Practices Matter More than Ever

Christine’s movement guidance, for me, is a sacred form of mindfulness where I am gently forced into listening to the fiberoptic highway of my body.

It is a practice as beautifully healing and helpful as prayer and meditation with the chemical and musculoskeletal benefits movement brings.

It is body language, but not in the sense of sitting across from someone else trying to figure out what they're thinking. And it is also allowing the body to talk, but not in the Olivia Newton John's, Let's Get Physical sense. (Linda)

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So often it’s my students who describe this work so much better than I ever can. I’m always grateful when they have the bandwidth to write a few words…

Because right now, we’re all really limited on bandwidth. More so, it seems, every week, as one thing after another just follows one thing after another and it seems there is no end.

Because there is no end.

Life is suffering, said the Buddha, and though that used to just piss me off, lately I find comfort in those words. I am not alone. We all suffer. Life is what it is but we can, as the Buddha goes on to say, work with that suffering to come to a place of peace.

I like to think that the work I offer this world, most especially The Peony Method, is one part of a path to that inner peace that we’re all, ultimately, seeking.

We just want to feel … okay and… steady… and like we have some say in what our own lives look like.

I think it’s crucial, now more than ever, that we take the time for practices that align us with those better, more sane, more loving parts of ourselves.

If you need that, March classes start next week. If classes feel too vulnerable, remember that I work one on one also.

The Joy of Lent (that's what I said...): An introduction to the idea behind The Re/Joy Project

A yoga sadhana is a practice meant to transform you.

TRANS. FORM.

Make you into a new form.

Often a dedicated sadhana will last 40 days, and so we come to lent.

Like any religious practice, lent is only as effective and meaningful as the energy we’re willing to put into it.

First we have to decide that this time is more than just an excuse to diet (don’t do that regardless…). And second, we have to decide to reclaim it from the toxic Christianity that has overtaken the truth and beauty of what Christ actually intended.

It’s no accident that lent takes place during this time when we’re all feeling the weight of winter and a deep desire to awaken to more light and warmth. (And my god… as I re-read that sentence… all we’ve been through and all that is currently happening… it surely takes on even more meaning than I even first intended.)

In the Northern Hemisphere, the body of Earth herself is awakening over the next 40 days. By the time we get to the end of lent, most of us will be seeing a profusion of (or the start of a profusion of) tulips, daffodils, green buds, returning birds, pea shoots, thawed bodies of water, warmth in the air, sun that penetrates to bone.

Are we not meant to go through the same process?

Alas, lent ends in a death, you protest, so how can it be included in this more pagan view of rebirthing/awakening things? Regardless of resurrection (or instantaneous reincarnation, as I like to think of it), that death was meant to remove the final veil of fear so that we might live in these bodies “free of all anxiety.”

This time of year is meant for us to shed all the darkness of winter, but more than that, it’s meant to take us through processes that help us to shed the idea of body as burden.

Perhaps we can take on a different sort of lenten journey in which we awaken the body to the light and warmth of our own love for ourselves and thus deepen our capacity to love “other.”

I challenge you — during this very serious time of the year and this very serious time of all of our lives — to be less serious and more joyful.

For lent, I am consciously working on “giving up” my existential despair as a default coping and protection mechanism.

I am consciously working on “giving up” disbelief in the wonder and beauty and magic of life.

I am consciously working on embodying the joy of Peony the Cat.

Would you like to join me?

To start, I will be spending more time cataloging things that bring me joy.

Cataloging can look like written lists but also photos. #DailyJoy

I’ll be paying extra attention to noticing every bit of earth awakening right around me.

I’ll also be spending more time moving in ways that bring me a deep sense of connection to the joy well that already exists within me but that I tend to disregard when things are going badly in the outside world.

What might you add to this list? #therejoyproject

Moving into the something larger; grounding into now

For some of us, traditional meditation only leads to exacerbated symptoms of depression and anxiety. It can feed the loops that support PTSD.

(There are some PTSD specialists who actually say that meditation should be avoided unless it is done with some supervision and with a movement component.)

And for some of us, the way yoga is taught through repeated forms and static holds can do the same thing.

I was/am definitely one of those people. Yoga was okay for me but it was still a space that could be somewhat dangerous for my mind, depending on where I was on my own personal depression/anxiety spectrum at the time.

Kundalini Yoga was the least dangerous of all for me as it is full of more spontaneous type movement. I often tell people that Kundalini yoga did not heal me but it kept me from getting worse and it prepared me for what I actually needed… the stuff I now teach that is more dance based.

When I dance or engage in movement play and experiments, when my bod is busy solving some sort of movement "problem" (and it doesn't matter if you're standing, on the floor, in a chair...)... that is when I will sense my way into the fertile ground of my own individual emptiness and my felt connection to something larger.

That is what The Peony Method is all about.

I can’t ever figure out how to explain what happens internally. Both of these statements are simultaneously true:

1. “It takes me out of myself and into spaciousness.”

2. “It grounds me into my nowness of being.”

Both/and.

I know I am in an internal space of truthfulness when I am practicing these methods, because if I feel at all confused about ANYTHING IN MY LIFE, I hear my authentic voice and get immediate and right answers as soon as I fall into the space that one and two up there are describing.

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.

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.

If you can't cry...

We had a good discussion around crying in the Sanctuary this past week.

The ability to cry and to release is absolutely crucial to our overall health.

It took me a long time to learn this so I understand when people say they have a hard time crying or they tend to stop themselves from crying or they fear that once they start they won’t be able to stop.

I’ve said all those same things.

And when I did cry, I was one of those people who would apologize for it.

Then my entire life changed about 8 years ago. More than anything, I was overcome with fear. I knew that I had been not living my right life. I had known that for a long time but the fear of change and the fear of the unknown kept me from stepping out of it.

Once I did… oh my GOD did the crying start.

Soon I realized that I was crying every day whether I wanted to or not, and at first, this was hard AF.

But over time, I stopped fearing the crying itself. And I started to notice how after a bit of crying, I could get into my breath and feel better.

Once I learned that, I started to bring intentionality to my crying.

Every night I would get into bed and sit in meditation and ask my body if it needed to cry some more. It usually did so I allowed that. It started lasting shorter and shorter amounts of time and I started to see the connection between all of that release and really good sleep.

I don’t remember when the daily crying stopped. It lasted about a full year.

At the same time that this crying was happening, my heart was opening to more and more joy in my life.

Eventually that led to meeting Craig and just feeling like I was finally living my truth in every area — relationships, work, spirituality.

Crying watered the seeds of all of that joy.

Locking ourselves down doesn’t just stop the crying. It stops all the other big emotions — including the good ones that we say we want more of.

Creating internal space for this emotional work starts with allowing the body to express. The Peony Method is for that work.

We are gently and with playfulness exploring being completely present to our physical forms SO THAT we can affect the chemistry of our brains SO THAT we can expand/evolve our spirits.

It just so happens that TUESDAYS during the January session are great for newbies.

If your brain needs a more concrete approach to this work, this is for you. We’ll be spending a lot of time exploring joints, body parts, and muscle and tendon connections via focused, breath based, slow movement. I want this class to leave you feeling relaxed and stretched but also like you’ve found new and fascinating things about how your body works.

REMINDER: You do not have to attend these live. You can use the videos on your own time. You can also TURN OFF YOUR CAMERA during the live sessions if you're feeling too shy or too vulnerable.

But THURSDAYS are also great if you want a more WOO approach ((giggling)).

On Thursdays, we’ll be using the physical body to move into and with the energetic body with special focus on the chakras, meridians, and the energy of shared space.

Hit that link for “January Session” to get more information and to register.

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.