One Minute Self Care: 50+ Micro Rituals for Peace & Health

You might remember me saying many times in the past, “Tell Asshole Brain, JUST FIVE MINUTES.” Well, lately — I’m sure many of you are feeling this — five minutes seems like a really big chunk of time and effort.

FIVE minutes!? What do I look like? A freaking ultra marathoner?

So here we are, one minute.

JUST. ONE. MINUTE.

Can you ask yourself many times throughout the day: What can I do for ONE MINUTE for MYSELF?

I asked members of our Facebook private group JoyBody Sanctuary what kinds of things they could imagine doing and we came up with quite the list. So here you are, in no particular order:

1. Breathe deeply with your eyes closed

2. Meditate/pray/chant

3. SCREAM — right where you are or in a closed room or in the shower or into a pillow

4. Jump up and down — HARD

5. Rub your own head and neck and feet

6. Place your hands on your heart center

7. Walk outside and stand on ground (bare feet, please)

8. Wash your face

9. Lay on the floor and cry

10. Lay on the floor and THROW A TANTRUM

11. Warm up your cold coffee/tea

12. Eat some dark chocolate

13. Pet a cat or dog

14. Punch a pillow as hard as you can for the full minute

15. Release a lot of loud sighs. Be super dramatic about it

16. Smack yourself — firmly all over your legs, around your hips, into your low back

17. Brush your hair

18. Go outside and just gaze at the sky — night or day

19. Wash a few dishes; make your bed; do something to your house that makes you feel good

20. Email or text a friend a positive message

21. Go online and look at art (have some tabs already saved for this)

22. Read a poem. Out loud

23. SING

24. Sniff your favorite essential oil. Dab some on your wrists

25. Hug yourself in a cuddly blanket or hug someone who is with you

26. Lie on the floor or your bed and stretch like a cat

27. Tap all over your scalp

28. Make a quick piece of art — take a photo, create a TikTok video, color, doodle

29. Pull a tarot/oracle card and sit with it

30. Bounce on a mini trampoline or ride your stationary bike

31. Drink a big glass of water

32. Take your vitamins

33. Stand up if you’re seated and walk around; put your leg up on a chair or table

34. Sit on the floor/squat

35. If you have wooden floors, put on socks and skate around

36. Go check the mail

37. Go to youtube and watch a video of the ocean or your favorite city (have some ready in a folder so you don’t fall down a rabbit hole)

38. Rearrange/clean an altar space in your house (or make a new one)

39. Go to your books, randomly pick one, randomly open it, read. Let it speak to you

40. Light some incense and walk around your space

41. Light candles

42. Write a haiku, a list of favorite things, a note to yourself to read later, a note to someone you love

43. Leave a random note of kindness on someone’s Facebook page

44. Dance. For one minute. To the sound of your own breath

45. Put on some mascara, eyeliner, lipstick, whatever you like to embellish yourself

46. Remember one of your favorite moments in your life. Recall as much sensory detail as you can

47. Twirl. Use a big scarf

48. Do you have a baton in your house? (Making this list and suddenly I want a baton again…)

49. Juggle

50. Play a round of Jax

Your turn… what could you add to this list?

Some Help is Needed When It's Needed Until It's Not

Beach one, May 11th

(Note: this is about me. It’s not about you. It’s about ME unless you also need it to be about you. If you don’t need it, then it’s not about you. Got it? We are each an experiment of one. PERIOD.)

Yesterday when I visited the lake, she was so changeable. From minute to minute, her color and the light across her surface was different. It was hard to stop taking photos, trying to capture each iteration.

We’re so much more like that lake than we like to admit.

We want things to be steady and constant. It feels good to imagine that we’ve arrived somewhere and that’s that.

But, of course, life is change. We are change. Our very identity is not a consistent thing but ever-evolving.

So, for example, when I found an anti-depressant that helped me, I assumed that was it… forever. But…

I’ve spent a long time in this life trying to heal myself with no help. It’s part stubborn and part stupid and just wholly unnecessary. We’re not meant to be 100% individuated. We’re part of a large ecosystem that includes all other humans and all other life.

There’s got to be a reason for that. Pure and simple. And that reason is that we aren’t as strong as we could be until we tap into the larger, vaster, deeper wisdom, until we partake of the infinite tools that are at our disposal.

We can only know so much. The larger ecosystem knows it all and we can plug in any time. We should plug in all the time, actually.

So when my depression got extra bad about a year and a half ago, I finally listened to the people who love me and I got help. I went on medication and I got into therapy.

That medication felt like a fucking miracle…. no. It WAS a fucking miracle.

The dark and often veering toward suicidal thinking was just GONE. POOF! Like that!

It was CHEMICAL all ALONG, I kept yelling at people. I walked around in amazement at this new found fact.

