I see you

I remember the very first time I saw into someone so deeply that I realized I was seeing a very young version of them. It happened during my first training at Kripalu, before I started teaching, as I witnessed a woman dancing.

That’s when I realized that this work I was about to embark upon was/is profoundly sacred.

The act of seeing another human — actually and fully seeing them — is profoundly sacred.

And when you are vulnerable enough to allow for that seeing, we are in communion together, bringing forth your truth.

I don’t think I can describe the work I do — the work we do together — any better than that last sentence.

I make the space for that bringing forth to happen by giving you the opportunity and the tools to be that vulnerable. I give you a method and a process through which you can explore yourself and all your parts and experiences… wordlessly, with no need to explain or make excuses or even to “try to understand.”

I also make space for you to process and transmute all of this, to make space for it inside yourself, to create wholeness, and to really know your strength.

If that’s not “church” or “temple” or “ritual,” I don’t know what is.

The Tricksy of Wanting to Lose Weight

Here’s the thing, in this photo of me… a few years before I met Craig… I thought I was disgusting. That’s body dysmorphia right there. I literally could not SEE what I actually, in reality looked like.

I thought I “still” needed to lose at least 20 pounds here.

First, no.

Second, why? I would tell myself it was so my “dance lines could be seen.” As if they could not already.

My mental health, just like any humans, is directly linked to my physical health. We are integrated like that.

But my weight is not part of that equation except in a results/correlation sort of way.

I must move a LOT every day to really feel like my best self, to beat the depression monster that lurks in my distracted brain.

The amount of movement that takes happens to result in a smaller body … in MY very specific case. It doesn’t work like that for everyone.

People will often think that because I encourage you to love your joybody that I am anti-weight loss.

I’m not.

I’m anti body punishment.

I’m anti self hate.

I’m anti food deprivation.

I’m anti food labeling (“good” versus “bad”).

I’m anti whatever you’re doing that is NOT joyful.

I’m not anti weight loss, but I do want you to be very clear about your weight loss goal.

Where does it come from? Is it true to your body type? Are you loving yourself? Are you moving and eating with joy and play and fun and delight at the center?

Are you living outside the constant worry about and obsession over numbers — the number on the scale, the number of the size of your pants, calorie counts, any freaking number that brings you anxiety?

How are you eating and moving lately that brings you joy? I’d love to hear.

6 Week Quickie Kundalini Yoga for Your Nervous System: Live or Recorded, Twice a Week, 20 minutes a class

NOTE: this session, live yoga will be on Wednesday and Friday, but again, you can also opt to watch the recordings after.

If your nervous system doesn’t feel pretty damn fried after the last year (four years), then I’m not sure what planet you’ve been living on, but whoa… for those of us who are feeling fried, Kundalini is here to help with that.

Kundalini is extra for brain health. With repeated movements, we’re actually working to reset and redesign brain. We’re also working on all the major glands.

Add in breath work and internal focus and you leave even a short class feeling calm but energized and focused (says this girl with the most scattered — SQUIRREL !! — brain who also has been battling depressive episodes for her whole life).

To read more about what an actual Christine-alini Kundalini yoga class looks like go here.

If you’ve never taken a ZOOM class with me, PLEASE GO HERE AND READ CAREFULLY. Pay special attention to how we handle music.

WHAT YOU GET:
ACCESS TO TWO 20 MINUTE PRACTICES A WEEK, WHICH YOU CAN WATCH LIVE OR YOU CAN WATCH THE RECORDING WHEN YOU HAVE TIME. IT’S ALL UP TO YOU.

Again, all practices will stay available to you for a week past the end of the session.

TIME ZONE: I’m in the Eastern U.S. Time Zone. For those of you for whom that might not mean much, I’m in the same time zone as New York City.

ALSO NOTE: Classes, though online, START ON TIME. You can jump in late, but I won't be waiting.

COST: $75 for SIX weeks, twice a week and unlimited access to all recordings during the session (and for one week beyond the session)
TIME: 10:30 AM (I get on about 10:20 for some chatting!)
Wednesdays: April 21, 28, and May 5, 12, 19, 26
Fridays: April 23, 30 and May 7, 14, 21, 28

April Yoga Philosophy Practice: Asteya (Nonstealing) (With a little note about where I've been...)

When I started this practice this year, I said there are 10 of these practices so we’ll have two months to review at the end of the year. HA! March got eaten up by the whole process of buying and then closing on and then moving into our new home in Columbus. If you wanna be nosey (and who doesn’t!?), it’s right here.

