WHEN: Saturday, February 16th
TIME: 10 AM to 1 PM
WHERE: Pranayoga -- A Little Breathing Room, 1001 West 6th Street
COST: $45
You MUST preregister. CLICK HERE.
When I first started teaching 10 years ago, right after one of my first few classes, a wise, wonderful, beautiful woman came up to me and said this, which I didn't realize would be something that I would hear over and over again in the coming years:
"I was always taught that I had to pick between being smart and sexy...that I couldn't do both... So I picked smart... but now I feel like I CAN have and be both..."
Until that moment, I didn't realize how much I had internalized that same exact message.
Another woman would tell me that suddenly, after months and months of classes with me, she was letting herself buy things she thought of as "too pretty for her" and things with "sparkles!"
She was shocked and delighted by this.
So many of us have learned to turn off certain parts of ourselves to succeed or even to survive.
We've bought into so many of the myths of being a woman in a misogynistic culture: that to be pretty or sexy is to be vapid. To be "too sexy" invites "wrong attention." To be attractive means you won't be taken seriously.
To wear this article of clothing or this much makeup or this sort of shoe could even put your life at risk.
Even more insidious, of course, is that only certain types of bodies are even ALLOWED to THINK of themselves as sexy.
And it's reflected in the dance and movement arts world: only certain types of bodies are ALLOWED to perform, or on a more basic level, to even consider themselves dancers at all.
Bullshit. We all call BULLSHIT.
And yet, these parts of us HAVE been silenced and to reawaken them can be difficult and even a bit scary.
But in community it all becomes so much easier, so much more fun, so much more joyful.
With the witness of #Treesters in a supportive circle, we can grow into our fullness in every way.
We can embrace our unique beauty and our uniquely wonderful moving bodies.
We can embrace our softness that is another kind of strong.
We can sink into the flow of our innate body wisdom, our intuitive knowing, and our empathic intelligence.
We can OWN all that has been either taken from us, hidden from us, or looked down upon as less than.
In this workshop, we'll move into these spaces within us and explore how they want to be expressed, how they NEED to be expressed, and what these desires are telling us about the kind of world we want to create around us.
We'll be using methods from Burlesque, which promote an assertive sensuality, but we'll do so with no regard for the male gaze. This is for YOU.
From Japanese Butoh, we'll use mindfulness techniques along with breath to discover the deep wells of strength that flow under the skin.
And from tantra yoga, we'll learn of our power of awareness and the paramount importance of and ritual approaches to experiencing through all of our senses with no shame.
Year of Magic 2019: Mountain Monks in Japan
This 10 minute documentary is a sparkling jewel, a meditation, and an inspiration that I can feel has entered into the bloodstream of my own work after only one viewing. I can already sense it leading me into my own sort of mountains…and there will be unexpected climbs ahead.
This makes sense, as these monks practice a religion that is a combination of Buddhism and Shinto, both of which are strong underpinnings of Butoh, the movement art that transformed my own practice years ago, when I had the opportunity to study with Maureen Fleming who studied with the founding family of Butoh in Japan. Lineage matters and I am proud this is part of mine.