Body Bypassing

We often speak of "spiritual bypassing," but there's SO MUCH body bypassing in this culture.

A lot of us (including myself for far too many years) walk around disconnected to the point that, for example, I often said that if you cut off my body, my head wouldn’t notice. At the time, I thought that was pretty funny.

As humans in a traumatizing culture, a large number of us have gotten far too adept at dissociating.

Feeling our feelings can feel overwhelming, but that’s because we aren’t encouraged to feel our feelings … which decreases our capacity to … feel our feelings. (Round and round we go.)

It starts when we’re little and we start hearing any number of the following…

• Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about.

• You’re too sensitive.

• You care too much about … everything.

• Do not show anger.

• Your excitement is … too much; bring it down a few notches.

And we’re also told a million things about our bodies:

• Sit still.

• Don’t climb that/hang there/walk so close to…

• Be careful. (This one is telling us that we can’t trust our own judgment or our body’s ability to do hard things.)

• You take up too much space

• Take up more space.

• You’re too fat.

• You should gain weight.

And on and on…

Our culture is designed to push us and our experiences deeper and deeper into our brains, shutting off access to all the intelligence of our senses AND our instincts, our inner voices, our guts, our hearts… our inherent wisdom is blocked.

Our wisdom is blocked but so too is the mechanism by which we can calibrate all the chemicals that keeps us happy and joyful and creative, and that mechanism is moving this body.

Somehow in all of this, there is also a body-based gaslighting. We start to believe that the body isn’t even important.

We look to sitting still as spiritual practice. We look to deprivation of sensory experiences as spiritual practice. Think about fasting and celibacy, just for two examples. We see people who do those sorts of things as somehow “enlightened.” One cannot be “enlightened” when one is not engaged in their own damn humanness.

We start to think that we can just think/pray/journal/talk our way out of all of this pain or lack of fulfillment. Not that those aren’t good things in and of themselves but they do NOT replace the body based experiences we are built for.

Alas…

You ARE this body and this body's very makeup is about movement. We are built to move. The imperative to move is encoded in our structure on every level.

NOT MOVING can be a sign of depression and anxiety but it's also fertile ground for depression and anxiety to grow, and this culture grows those two things at rates we’ve never seen before.

Disclaimer: moving is different for all of us so I'll repeat this forever: AS LONG AS THERE IS BREATH, THERE IS DANCE.

What Dance Looks Like When Things are Difficult: Or Authentic Dance is Not What You Think It Is

In the JoyBody Sanctuary, a member wrote this:

"...so Christine, will you talk about how to dance through hard things? When the pandemic hit my whole body went into freeze and I can do other things but not dance."

At first, I answered with some suggestions about music and tapping into parts of ourselves that at one point were already able to dance and took joy in it. That's important, but it's really only the first layer of this work, and I think going deeper into why and how I teach is demonstrative of what separates The Peony Method that I've developed from most things out there.

In the Peony Method, we're not using dance to FEEL JOY. There's no "fake it til you make it." (There are some prompts that I use that we play with that idea but we take it much further and I don't want to focus on that right now.)

In the Peony Method, we're using dance in its most fundamental and spiritual way -- and the way it anthropologically evolved.

We're not dancing to feel joyful.

We're using dance/movement art as a TOOL to first, FEEL EVERYTHING.

Second, to TRANSMUTE everything.

And third, over time, to get back in touch with our essential joybody.

BUT THIS TAKES TIME and it's a process/practice that is meant to last for your life. The material is that deep. It's also material that is constantly spiraling in and out of itself as you go through layer after layer of the calcified crap that life has plastered over your soft heart.

This is one of those cases that really demonstrates how we've degraded dance over time AND how we have dismissed the body as our main tool to enlightenment/evolution.

We put all other arts above dance not only artistically (don't get me started on the association of prostitution with dance to this day) but also therapeutically.

Expressive arts, for example, almost always focus on writing and visual arts as their main tools.

That's all just a bit of background... now to Leela's actual question.

The answer lies in how we think about dance and the processes.