I needed that medicine like we all need oxygen. I was in trouble and that medicine saved me.

I walked around for months feeling brand new and then I started to notice, well, that it didn’t feel as miraculous any more. I didn’t feel the dark brain coming back to life but the light that had entered was definitely dimming.

I got put on a helper med. It didn’t really. I started to think that the helper med was all I needed, and the first med was something I didn’t want to be on long term, so I stopped. That worked out fine.

Until I noticed that nothing good was really coming of the second med either. I can’t tell you HOW I knew this. I just did. I knew I didn’t need anything any more.

I accidentally missed an evening dose and nothing horrible happened so I continued missing evening doses and then every other day morning doses and then I was off.

And dark brain was still nowhere to be felt. (Of course, I am still prone to despairing but LOOK AT THE WORLD. This is normal right now and it doesn’t come with suicidal thinking.)

Dark brain was nowhere to be felt and other stuff started to happen…

I heard the laughter that comes out of me when I’m actually happy and relaxed. I know it because it reminds instantly of my toddler laugh. I just KNOW this laugh. It’s my core laugh.

I noticed that I was getting REALLY SILLY with my husband again. Like silly enough that he would give me these funny little looks that said, “who is this?” It’s been a while since this me has been around and I know it felt foreign (yet delightful) to him.

THEN…

We watched this movie (WATCH IT!!!!!!!), and a few minutes in, there is a scene at a local TV station with Chris O’Dowd in a very brief cameo. I started laughing and then I was LAUGHING and then I was just LOSING MY SHIT.

Every time I looked at Craig, I just laughed even harder. I couldn’t believe I wasn’t peeing our couch! My face felt like it might crack!

I thought Craig was laughing so hard because the movie was funny — and he was — but he was laughing THAT hard because he couldn’t get over my utter JOY.

Which stopped me in my tracks, right? I was feeling the deepest joy… I can’t remember when I last felt like that and I KNOW I haven’t laughed like that in probably 3 years. THREE. YEARS.

Which could make me sad but I don’t have time for that shit.

Along with my happy and silly brain, being off those meds means my creative and ACTIVE brain are on OVERDRIVE.

My point… sometimes you need meds… and then sometimes you stop needing them.

If you don’t stop needing them, so what? You need them and we are grateful you have them. As I was grateful when I thought nothing could possibly help.

If You People Please, You're Likely Expecting Others to Do the Same for YOU

I’m thinking a ton lately about issues of race and gender/sex/identity and how it’s all intertwined and how it affects my work and how I should/can change my work as I know and understand more. And I understand so very little, when it comes right down to it.

The more you know, the more you know you don’t know shit, right?

As I’m thinking about these things especially intensely over the last few weeks, I try to very gently enter into conversations that are about these topics and ask questions. For a while, it just seemed I couldn’t ask anything right or in the right way. I kept getting, well, yelled at in a variety of ways. No one was super mean but I was definitely getting my hand slapped, and I was getting more and more frustrated.

How can I learn if I can’t ask?

Then I had a private discussion with someone who lives these questions and who cares for me and was willing to kinda hand hold and be patient though very direct (which I respond well to). Thank GOD for this person.

But you might be surprised to find out what I learned or maybe you won’t be surprised at all because you’re further ahead on this curve than me and you’ve already been muttering to yourself as you read this.

I learned that, really, I WAS the problem. Or my approach was anyway. Even though I approached with love and good intentions and care, I was still expecting too much.

I was still expecting the person who is suffering to do the work for me. I was still expecting them to do heavy emotional lifting for me.

Here’s what I was extra surprised by: this was happening because I do this FAR TOO MUCH FOR OTHER PEOPLE in my own work and world.

People who have brains and can do research come to me with basic questions about trauma. I use my precious time and brain energy giving them all of the information on a platter. When they could just as easily go get that information for themselves, do the basic thinking for themselves, and come back later when they’re ready to have a genuine discussion with me as two equal humans struggling.

I hand hold people like crazy on the regular, thinking I “should” or maybe people won’t “like me.”

See that people pleaser woman shit right there?

So then when *I* am the asker, of course, I enter into the scenario with the same messed up expectations for the person I perceive as the “expert.”

Whoa…

What a crap ton of codependent shit right there. Can you see it?

I’m off to order a bunch of books about racism, white fragility, and the intersection of racism and sexism (because hello, constitution, written FOR AND BY white men).

I’m gonna go do my homework and I’m asking that you do yours too, okay?

Because I’m also gonna be recovering from all that people pleasing.

12 Years Ago You Would Not Have Known Me

In this photo, I think I am happy. I have just finished my Yoga Dance teacher training with the amazing Megha at Kripalu. My life felt like it finally had some meaning and purpose. I was starting to feel more like myself than I had in…forever.

And YET.