I cannot explain to you what a freaking miracle this purchase was. I never thought we’d find something in Victorian Village, mere blocks from the main arts district. But here we are. If you knew our home in Erie, this space is that square footage, BUT there’s an undeveloped attic space here that shows a ton of promise as an art and music space for Craig and general storage. We’re settled in and excited.

Now to begin again with our yoga inquiries…

Nonstealing seems pretty obvious, right? Don’t take what’s not yours. We tend to limit our thinking around this to the material world, to concrete objects that do not belong to us. So, most of us, can feel pretty good right away about ASTEYA… most of us can immediately say, I’m good here! I don’t steal.

But that is the most simplistic level of this yama (restraint).

Over the coming month, think about and observe yourself relative to the following questions. Try to observe and not also layer on shame. Guilt is okay; it can tell us something is off. But shame is not productive.

1. How often do you steal from YOURSELF? This one is freaking VAST, right? When we’re not true to who we are, we’re stealing. Every time we don’t honor our own needs, we’re stealing. When we give too much to others, we’re stealing from us. There is so much we steal from ourselves: energy, time, integrity, care, love, trust, faith, belief… the list could truly go on and on…

2. How often do you steal from others? Do you pop someone’s excitement balloon? Do you rain on friends’ parades? Do you not tell them something they need to know? Again… this list could take many pages.

3. How much do you steal from this earth? I can barely begin to start the list of questions here. Follow yourself through your day and just notice…. did you leave the water running? Did you drive when you could have walked? Did you waste food? Sigh…

4. Are you stealing from the future? We are someone’s ancestors. What are we leaving behind?

I would love to hear from you on this one. Even if we all just added more questions, that would be helpful to the community at large.

Dance is an Act of Rebellion

Dancing has always been an area of control for the dominant culture. Patriarchy, for example, has always equated the female body dancing with prostitution, and dancers, to this day, are statistically the most in poverty of all professionals in all arts.

Dancing is freedom. Dancing is expression of truth. Truth cannot be hidden in a dancing body.

And dancing is joy. Joy is power. Joy fuels us. Joy reminds us of who we are and that we are worthy. That is too much for the patriarchy... they want us seated and still.

@notoriouscree

Crow hop styles ##dance ##native ##nativeamerican

♬ Crow Hop - Northern Wind

I do not teach movement...

It may seem that I teach movement. I do not. I teach compassion for self and others. I teach the building of healthy communities of care and support. I teach vulnerability married to self empowerment.

Elder dancer, Flo, who understood the prayer aspects of this work better than almost any other student I’ve ever had.

I do this in the context of movement because we need better ways of being together and growing together. AND we need ways that aren't about food or alcohol or even WORDS because all of that can so easily get in the way.

I do this in the context of movement, too, because most of us are desperately disconnected from the primal power and essential wisdom of these bodies.

If we weren't disconnected from our bodies we would not SETTLE for SO LITTLE in these lives.

We would not EVER settle for ANY kind of abusive "love."

We would never ever tolerate "leaders" who do not give a shit about us.

We would never ever feel LACK and so we'd create a culture of giving and taking care of.

If we weren't disconnected from these bodies, we would never drink the poison of toxic masculinity, white supremacy, and patriarchy.

All systems of oppression, whether internal or external, count on us remaining numb to our feelings, numb to our intuitions, numb to our wisdom, numb to our power, and especially numb to our connections to each other and to this world.

When we re/member ourselves through movement, we are practicing re/membering what we are actually here to do — to love one another so that each of us can be fully ourselves. That’s it.

The Magic of Ten Minutes

How many of my students and private clients have expressed the idea that if they’re not doing an hour of this or that or if they aren’t completely exhausted after moving or if they aren’t sweating buckets that they didn’t “try hard enough” or they aren’t “committed enough.”

Too many. And because an hour and exhaustion and that kind of sweat feels like a LOT when we think about it, we have already defeated our healthy impulses before we even begin. If we manage to begin, that is, with those kinds of heavy ass expectations.

I’ve talked a lot in the past about overcoming asshole brain’s desire to stay on the couch in front of the TV (or wherever you are stuck) by telling it “just five minutes” and then once you’re moving, it’s quite easy for those five minutes to turn into 20.

But those five minutes do not have to turn into 20.

Those five minutes count for something all on their own. By doing those five minutes, well, you’ve done the thing and you’re training your brain to get out of the way. You’re, again, doing rewiring work which takes longer than we want it to but that’s that.

Now I’m talking about ten minutes.

Craig got me roller skates for Christmas. I haven’t been on roller skates since my teens. At the time, I was good on them. Solid. Could even do a couple tricksie things.

And for some reason I expected them to be like getting on a bike again after years — pretty much easy peasy.

NOT!! I SUCK!!!! But that will not stop me.