So first, as laid out above, we let go of dance as "feel good" or "fun" or whatever is blocking us from getting to the music and our bodies.

We start at the beginning.

Which means removing the crap.

Which means doing something as simple as putting on loud music and PUNCHING KICKING JUMPING SCREAMING STOMPING .

That is dance as ritual process.

And right now when life pretty much sucks all around us, this might be your only practice for some time.

Then suddenly, after doing this for weeks or months or whatever, you might notice that the music on the radio in the car is making you bop about a bit.

After doing this for some time, you might hear yourself giggle.

After doing this for some time, you might even be able to listen to music that used to make you sad.

But we have to start at the beginning.

Release.

Then comes acts of noticing.

So a second practice could be as simple as putting on music, standing up, and focusing solely on your feet... moving them, stretching them, smooshing them, etc. Getting INSIDE your feet.

These noticing practices are what is keeping me going during all of this grief.

There’s so much more to all of this but this is a good starting point.

If you can't meditate, there's nothing wrong with YOU but with what you're trying to do

I want to talk about meditation, but first a couple of things:

If you have a classic sitting meditation practice that works for you, great. That's you. #ExperimentofOne And I don't want this to turn into a discussion about how that works.

And to be clear, I have studied with some of the leaders in the field of somatic psychologies. For a long time. They would agree with what I'll say here.

Meditation is (like everything) not for everyone, but it can actually be dangerous if you're still in the worst parts of anxiety, depression, OCD, CPTSD, and many other mental illnesses.

I've said this in person enough times to know that some of you probably just breathed a sigh of relief, thinking there was something inherently wrong with you because meditation feels so impossible. There's nothing wrong with you when it comes to meditation. Meditation is just not necessarily right for you... for right now. (And that might be forever, depending.)

Stay with me here...

Whether or not you've experienced physical or sexual abuse of any kind (and especially then), if you're someone suffering from mental illness, the BODY ITSELF does NOT feel safe.

To SIT in the body and watch the mind CAN BE like throwing gasoline on a fire.

And this is where movement practices come in.

For all of my 20s and 30s, people would tell me to meditate to help with my depression, etc.

And I was one of those who thought there must be something even more wrong with me because it made me feel worse.

THEN I started to dance again. And FINALLY my mind could quiet in that context.

Keeping the body moving, focusing on the breath, and focusing a lot of the brain on a problem solving prompt (a simple example: make as many circles in space with your body as you can)... this quiets the part of the brain that often felt like it was out to get me (my metaphorical experience... insert your own here).

Furthermore, over time and I mean TIME (months to many many years), your brain creates new neural clusters and pathways marked "body is safe to feel."

This happens BECAUSE you are working with someone (like me perhaps) who can create safe ways for you to be in your body feeling all the things, bit by bit... I watch for overwhelm of the system and pull you back when that happens.

Because re-traumatizing is not the damn goal. Which CAN happen if you're sitting in your own nest of awful during meditation with no one there to bring you out of it.

As Gabrielle Roth said, most of our problems were created and exacerbated in the brain/mind; we can't use that same tool for healing. At least and especially not during the initial phases of healing, which again, can go on for many years.

The movement work I teach is not some once in a while thing to be done when you're feeling extra bad or extra good. It's a lifetime practice of tools to be used over and over as we go through new and challenging experiences.

And I have to add ... part of the healing is due to the COMMUNITY aspect of the work. RELATIONSHIP is where true healing happens.

The Lie of Effort Bringing Reward

I’m pretty used to chronic pain. Or I should say that I’ve had a lot of time in my life where it was the norm. Then I started to dance at 40 and I got rid of most of it for the majority of that decade.

Something might come up here and there but I made a little effort around it and it was gone in no time.

Because that’s how things work, right? You put in effort and you get rewarded.

No.

SOMETIMES that is how things work. Sometimes rewards simply are not on their way no matter what you do.

My strong and very healthy shoulders six years ago.