I look at this photo now and it makes me sad. I can see that it is me but it does not look like me, if that makes sense. There is something off about the eyes in particular. I think I look older in this photo from 11 years ago than I do now, as I approach 51 in mere weeks.

11 years ago, I was starting on this path that has led me to creating Bodypoetics, but oh, my, the distances I have had to cover before I got here.

The distances I had already covered before heading to Kripalu…

12 years ago, you would not have known me.

My body was much bigger, but that is just the outside, which for me is very much about the insides but that’s another post.

My eyes were empty, from over a decade of serious depression, and from living a lie of a life in every way.

My body was always and forever carrying some sort of pain — back, hips, migrained brain, and on and on with one chronic issue after another.

And oh, my, MY MIND.

I had been convinced that I did not like people, that I hated people.

I had been convinced that I did not ever want to be touched or hugged by anyone. BY ANYONE.

I had been convinced that my fears prevented me from pursuing good work or even leaving the house.

I had been convinced that I had this mental illness, then this one, then this one, then this one…all to keep me obsessed and paralyzed.

I had been convinced that getting professional help was a waste of time and wouldn’t help anyway. That pills were bad. That therapy was dumb.

These beliefs came to me from another human who counted on me staying down.

But there was plenty of inner shit to work with that I had been carrying since I was about 9.

I was already convinced that I was worthless.

I was already convinced that I had nothing of value to offer others.

I was already convinced that life was a burden, as was I to anyone.

12 years ago you would not have known me.

And then, long story short, a dear friend died and I attended the wedding of another and I started to dance and eventually met Megha, and well, the rest is (recent) history.

I do not know what compelled me to dance at that wedding.

I do not know what compelled me to go to Kripalu, and in so doing, face about 100 of my greatest fears.

12 years ago you would not have known me but that’s because I did not even know myself.

Somehow I am still alive.

Somehow I am getting real help and am surrounded by well meaning people who only want the best for me… finally.

Somehow, every day, I get up and believe in my vision of me just enough more than I believe in that old version of me. Just enough to keep me going, to keep me trying and hoping.

A Glimpse into My One on One Work and What It's All REALLY About

I work with people one on one, and with every person, this will look very different, of course but eventually it all comes down to similar issues.

People will come to me wanting to work on flexibility or they want to get stronger. They often start by coming to me with what they perceive to be a physical issue.

But eventually and inevitably, we get to the real issue.

Chronic physical issues (as opposed to illnesses) always have a basis in your emotional or spiritual life.

The body is simply telling the truth about your pain or what you need before you yourself are ready to articulate it.

Some of my students though know this from the start and come to me immediately with requests like Chris, for example.

She’s working through a lot of layers of grief, and even though she takes weekly classes with me, she knows that on occasion she needs more intense and focused help. So right now, we’re doing a series of one on ones focusing on exactly HER.

This is how we started last week — with what I simply call folding and unfolding. It’s a way to very easily drop into the body without feeling like you’re trying to make the body “perform” in any way.

Food, Alcohol, Pleasure, and Meds

The warmth during our trip to Asheville was my favorite thing…

I’ve written a lot (and still have so much more to write) about the changes to my brain since going on the right anti-depressant. (Here, here, here, and here.)

And before you read: Please remember that I am the mother of #ExperimentofOne. This is about what works for me. That doesn’t mean I think it would work for you. What I DO believe would work for you is questioning your own assumptions frequently and playing with variables.

To paraphrase Thomas Merton, we are built not for pleasure but for joy. The distinction is important. Pleasure is momentary and of the world; joy is deep and abiding and can be tapped into at any moment because it’s embedded in our operating systems, so to speak. It’s always there, waiting for us to notice. It’s not dependent on anything else.

Pleasure is good. I’m not a puritan. But it’s not the point and it can’t be our primary motivation. Or you can easily end up with a nation of high-functioning addicts. (Oh, wait…)

Pleasure is important but it’s secondary to the depth of joy.

Pleasure is easy. Go eat a cupcake. (Now I want a cupcake.) Joy takes devotion and awareness.

And eventually I’ll relate this preamble to food and my depression…

Though the anti-depressants have removed the Chemical Asshole from my brain, there is still work to be done.

I am still responsible for my own health, wellbeing, and happiness.

A pill can take care of the biochemical issue — and thank god for that — but there remains first, old habits developed out of coping with chronic depression, and second, a desire not just for “good” but for AWESOME.

The pill allows me to spend my energy where it belongs — on joy and love and writing and dance and relationships and learning and growing and all the good things that used to get eaten up by the energy it took just to live with my depression from hour to hour and not succumb to a deep desire to give up.

But the pill does not do All the Things. It does not suddenly make me a different or new person. It does not change who I am on a basic level. It simply gives me access to myself again.

I could decide this is good enough, but that’s not my nature.