I practice in our basement because it has that super low carpet that slows me down just enough but still allows me to glide.

Here’s the thing: I’m only doing 10 minutes at a time. There’s more going on with this than meets the eye.

I’m working some forgotten muscles, for sure, but my brain is exploring and learning a ton of new material here. It’s been long enough that I am totally back at beginner level, and this is where we get the best benefits in terms of brain health.

Ten minutes at a time. That’s about it. Sometimes closer to 15 but mostly just 10.

Why? Because if I tried too hard for loo long right at the beginning, I would get overly frustrated (and overly sore). I don’t want to be frustrated. I want to be learning from a place of joy.

THAT is the magic RIGH THERE.

When we were small, we didn’t do things for any other reason. If we didn’t like something, we tried something else. And when we liked something, we stuck with it because it was giving us this sense of joy. (This is our natural state. I’m not speaking to shitty parenting that forces…that’s another issue.)

Ten minutes. And let me tell you… even after just FIVE times on my skates, I was already significantly better. And not frustrated. I still look forward to skate days because I didn’t go at it like some downhill freight train. I’m flirting. I’m testing. I’m playing. I’m joyful.

Expanding Our Internal Peace

I have BIG EMOTIONS. (If you know me, you’re laughing and wondering if I could say something more obvious.) I think I’ve been this way since I was very small. My mother tells the story that you could sit me in front of the TV when I was a toddler and I would just basically laugh my little ass off at anything that was remotely funny.

Because of that, for a long time, I resisted the word peace. The very concept shouted BORING to me. Who wants to be all quiet all the time!?

I think a lot of people equate the concept of peacefulness with a certain kind of weakness. I mean, duh, our culture LOVES war in all its forms. It’s our favorite set of metaphors to apply to every aspect of life.

But like the word love, I think we are confused about what peace actually is and how it’s related to feelings and emotions.

Peace is not the opposite of war, just as love is not the opposite of hate. Peace and love do not have opposites. They are the nature of the universe. They are the fabric of everything. War and hate are human manifestations of perceived lack and unresolved pain.

Peace and love (which I see as folded into and the same as “joy”) are our true nature, and they are truly the only states from which we can create justice and goodness and art and beauty.

They do not, though, eradicate the possibility of anger and sadness and grief and rage. Those things exist within the scope of human emotion and feeling.

Peace, love, joy… these are NOT emotions or feelings but rather actions and ways of being.

So we can be angry and then still create justice through the energy of peace. (This is a lot and I’m moving through it fast but just think to the basic teachings of Gandhi, MLK, Christ, Dorothy Day…and too many others to list.)

I now think of and experience peace as clarity of vision and knowing. I like the word “clearness” even better here than clarity. CLEAR. Like clean water and bright light.

I also think that to chase peace can be a frustrating and futile effort like chasing happiness.

I believe this is why meditation to find it often doesn’t work for people. Peace is more like a shy woodland creature for many of us because we’ve known it so little in our lives and it’s not sure it can trust us. (Stay with me, here.)

Our own inner peace is so often very deeply buried under intense pain and fear and just mistrust that we can ever live in this sort of state. We’ve been taught that good things should be difficult, that life is about working hard, that love can be fleeting so watch out, that other people are our competition and should be kept at a certain distance, and that we ourselves are never strong enough, good enough, or worthy enough.

Peace feels like a golden carrot at the end of an infinitely long stick and we’ll never ever do or be enough to finally grab it, and if we did, it would very likely turn out to be an illusion and turn to dust in our grasp.

So what do we do? How do we ever find any kind of expanded internal peace/love/joy if they are all that golden carrot but are resistant to “trying.”

We start by getting more honest about all the inner crap that is clogging our way to our true, basic nature.

We do work that clears that. We resolve. We heal. We spend more time in the body, allowing the body to express itself, breathing, settling, getting more and more comfortable with some inner stillness.

The body is the key here. The body can only live in the now. And when we get deeply enough into body, brain and mind chatter start to either shut down or slow down enough that we can identify the problems, the levels of utter ridiculousness with which we torture ourselves every day. We start to CLEAR our inner sight.

For me, this happens most in dance and vigorous movement. It’s like the more my body is being engaged, the more easily I can enter the eye of my inner storm and view it from that place of quiet.

Now, after about 12 years of serious practice at this, now and only now have I finally been able to cultivate a more traditional looking meditative sort of practice, one in which I am actually seated in stillness but this has only happened because I’ve gotten to the place where that inner forest of creatures is no longer scary to me. I feel strong enough in my physical body to enter into the other layers of this body — the emotional, mental, and spiritual.

And here finally, I am able to coax out that woodland creature and feed it a bit. We’re actually becoming friends.