From the Sanctuary: the problem with helping others

I think this will be a part of a new series that I will write here where I take from some of the extremely interesting conversations we have in the JoyBody Sanctuary (the free space that is private on Facebook that you can ask to be added to here).

Rule number one of the sanctuary is that whatever is said in the Sanctuary stays in the Sanctuary so I will only be sharing bits of my OWN WORDS.

Someone was talking about the toxic idea that we can get out of depression by helping others and here’s what I wrote in response:

This is, as always, more complicated than all the memes etc. make it out to be.

Because first, there is a LOT of truth to this.

Our interconnection is key to our health on every level.

But our culture is heavy on codependence and does not generally understand the different that is interdependence.

So we go at things like this with bitterness and should-ness and martyr energy.

And we could write BOOKS, of course, on the complications of this for WOMEN specifically because we are taught to BE martyrs.

But the doing for others needs to come from a... clearer place than that.

And yes, when it can come from a clearer place of compassion and WANTING TO, then it very much can take us out of ourselves in a healthy way.

So first, we must know what WE NEED and work on that.

Second, we have to have healthy boundaries.

Third, we need to work for a compassion that includes ourselves and does not turn compassion for others into a weapon against our own needs.

Fourth, we need to be able to distinguish feeling compassion for a human and the totally legit feeling of NO for some of their actions.

I think they biggest key though is our own needs... are they being met because I don't think we can truly work from a place of compassion without that.

But again, girls are raised to do exactly that... to ignore themselves in favor of everyone else.

Devotion to Essence not Form

This is key. To everything.

I’ve been talking to so many people about this in so many different settings.

We start a practice for a good reason, and at first, it seems to be “helping” In whatever way we were looking for help.

Then over time, this feeling of being helped diminishes. We become disillusioned with the practice. We blame the practice. We stop.

Here’s the thing: the practice isn’t entirely the problem; it’s our own misunderstanding of the big picture process that is the problem, and it’s why people jump from one thing to the next, always searching, never diving deep.

Now I said… the practice isn’t “entirely” the problem, because there is a problem when we get too married to a FORM of practice.

This next thing I’m going to say is important:

Form can be helpful... until it's holding us TO IT instead of holding us to the growth we went to it for.

Our devotion, to be effective and to help us evolve, needs to be to essence, not to form.

Look at WHY you are doing WHAT you are doing.

WHY are you doing yoga, for example? Because that WHY is your DEVOTION, not the form of yoga you’ve chosen.

One simple example from my own life:

Sometimes I study Buddhism. Deeply. Then I move to Tantra yoga. Then I even find my way back to the teachings of Christ.

For me, it’s not the form of the spiritual path but the path itself that I am walking and it is created as I walk it.

My devotion is to some sort of understanding of this life we’re all living. The form of that evolves over time as I grow and as my needs change via my experiences.

When it comes to movement practices, this is how the Peony Method was born.

The form of yoga was holding me to a certain shape — on the mat and in my life.

For a time in my life, that restricted shape helped me to feel safe.

But safety is no longer my number one concern because I AM safe.

Now freedom is my concern. Liberation. Thus the Peony Method is alway evolving. From minute to minute, I am breathing and waiting with patience and then allowing movement to arise that is honest to my present moment.

Find something like that, right there. Something that challenges your edges and simultaneously helps you to keep your center.

February Classes are Open for Registration

(If you’ve not read Katy Bowman’s Move Your DNA, I HIGHLY recommend it. I’m reading it for the third time right now.)

REMEMBER that you can attend my streaming classes live or use the videos whenever you want. AND the links for the videos stay available for the entire month. They don’t expire after 48 hours (which is how a lot of streaming classes do this).

FEBRUARY classes start, of course, on Tuesday February 1st, including:

Quickie Yoga: Two 20 minute classes a week that cover all your body’s basic needs in terms of movement nutrients. These are great also for breaking into smaller snack bites for use every day.

Peony Method, two versions: Slow Anatomy — a concrete approach — and Energy Body — a more woo approach. HA. Each are an hour once a week and you can save a bit of cash by taking both.

All the information and registration is here.

Happiness Toolbox: My Two Most Important Tools

That toolbox would be better if there were glitter but it’s pretty good…

This post is a rewrite of a post that I wrote on Blisschick many years ago and it popped up in my memories the other day and I thought… oh! that’s good.

AND I think this stuff is needed more than ever. So here we go.

I think I came up with the two most important tools that you need in your happiness toolbox.

First, I’ve been doing a shit ton of thinking about compassion and how we apply it not just to the world but to ourselves.

To ourselves.

I think we miss that part all too often.

This all seems very obvious, but every day we make decisions lacking compassion. We make decision based on some sense of right and wrong which is based on someone’s arbitrary rules about those things.

Rules can be dangerous weapons if they are not changed to fit each and every individual and situation. #ExperimentofOne

But if in every single situation, we apply the tool of compassion, we will see just how fluid our rules have to become.

And here is the first tool: in our lives, compassion should always be our guiding compass.

A compass will point true north.

And isn’t true north where our highest self resides? There is no confusion, no sense of righteousness; there is just love and compassion.

When you think you have been wronged, pull out this compass and see where it guides you. (And really, the most compassionate act might be that it guides you away from whomever wronged you.)

When you think you can know another’s heart, another’s experience of their own life, and thus judge it, pull out this compass and see where it guides you.

But again, do not forget: when you feel you are being at all mean to yourself, pull out this compass.

When you hear those freaking gremlins in your head, check your compass.

Being compassionate to ourselves has a lot to do with balance. When we are balanced — meaning getting the things we need — we treat ourselves with love and kindness and those things are then easier to extend to others.

Remember, though, that “balance” is not a static thing; it must be fluid.

This brings to mind an image from my childhoood:

A level. I can see my small hands carrying it around and just laying it on random things and watching that bubble move and waiting for it to land. There’s that exact center but there is some leeway.

Leeway /li:wei/ noun. Freedom of action within set limits; room allowed for this; a safety margin (Oxford English Dictionary)

Isn’t that a perfect description of how balance should function in our lives? We aren’t building a house here but a life so aiming for this space and not always hitting it exactly is good enough.

There is freedom of action but also set limits.

The level in my toolbox tells me I really need to MOVE every single day.

But… I can miss a day occasionally and get right back to it the next. I can do 40 minutes one day and ten the next and 75 the next, depending on what kind of day I am having and what my body is needing.

To keep my mind healthy there are a whole list of things I “should” do every single day but there is a safety margin to all of it. Little bits count. Not too many misses in a row matter.

A compass and a level. Those are the main tools in my glitter box.

Yours?

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.