The Seven Types of Rest

(Before we start talking about types of rest, the August session of Quickie Mindful Mobility and The Peony Method starts up the week of August 9th, so go here to register.)

Let's talk about types of rest. (And these come from a physician-writer and her book. I’ve not read that but listened to her speak about it.)

I work with enough people who have had issues with depression, that I've had to talk a lot about how too much rest can be a thing... too much napping can be a sign of something else happening.

That said, if we look at the different kinds of rest and think about in what ways we are actually exhausted... well, this would have helped years ago when I was first teaching this stuff.

A quick list with tiny notes.

Where are you needing rest and not getting it?

1. PHYSICAL REST: two types -- passive (naps, sleeping) and active (stretching, yoga, massage, etc.)

2. MENTAL REST: needed when we find ourselves trying to fall asleep and then we can't stop thinking, when we're working on too many things at once. The rest part of this is drilling down. Getting specific, for example, only thinking about one thing. Focusing on a word of the day. As for night time thinking, I found I could repeat a healthy phrase or sentence over and over and then it would stop and I would sleep.

Mental rest CAN ALSO come during physical activity. Runners feel like they're meditating, for example. AND the Peony Method has a ton of mental rest and we rest brain by moving body in specific but creative ways.

3. SOCIAL REST: being around people who NEED NOTHING FROM YOU. This is a HUGE part of the Peony Method, for sure.

4. SPIRITUAL REST: when you feel disconnected and despairing, you need this. It doesn't have to include any kind of religion. It's about a feeling of BELONGING but also just a feeling that your life matters and that you're connected to something larger. There are so many ways to get this, and again, The Peony Method does this.

5. SENSORY REST: I think we understand this the second we read it if we are at all extra sensitive. It can be as simple as turning your phone off at 8 PM every night. It can be going for a walk in the woods and just focusing on your breathing. The lake gave me this and number 4 in particular.

6. EMOTIONAL REST: for many reasons, we don't process emotion in the moment. The reasons for this are not always negative but they can be. So we need ways to process and allow ourselves to feel. This is also a HUGE part of the Peony Method -- maybe the CORE. (It's different, I'm sure, which is the highest priority for each student.)

7. CREATIVE REST: as creatives, we're often demanding of our creativity. We're often WORKING at it, one way or another. Creative rest for me is about going to a museum, listening to live music... anything where I am the RECEIVER.

As you can see, you can have very specific deficits in one or more of these areas, but the remedies tend to overlap, covering a few areas at once.

If you’re interested in the sorts of rest that the Peony Method can provide, a new session is starting for August on the 9th and 11th (or whenever you want to use the videos.) Go here for registration.

A Tiny Experiment for You

I shared this in the Sanctuary on Facebook and realized I should share it wider:

TASK at the end...

One time when I was at a training at Kripalu, a woman walked up to me during an open dance/movement class and said that watching me was like watching moving sculpture, and I think back to that often...

I think about how much that could change how a lot of humans think about dance and their own bodies and moving if they thought of it like that.

Too much what passes for dance now looks more like gymnastics and it ends up hurting the core of what dance is... ART... EXPRESSION... PRIMAL IMPERATIVE... RITUAL...

This tiny clip works here. The choreographer is sitting against the wall in the first frame... with all that lovely white hair...

TASK: over the coming days, even as you're just walking about... thinking about yourself like moving sculpture, like art, and ask what you are expressing even in that mundane movement.

EVERYTHING can be dance... or should be...

Forget, Remember, Forget, Remember... sigh

I’ve started Morning Nutbags up again, as I’ve written about over here, but there’s much more going on with my morning routine than that.

It’s really a three parter: first there is reading and journaling for about 20 minutes. Then I get on the Morning Nutbags zoom and do about 30 minutes of functional movement targeted to the specific issues and needs of my own body (I could make that for you, by the way… just sign up for a one on one and we can figure it out… I digress because SQUIRRELS!).

And finally after the nutbags, I go out for a walk.

I always hit this wall with walking where I suddenly just CANNOT anymore. It’s BORINGGGGGG! I whine and I just stop.

It doesn’t mean I’m not ever walking, ha, but it does mean I give up the daily of it.

Then I start again and remember all the things that I have forgotten approximately ONE MILLION (pinky to mouth) times in my life:

First, I like it. It feels good to get outside and be around people and the energy of our neighborhood.