I know there’s more to life even than this. I have Big Dreams and goals and desires. I have dance to teach, worlds to explore, books to write.

Because I’m not fighting Chemical Asshole, I have the power to dream again (I had recently totally and truly lost that capacity and that’s when I knew I had to seek help because I’ve ALWAYS been able to IMAGINE), and I have the power to go after those dreams. (None of this can be overstated. I’ll try to write about how this FEELS on a basic level at some point but the words aren’t available to me yet. I’m still adjusting.)

One of the most fundamental ways that I know to make my brain even happier and healthier is through my diet.

For example, in the past, when I’ve been pretty darn strict about being paleo (with occasional treats), I have had less brain fog and less systemic inflammation issues in general. I had more energy. I slept better. I felt more rested.

I also do better with VERY little alcohol in my life.

But I’ve noticed something: when I tell people that I am going back to eating like this and only drinking a beer once in a while, I get met with a lot of objections along the lines of…

But you like beer and wine…

But food is yummy…

What about fun and pleasure…

Life is too short…

First, thanks for the sabotage.

Second, life is too short, indeed, and that is my whole reason for doing this.

I’m much more interested in joy than pleasure.

I will eat the occasional cupcake, but I want the energy and focus it takes to do great and good and big things in this life.

I want adventure and learning and curiosity and excitement and experiences of awe.

Wine with dinner that gives me a headache the next day or somehow numbs me to the now? No, thanks. Depression numbed me for 20 years. I want to be HERE in the NOW; I want to FEEL this life.

Food that makes me feel sick and throws off my system and leaves me creaky and exhausted? Nope. A side effect of my depression were chronic pain issues that left me pretty darn immobile and thinking I needed a cane by the time I was 35. (For real.)

Why the hell would I choose yum over being completely in my life?

And why is it not enough to enjoy a simply perfect peach? What about a square of dark chocolate?

Why are we slaves to foods and beverages that do not uplift us and sustain vibrant life? These questions are important and our resistance to answering them can be telling.

I want more joy and if that means eliminating a bit of momentary pleasure here and there… well, that is devotion to myself, to my purpose, to ultimate love.

To paraphrase that rather awful Kate Moss quote and turn it into something meaningful: Nothing tastes as good as joy/happiness/mental health feels.

Yoga is not of the body and how the body can take us into yoga

Yoga is not postures. And the postures you think are yoga are very young, especially compared to yoga. Was that confusing?

We keep figuring out that yoga is so much older than we think we know it is. Let’s just assume it’s 3 or 4 thousand years old at this point. Those asanas you do? Some of them are under a hundred years old.

So what the hell is yoga, then?

It’s the underlying philosophy (which is meant to be experimented with and LIVED), and some of it did include postures but that was for the sake of people who need a physical entry point.

I need a physical entry point and I think right now, in this day and age, most people do, because most people now think the body is just a vehicle for the mind and that’s about as un-yogic as it gets.

But the physical entry point is not meant to be solidified. Yoga — the real yoga — is way too smart for that. Yoga is all and all is yoga, and each human is a unique expression of that so why would we think that downdog was somehow necessary to a yogic experience? And who would think that headstands were “advanced?”

People mistaking the material for the all, that’s who. People STILL living in a world of dualism where we are separate from the flow of the divine.

But we ARE the flow of the divine and so we come to what I really want to write about…

I’ve been studying yoga for 25 years. I’ve been teaching for 10 years.

And only just a couple of weeks ago did I feel like, as a teacher and as a student, that I had finally come to START to know “my” yoga.

“My” yoga being the yoga that is natural to this body and that allows this mind and spirit to engage on the same level as body. “My” yoga being a way of moving that integrates awareness and allows me to BE ME. (Language is so constraining right here… I’m struggling to express this.)

I am a student of Tantric Yoga, and in that system of nondualism, the ultimate reality is Awareness.

Awareness has two parts: noticing and then action based on clear sighted noticing and that is unencumbered, that is free and only in the moment and of itself.

For me, to even get close to that sort of awareness, I have to dive deeply into body.

For me, to dive deeply into body, I have to enter into the most easeful flowing state of movement possible.

And so my study of yoga, my experience of yoga, is much about breath creating fluid and strong movement.

This is too big for standing in down-dog or pushing my students into triangles. We are not triangular.

We are water.

And the key to our water state is in the mobility of the spine.

And so, I bring to you what I will henceforth refer to as Water Spine Yoga. You can read more about it here.

No Sanskrit… I do not want to use language that might push people away who need this work.

(I could go into a long rant, too, about how current yoga is very heavily masculine energy yoga and how that’s not what we really need right now and how the yoga I teach is meant to strengthen our feminine energy so that we can go out into the world and be the warriors of love and compassion that we are meant to be, but I don’t really want to go into that right now. HA)

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.