There can be a million reasons for this, unique to each human, but when we assume that effort brings reward, this leads to the moralizing of effort which then leads to judgement of humans we think are not “efforting” enough.

It’s the basis of all ableism (and of toxic capitalism that says enough effort can bring wealth to anyone no matter what but I’m focusing on body issues here and that is a whole book in and of itself).

This year, I’ve been dealing with a shoulder tear. Not bad enough to warrant surgery (which I want to avoid and my doctor agrees) but bad enough that I lost a ton of mobility and was in constant pain and had a hard time sleeping etc. I got a shot and that helped enough to let me start doing serious P.T. on myself.

Which has increased my mobility but I’m still only at a B grade.

Now, I’ve always been extremely mobile and very strong, so my idea of an A grade is different than a majority of humans, but I’m not willing at this age to give up on that. Because that’s a slippery slope right there.

All of that brings me to a few nights ago when I was crying to Craig about the progress I was making not being enough and not being fast enough and what if this is IT!?!?

That’s when it really hit me that I’ve always bought into the ableist crap of effort = reward.

Any doctor I’ve ever had for issues like this can’t get over the effort I put in. They say “no one does that. People want pills and surgery.”

I work hard and I’m consistent. And I stay consistent over long periods of time. I am stubborn in those good ways (and some bad ones but alas…).

And still… with all my stubborn consistency, hard work, and the knowledge I have about what to do and how, I am still not healed.

There are two things here that I want to emphasize.

First, sometimes we think we’re not getting the reward for our effort because it’s happening too slowly and in too small increments to notice. So we give up or we dilute our efforts and this then proves to us that we are not succeeding and “SEE!?!? This is why it’s not worth it!!! NOTHING is happening!” Self fulfilling prophecy type stuff.

I myself — Ms. Stubborn — have been tempted to give up in this very way.

Second, sometimes we’re simply not going to succeed. Sometimes things are worse than people can know. Sometimes there are circumstances that simply cannot be overcome.

This is hard. As a culture, we want to believe that there’s always the possibility of success.

But sometimes the success we need is the redefinition of what that looks like for us, the altering of expectations, the release of a strict goal so that we can move forward and start in a new way.

I believe that there’s ALMOST always room for improvement and space to create new mobility and strength, but sometimes this will look different than we want it to, and that’s got to be okay.

The Betrayal of Self and The Rebuilding of Trust

There are a lot of reasons we can't "hear" our body's wisdom anymore. One of the most common? Learning from an early age that our desires/needs weren't to be our primary concern/responsibility but instead that we were supposed to focus on being a certain way to fulfill others' needs.

This happens to almost everyone in one way or another, but for some, it’s more directly intense and much more destructive of the sense of self that’s crucial to individuation and a sense of fulfillment.

Learning to listen again can feel scary, for sure. It can feel totally overwhelming. We can feel like the emotions that come with it are too much. Or perhaps we have simply decided we aren't worth the effort.

The Peony Method is gentle and it takes time but eventually? All of this can and will change.

We must start with simply allowing the body to be what it is in this moment. We spend a lot of our lives in this culture trying to manipulate the body into a certain form or action, only to then get angry at the body for not doing so or not doing so quickly enough.

We are betraying ourselves in those moments and so trusting starts right there.

Trusting starts with acknowledging, noticing, allowing, and eventually? Being fascinated. I’ve seen it thousands of time — women thinking they’d never be able to feel fascination within their own bodies “UNLESS…” (fill in the blank… they were thinner, stronger, had this or that…). But they’re always wrong. And delighted to be so.

It won’t happen over night, but over time… with patience and commitment to practice.

Things Pretty Much Suck and Yet We Still Must...

I’m writing this the day after the Texas fuckery. I don’t have the capacity to really write about that yet. I’m seething.

It feels like the world is just falling apart… or imploding… Like I said, I don’t have the words yet.

Which makes me feel like, oh, right, duh… movement.

Isadora Duncan was once asked what one of her dances MEANT, and she said, “If I could tell you then I wouldn’t need to dance.”

Exactly.