Second, I really like listening to podcasts and stimulating my brain with other people’s insights.

Third, I also really like turning on some Go Gos or something high energy and walking really fast. It starts to almost feel like dancing. It makes me smile at people. (Scary.)

Fourth, and this one is really what I’m writing about…

My hips are so damn tight when I don’t walk like this every day.

We sit. We all SIT WAY TOO MUCH.

We know this. But we don’t REALLY know it until we FEEL it.

And for too many humans, we don’t really feel it until it becomes a screaming sort of pain and then a serious chronic issue.

Often we say things like… well, I am aging… or well, that’s what happened to my grandmother…

But really? It’s quite simply that we just sit TOO. DAMN. MIUCH.

Because guess what? In about a week or so, my hips will no longer ache at the beginning of my walks because body adjusts so freaking fast when we give it even a tiny bit of what it needs.

FREE 20 Minute Zoom Class to Help with Anxiety and Anger

This Friday, July 1st, I'll be doing a FREE QUICKIE (20 minutes) on Zoom specifically to deal with ANGER and FEAR and all the things we're feeling right now.

This is simple breath and movement work that can be done seated on the floor or in a chair. I always offer tons of modification.

This is also community ritual, which we definitely need more of right now (and forever).

We'll be doing a combo of a bunch of things I regularly use in the Peony Method (whether quickie or longer classes) that focus on the nervous system and creating happy brain chemical cocktails.

You can join without your camera on but I would love to see you!

We'll meet at 11:10 AM (United States, Eastern Time).

Once I see the interest, I'll get everyone the link.

Please let me know if you want to be included. You can give me a shout here or on Facebook messenger or anywhere where you and I interact.

I’ll also share a recording of this in the Sanctuary so if you can’t make it live, you can still access the work. (If you’re not in the Sanctuary, ask me to add you.)

These times seem to be for breaking hearts

I shared this meme on my Facebook business page in the hours right before we knew what had happened in Uvalde, Texas.

And that night there was class to teach. Which seemed ridiculous, right?

Until one student said, “I knew this was one of the safest places I could be right now for my mental health.”

Amen and thank you.

Community has always been such a huge part of the classes I teach.

I can remember when I first started teaching in my very own space in Erie, and how many times, new students would come up to me afterward and tell me they’d never felt so instantly welcomed and safe… that when they went to yoga spaces in town sometimes they weren’t talked to. ((WHAT?!)) Or that exercise spaces just felt too competitive and there was none of that in our space.

Amen and thank you, again.

It seems that that has not changed at all on Zoom and that feels like a little miracle to me. That we can meet from across so many many miles, and still, the main thing that happens in class together is that we are present to one another and we move in compassion, witnessing and being witnessed in whatever is happening for us in that moment, whether articulated with words or silence.

Movement is life, for sure. These bodies are built to move (in whatever way currently capable) and it’s all written in our cells and DNA that this movement should be, needs to be joyful and communal.

And yet…

The real reason for these classes and the real reason for movement is that the best way for us to bond deeply is through these bodies, engaged in nonsexual intimacies that are SEVERELY lacking in our current culture.

We are aching to be seen.

We are dying to be heard.

Literally.

Anger, hatred, fear… if you trace it back to its very origins, it always comes to this: these people who walk around every day with hearts of stone (who may or may not act on that in a directly violent way)… these people are screaming inside to be seen and heard.

They don’t have the tools to know how to simply ask for what they need.

They either weren’t taught, or when they were quite small, those tools were used but denied.

These times seem to be for breaking hearts… I mean this in so many ways.

There is a breaking that is good and healthy. It’s the breaking that happens when we’re very young and we’ve learned that we are safe and it’s time to venture out on our own.

It’s the breaking that happens when we lose someone we loved more than we thought possible and yet we continue on and their memory becomes the foundation of our strength and hope.

It’s the breaking that teaches us what we want and need by showing us what we do not want and do not need.

It’s a breaking that too many have hardened themselves against and so they stockpile — whether it be guns or cruelty or hatred or shame or power over others.

We must also stockpile…

But we must stockpile inner strength, compassion, love, empathy, and a soft willpower that gets things done without hurting others.

