time there is ANY music — in a commercial, on the radio, in my head — I do little dances. That had completely stopped.

And another: I talk. I talk A LOT. I talk in vomitous rivers of excitement. This is ME.

Ten days. On a half dose.

IMPORTANT: Since I’m not exhausted fighting the Asshole Brain, I have energy to do MORE of the other things that I know help. More exercise. Better eating. More play. We can’t let a pill replace those things; a pill, if it’s working right, will help us DO those things.

MOST IMPORTANT: Don’t give up. Keep pushing for the help you deserve. Find a GOOD and KIND doctor. Find a CURIOUS doctor. Research for yourself; be informed. Ask a friend for help if you’re too depressed to do these things. Ask someone who has been there. Don’t accept “okay-ish.” Docs love SSRIs and maybe those aren’t for you. Try something else.