Re/Joy in this shitty time

Name one era when you think things were better, and I’ll be 100% correct that it wasn’t, no matter what time you name. History repeats itself, for sure. If one group isn’t marginalized, a whole host of others are.

When I was in college in the late 80’s/early 90s, things did feel like they were somehow shifting. Yet even that was an illusion: the economy was tanking, poverty was rising, homelessness was worse than ever (thanks, Reagan), incarcerations were on the rise and wouldn’t stop (and won’t stop), the war on drugs was targeting the wrong thing and the wrong people (for the most part), people were banning music (remember that?), the excess of the few was the leap off of the cliff that would start the real climate spiral, and I could go on.

Today things feel worse because they’re so much more on the surface and in our face pretty much 24/7. We had a toxic idiot of a President that made all hate acceptable in a very public way. (Some would argue we needed to see that … that too many of us were still living in denial… I kinda agree.)

So all times have, technically, been shitty times. For someone. For groups of someones.

And yet humanity keeps trying to move forward. Honorable or stupid? Some days I go back and forth depending on how exhausted and angry I’m feeling.

Most days… most days, I feel like we’re to be admired for a seemingly bottomless well of hope and effort and optimism.

Most days, I understand that those of us with access to hope and effort and optimism have to hold on to those things, if not for ourselves then for those who just can’t anymore.

To do this requires a certain kind of mental, emotional, and spiritual musculature. It’s easy, in this world, to allow that to atrophy, and then when we need it, to act surprised by its weakness.

In other words, we have to use some of our effort muscle to keep our hope, effort, and optimism muscles in shape. The world needs them.

How do we do this? What is the “gym” of this sort of workout?

It’s the very world that we can find so utterly reprehensible.

But we need to take that world in our hands and turn it every so slightly so we’re looking at it from a different angle: we need to look at it in better lighting so that we can see the beauty and love there. There are days that no matter how much we adjust the angle or the lighting that the beauty and love we find feels just about… microscopic. But that doesn’t matter.

It’s in this noticing and then in the naming that we work out. This is our gym. These are the weights we lift over and over for strength. The treadmills we walk and run for stamina. The stretches we use to maintain mobility.

And these sorts of workouts for emotional, mental, and spiritual musculature need to be as consistent as any we do for our bodies. You know full well that you can’t run a marathon if you’ve been sitting on the couch for the entire year leading up to it. You’re not surprised that you can’t deadlift some crazy amount if you’ve never picked up anything heavier than a soup can.

But we act surprised by our own exhaustion over the work of the world when we’ve done very little to maintain our healthy connection to that same world. We wonder at our anger and our rage that is paralyzing when we’ve done nothing to feed our joy that is mobilizing.

Start small, just like you would with any exercise program. Small steps, small amounts, build slowly but be mindful and intentional and persistent to the point of stubborn.

Start today: go outside with a small notebook and just make lists of everything you see that you love. Do this for… five minutes. Then do it tomorrow and the day after and the day after…

Young Bjork speaking wisdom

I came across this on TikTok a couple of weeks ago, and it’s stayed in my head, so I figure others need it too.

She’s NOT insulting Madonna but speaking some deep truth about instinct versus intellect. Wait until the very end when she talks about the age of your brain versus the age of your instinct… it made me go, WHOA… (This video is about a minute long… you have time.)

Making ugly noise to get to the beauty

I wrote these words about 2 weeks ago on someone else’s post on Facebook:

I keep thinking about this as I venture further into my singing lessons. I keep thinking about a documentary about the making of the Joshua Tree (I can't find it to watch it again... it seems to have disappeared...)... Anyway, there's this part where Bono has written the words for I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For and the music was already done. But he has to figure out HOW to sing it... BONO... right? And whoa... it struck me exactly this... he had NO FEAR of sounding AWFUL and THAT is why he can do what he does. So now when I'm practicing, I push like that... just like I would do in dance, of course, but singing for me has been such a fear thing that it's more tender and vulnerable... but I push like that... where can I go that it's BAD... because RIGHT AROUND THERE... that's where you'll find awesome hanging out. 

I wrote that about 2 weeks ago, and since then, so much has changed.

So that little story — and this adventure I’m taking with singing — remember, it’s literal for me, but it’s simultaneously one giant metaphor for all of us, and it’s all about living life fully.