We will likely not live to see the new world that will evolve from all that’s been happening over the last six years, but we must keep healing ourselves of these broken hearts over and over again so that we can go out beyond ourselves, beyond our smaller and safe communities like the ones in my classes, and do the larger work that is calling for us right now, the work that is begging to be seen and heard and done.

If you need community like this, if you need support, if you need safety, June classes are starting on June 7th, and we would love to welcome you.

Why I'm not calling it yoga anymore

If you’ve been with me on this journey and/or taken my classes over the last few years to the last 13 years, you know that when I say I’m teaching a yoga class that you just never know what you’ll get. You know that I have a hard time staying still when it comes to what and how I teach.

You know I’m a seeker and a learner and a deep diver and that eventually everything goes into the big compost heap that is my brain and eventually comes out this body via something new in class that makes us all groan or laugh or, most often, both.

You don’t take classes with me because you’re someone who needs things to always be the same or who needs to know what the heck is going to happen from minute to minute.

You take classes with me because you know I’ll keep you safe and I’ll provide a familiar context but that there will always be something different happening to take you deeper into your own experience of your body/mind/heart.

You also probably know that even though I’ve been studying different lineages of and the philosophy of yoga now for about 25 years, I’ve also always had a love/hate relationship with how it’s used and how it’s taught in the West.

There’s so much missing from what most people call “yoga.”

I've thought long and hard about all of this and have been contemplating the idea of appropriation when it comes to yoga for years now.

On top of that, I simply don’t want to be constrained by someone’s ideas of what I’m teaching just because i use the word “yoga” because it’s simpler than other words or trying to explain myself.

Like I said, you know I’ve never taught a straight up yoga class in my life. Even though my classes most likely have had more prana focus and chant than most classes out there, more emphasis on the underlying philosophy than most.

I will not be calling anything I do "yoga," though I will always source my material and much of what I teach is derived from, again, over 25 years of studying many lineages of yoga.

But I respect the spiritual foundation of yoga too much and I also do not want to associate myself with others teaching yoga in a westernized, watered down way.

So from now on, if you’re looking for my wacky take on yoga, look for Peony Method ON THE MAT or Mindful Mobility. Those will be the “non-dance” versions of my work with lots of emphasis on breath, alignment/biomechanics, nervous system regulation, glandular system stimulation, and energy body schtuff.

Things Suck So We EXTRA Need Each Other and Our Practices

I don’t have the bandwidth to write some things that need to be written, but suffice it to say, that I am beyond angry at the world and that that anger has reignited some important and powerful parts of myself.

One part of me knows absolutely for sure that we need to be MOVING in these bodies MORE THAN EVER.

The next classes of sessions starts the week of May 10 so get over here and find something to do that will ground you in your power and energy because we need all of us at our best to get the shit done in this world that desperately needs to be done.

That said… I often use the words “body liberation” and it’s not some light thing that I say about feeling comfie. It’s much much much more than that and I want us all to be on the same page (or you can always go find another book to read because this book is about radical shit):

This is #bodyliberation: Creating culture and community that embraces every single human as the beautiful, fragile yet strong, inherently dignified beings we are. No exceptions.

We are creating (and we demand) culture and community in which your inner sense of yourself and your outer expression are never expected to clash.

We will no longer settle for anything less.

We stand in circle with all beings reaching for authentic, loving lives. #translivesmatter #womensrights #transrightsarehumanrights

Being seen for exactly who you are

I just came across a very old blog post from when I first started teaching… or maybe about two years in… and the main thing people seemed to be telling me about my classes was this very thing: that they felt utterly safe to be themselves and they felt completely seen as they actually are.

I like to think I am even better at doing that today after so many years.

I like to think this is one of the main gifts of this work.

AND I like to think that it still happens even via Zoom.

Though I don’t have to “like to think it” since students have confirmed that, for them, much of the same magic happens regardless of the form through which we have these experiences.

So if you’ve been on the fence about (re)joining us via the Zoom classes, April’s session might be the ideal time to try: it’s only 3 weeks, starting the week of April 11th, so it’s less time and resource commitment.

(Please remember that if for ANY REASON the cost is too much to simply let me know. You don’t have to tell me why. I will make adjustments for you.)

For now, registration is open for two versions of the hour long Peony Method and the twice a week, 20 minute quickies.

Another reminder: You can take them live, by video, or both.

Information and registration is here.