At times like this, it can be easy — for me anyway — to succumb to an externally created depression. To just give up. Lay down. Do nothing.

Which is what evil shits want, right?

Getting into these bodies and feeling the anger and the grief and the overwhelm is the only way. Once we do that, we can start transforming that energy into something to counter what’s happening — even just in tiny bits at a time.

Like in that image to the right… I was working some serious stuff out there. Without the need for words.

Anyway… like I said… I’m feeling pretty quiet.

But if you need space to move and be with others, the next session starts on Tuesday, September 7th.

All the yoga and movement art are right here.

AND remember that you can participate live or use the video whenever you want.

AND FEEL FREE TO WRITE TO ME TO ASK ABOUT A DROP IN IF YOU’RE CURIOUS ABOUT WHAT WE DO.

You Only Need One Yoga Pose

This photo is from about ten years ago, and yes, there’s my actual, original hair color. And this is me with Erich Schiffmann, still my favorite of all the “big” yoga teachers. He’s the real deal to the core. A gentle bear of a man who is brilliant and funny.

This yoga retreat with him took place in Yellow Springs, OH, now under an hour from where Craig and I live (and I can’t wait to take him there because that town is adorbs).

Okay… enough background stuff…

The whole retreat with him, we listened to dharma talks, meditated, and did downdog and child’s pose.

That was it… downdog and child’s pose over and over and over… it was WONDERFUL.

To focus on those postures alone was enough.

Because with a good teacher, one posture contains the entirety of yoga.

And to really get to know yourself inside one posture? That’s the entirety of yoga.

How much we distract ourselves with newness… even in yoga.

It reminds me of Butoh, actually… taking our time to notice the most micro of details. Going SO SLOWLY that we can’t help but run into our own crap.

And lately, as I listen to Sadhguru on my walks, he is constantly saying the same thing. He mocks American yoga with its obsession with SO MANY POSES.

KNOW ONE POSE, he says, that’s all you need.

As a teacher, I feel the pull to constantly be changing things up, but that comes from how we’re taught that everything is supposed to be endlessly entertaining.

In the meantime, we are turning our spiritual physical practices into yet another mode of consumption. More, more, more.

As we feel like less, less, less.

Nothing will fill an emptiness of that kind.

Slowing down. Paying attention. Limiting our intake.

We can finally truly come into contact with our wounded parts, and then we just might have the patience to sit with them.

A Question to Tap into the Wisdom of Your Original Self/Body

When I do one on one work with people, it can look about a million ways, but one thing stays consistent: Homework.

Mostly, I listen to you. I’m listening for experiments that you can run to get more into your body, to become more aware of what you really need, to take better care of yourself.

This can be something simple like taking the typical two weeks between our sessions to really notice what tastes good. Or to set up some mini altar to pay attention to a particular aspect of yourself every day for a few minutes.

Recently during a one on one, it was a question that came to me that I then told my client to ask herself every time she was starting to feel uncomfortable in a situation or with a person.

Or you can even use this question as you enter any new situation or encounter any person any time. It could become a really great habit, actually.

This question won’t necessarily create word based answers, and that’s the point of it.

This question will most likely create instant body based reactions like sick tummy, butterflies, a feeling of wanting to run, or maybe warmth and peace.

HERE:

Is my little self feeling safe and taken care of here/with this person?

It helps if you have a specific “little self” in mind. I use the one in this photo. Look at that silly/happy/open face. She’s my perfect go-to wise woman.

Now I know that a lot of my students experienced awful trauma, even at a very young and tender age, but that actually doesn’t matter with this question.

This question will STILL help you tap into your wise and knowing self. It will tap into the part of you that even at that young age knew what and who was wrong and bad and unsafe. It will tap into that part of you that even at that young age was developing coping mechanisms to protect themselves.

Ask the question and slow your breathing and keep asking it until your answer becomes clear.

The second part here is important…

THEN ask your ADULT self, what do I need to do to take care of this little self in this context, relative to their answer to that first question.

Because it’s your adult self that that little self was waiting for all along. You can do this.