Over the last two weeks, because I’ve been willing to make ugly noises, to falter, to crack, to just sound like OUCH!, I’ve started to truly find my voice.

And under all that fear that I’ve lived with for so long, what am I finding?

That my voice is BIG and it’s sassy and ferocious and demanding.

It makes me think about my honest dance. I’m an aggressive mover when I’m fully in my body, so it’s no wonder that I’m an aggressive singer. (If the word aggressive makes you uncomfortable, sit with that because it’s my preferred word here and if it triggers you in some way, that’s your trigger to pay attention to. I stop to say this because over my life when I use that word, so many WOMEN correct me and say I mean assertive. No. I mean aggressive.)

I also don’t think it’s a coinkydink that once my singing lessons started, my shoulders reached new levels of healing. During a Peony Method class this week, I could feel my whole body connected in a way it hasn’t been for almost two years, thanks to a lot of factors, including Peony’s death and two frozen shoulders.

And they were frozen, for sure. The shots I got were totally necessary, but there’s some woo here, isn’t there?

Shoulders… how many times (if you’ve been in classes with me for long) have you heard me say, “Many women are weak in the shoulder area and that makes sense because it’s the connection space between heart and throat… how many of us are not saying what needs to be said and it’s stuck right at that shoulder level?”

I was obviously talking to myself.

Despair and joy and exhaustion and curiosity

Dancer: Rachel VanDyne

I’m feeling a lot right now, but it’s all rather paradoxical. As I teach in the Peony Method, we can and must hold these paradoxes.

There’s no either/or in our existence or in our emotional lives. When we want to either/or ourselves like that, I guarantee it’s a sort of emotional bypassing — a desire to feel just “good” and push away more difficult things.

Because it’s always both. Always. We can feel good but we also feel like the world is falling apart. We can feel sad but the kitten is making us laugh.

Right now, I’m feeling both joy and curiosity about a bunch of things, including, of course, tennis and slow jogging. Both of which are definitely at the obsession and special interest level which makes not only my body happy but also my brain.

Right now, I’m also feeling despair and exhaustion. For more reasons than I care to articulate but for one tiny example…

I just watched a (“whyte spiritual”) woman on TikTok try to say that Kanye West’s blatant and violent antisemitism is really his Christ enlightenment shining through and he’s trying to elevate all of us. (WHAT the actual FUCK?)

That makes me, first, want to vomit (for real… it made me sick) and second, to start lecturing everyone about the pre-Holocaust days in Germany but it also makes me want to just shut down.

Despair and exhaustion are dangerously enticing for us, aren’t they?

As a GenXer in particular, it’s easy for me to roll my eyes and say whatever to almost anything. I think that’s true for a lot of us.

We learned to survive via a certain kind of apathy. (Which wasn’t really real. We care almost TOO deeply and have felt so powerless that we decided to pretend not to care.)

As I write this, I am thinking through this. I don’t have answers. I don’t have any sense of a pathway out of this.

I have only some… inklings.

First, I trust Mr. Merton there in that quote. His conclusions didn’t come from some idealistic monastic life. He lived through very difficult times historically. He was someone who was constantly questioning all ideas and even more so himself. He dug deep and he traveled wide, always open to wisdom coming from anywhere. He was a student of many Eastern philosophies, and though he remained Catholic, all of that informed his utterly mystical views of life.

All that’s to say, I think he was onto something with this hope thing.

But second, notice his language.

This is not some esoteric or ethereal hope.

This is active hope. Aggressive hope.

And it’s not just abstract hope. It’s concrete hope as acted through our very concrete human bodies.

Which brings me to this thing that’s been floating around on my front page and in my hashtags for quite some time and in my brain for even longer — what I call the Re/Joy Project.

I have notes upon notes upon notes about this concept but the other day I said something somewhere that gave me the piece that I think we need right now.

What would happen if you were simply, day to day, moving through life with a curiosity about joy?

I think that phrase — curiosity about joy — takes away pressure and replaces it with some sense of breathing space and freedom.

But I think it matches Merton’s “trampling down with hope.”

They’re both active.

Curiosity about joy says that joy is not some magical thinking way of living waiting for you to just stumble upon it or suddenly feel it or that joy is perhaps just for the “lucky.”

It says you need to go out and purposefully investigate. Search for clues. Pay attention. Always have your notebook and tools at the ready.

I’ll be writing about more ways to do this but for now I’m planting the seed.

