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.

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.

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.

About me... because I feel like I don't let people know this stuff enough...

If you’re new to me, you probably have very little clue as to who I am and what sorts of credentials I bring to this work.

Even if you know me, you might only know bits and pieces of this, and I think it’s important to understand where I came from so you know you’re working with the right (or not) person.

Without going into all the details, by the time I was in my mid 20s, I was suffering from severe (and sometimes life-threatening) depression and anxiety. With that, there was a ton of comorbid chronic pain throughout my body. I had also had severe digestive issues and migraines from around the age of 11. I would say, I actually identified my depression at the age of nine; I actually remember a very specific moment when I said to myself that I was deeply sad and would be so for a long time but that I would eventually get out of it. (But that’s another story.)

In my mid 20s, in a desperate attempt to FIX something… I blew up my life, which is probably what then mired me in that depression for much longer, until I re-found dance at the age of 40. (I had danced since I could walk and then even into college but stopped when the depression hit so very hard.)

By my late 20s, I had found yoga and embarked on a study that’s never stopped. By my early 30s, I found Kundalini yoga specifically. While yoga in no way healed my depression, it made it, here and there, a bit “less,” and I think Kundalini prepared me to be able to dance again… it brought me back to the idea that my body could be a source of joy.

Then at the age of 40, at a friend’s wedding, I danced again for the first time since my mid 20s.

Over the next six to nine months, everything changed for me. Keep in mind that I was dancing/moving about 3 hours a day. Sweating my ass off and having so much freaking fun. Without intending to at all, I dropped four sizes. This was the literal weight of my depression (not that weight and depression are always cause and effect; they are for me). 

I also was no longer in constant pain. And something amazing was happening to my mind. This was the most important thing. I could feel hope and light and joy and curiosity and awe coming back. I started to feel like my little self. I would giggle and hear her.

Knowing I could not stop dancing but that I needed outside structure and support, I signed up for my first training at Kripalu. Over the following six years, I went to Kripalu nine times for intense trainings as well as traveling elsewhere for trainings.

Now, keep in mind, preceding my return to dance, I spent countless thousands of hours trying to “figure out” my depression, trauma, and chronic grief. Along the way, I studied a huge array of leaders in the field of psychotherapy, until I eventually found body-based psychotherapies and studied in person with some of the most forward-thinking humans in that field.

I read everything I could find in the psych section of our local college libraries. I wasn’t stuck in “self help” books. I wanted the real theory and actual results of studies.

I had tried to intellectually “solve” depression (which has given me a bedrock of knowledge that underlies all my movement work), but it wasn’t until I got into my body that anything really shifted.

Depression eats the very thing that is YOU -… the very thing that can help you navigate whatever traumas etc. led to that depression. 

And depression, of course, eats your desire to move. Paradoxically, moving in joy is one of the main things that can heal us, but to get to the place of being able to move can be a long and arduous journey. 

I’m here to help you with that.

My most influential intensive was with the Butoh artist Maureen Fleming. I think of her as my core mentor. She is the most important American woman in Japanese Butoh and had studied many times in Japan with the originator of this movement art. She is my lineage.

My first trainings were in YogaDance and YogaDance for Special Populations with Megha Buttenheim. This is based in chakra energy work and community building. Special-populations studies were targeted toward people with Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, dementia, and post-cancer treatment.

I’ve spent serious time with Bessel van der Kolk. When his book “The Body Keeps the Score” came out, it was like reading his plans for the intensives I’d attended in person.

I’ve also spent time with Peter Levine (one of the originators of body-based psychotherapies), Bo Forbes (a psychotherapist and yoga teacher), and a variety of other somatic psychotherapy leaders.

I’ve studied biomechanics with Katy Bowman, and I was lucky lucky lucky enough to study in person with the amazing yoga teacher, Erich Schiffmann, one of the first Americans to study yoga in India with BKS Iyengar. Erich has developed what he calls “freedom yoga,” and his DVD with Ali MacGraw was my very first introduction to yoga and still remains my favorite.

I’ve been teaching now for 13 years, weekly and sometimes daily, and in a huge array of venues. A tiny sampling of my most significant experiences would include

• Working with different groups focused on processing grief to eventually develop movement art processes to transmute the grief and build communities of support.

• Developing and teaching movement art methods to children living in a residential therapy grade school and high school, focusing on creating tools for emotional regulation and helping them understand, allow, and provide safe intimacy in relationship.

• Developing and creating classes for a Regional Cancer Center, focusing on relationship and healing.

• Developing and teaching elder dance at Mercy Center for Aging.

• Creating and running movement workshops with the Sisters of St. Joseph elders.

• Teaching for a chiropractor where I focused on basic mobility and joint health.

• Being the Keynote Speaker (with interactive movement demonstration) at the Annual Conference for the Pennsylvania State Association of Senior Centers, at PSU, State College in the Fall of 2013.

• Being the Special Speaker at Alzheimer’s Association Conferences, May 2016 and again in 2017.

• Developing, in 2019, Brain Grooves with the NWPA Alzheimer's Association, with the help of Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine (LECOM).

And of course, over all this time, I’ve put ALL THE THINGS into a GIANT compost bin and that is now named The Peony Method.

I don’t think my story is unique. I think, culturally, we’ve gotten so used to not moving and not being expressive with our bodies that we don’t even look to that anymore when we are suffering from myriad body and mind based challenges.

But we must. We are EMBODIED beings, for whom a movement imperative is written into our very cells.

Furthermore, the way we’ve treated our individual bodies has leaked out to how we’ve treated our communities and this planet. Only when we come back into right relationship with our physical selves will we have the vision and the energy necessary to take responsibility for and rebuild everything from communities to ecosystems.