Acknowledge and make space for all the sad and the despair and the fear and the anxiety and the anger but don’t forget this other stuff too.

I hate running so why am I doing it?

I’m not. I’m not technically running. I’m slow jogging, which is a very different thing.

But first… WHY? I’ve been uber clear about how much I hate running. It just doesn’t feel good in my body. But a couple of years ago, I think it was that long, I heard about this concept of slow jogging and I watched a video and thought it made sense. Still… wasn’t interested.

Then along comes tennis and one of my biggest issues is my legs aren’t fast enough. (My cardio also sucked the first couple of times but that improved quickly.)

I knew I needed something to support not just my tennis but the things I envision for my dance work in the coming years.

So the other day, I was on my desk treadmill and some good music was playing and I wanted to go faster but I was barefoot. I turned up my speed and found myself very naturally… slow jogging.

I looked up more videos, and yep, my body, in bare feet at just the right speed, had naturally done the technique correctly.

You keep everything low like walking, back straight up, land on the balls of your feet, and don’t try to kick the ground away.

You should be able to talk or sing quite easily or you’re going too fast.

There are a ton of benefits but just a few to start:

1. This is super kind to your joints. Unlike with full out jogging/running, you’re very unlikely to injure yourself.

2. It still gives you all the aerobic advantages while also…

3. Preparing you to go faster (if that’s a goal).

4. And for women in peri/menopause, this is great for our freaking hormones and metabolism.

Right now I’m starting small and easy, only going for about ten minutes at a time on my treadmill in bare feet.

Over time, I’ll add longer bits, but this is perfection. I FEEL FANTASTIC after but don’t feel gross or out of breath. It’s the perfect balance of ease and challenge!

Here’s a video about all of this, but even just watching the beginning (wait until the woman in pink joins him), you’ll see the technique pretty clearly.

Another way to get going is to do one minute of this, then one minute of walking, and so on. (Slow jogging intervals.)

Tennis came to teach me all the things I have been forgetting

My favorite tennis partner

Where to begin… I haven’t played tennis since my late 20s and now I’m 53.

When Craig and I were first dating, he used to say to me that he thought it would be fun if we could be a runner couple. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

No.

If you know me well enough, you are laughing along with me. I hate running. I did a running experiment for a while and I accomplished my goal — to run a straight mile without stopping or feeling like I was going to die — and then I stopped. Just like that. Because like I said, I hate running.

But that said, I understood what he wanted: something we could do together. Beyond going to the gym or practicing pilates at home. Something more… engaging.

So he started asking me to play tennis, knowing I had played when I was younger. I had been thinking about it for quite some time before I even met him, but I always decided no because dance was(is) my life and I thought, why do something during which I could get injured and be limited in my dancing?

But then I had two frozen shoulders over the course of the last year or so. Due to no sudden injury. They just… happened (which they can). I got shots but not surgery and I worked my ass off by myself with not PT besides my own PT to get my shoulders back in working order.

Every. Single. Day.

One is 100% better and the other lingers around 95% (but I know that will also get to 100).

And then suddenly, one morning not too long ago, I announced to him out of the blue that we would be buying rackets that day. (This is often how I function. Seemingly suddenly but there’s been a lot going on in the background.)

I have loved the sport of tennis since I was a tiny girl, sitting just outside the fence, watching her father play. (He was truly gifted. For real.) I would sit with the big red thermos (you probably had one like it), and just watch … for hours.

When I got to be about 8, I think, he would then let me hit a few balls when he was done, and so it started.

I got on the boys’ tennis team in high school because there was no girls’ team and so they had to let me try out and I succeeded. But I never got as good as I could have because I didn’t work hard. I half assed. (That’s another and longer story.)

Around the age of 23, I was playing tennis at a court at Penn State Behrend and the tennis coach got all excited, thinking I was a student, and telling me he could probably get me some scholarship money. He had seen me rush the net and play hard, something that was rare for him to see in those days from a female player.

Alas, I was no longer a student but the memory is a loved one, for sure.

Fast forward to about a month ago, we got our rackets, and got home late, so we waited until the next day to go play.

I was so freaking nervous. I have serious public performance anxiety with everything BUT dance. I hate people seeing me struggle. (Another long story right there.)

I told him, “If there are a lot of people already playing, I’m not playing. You can just practice serving.” He was okay with that.

There were a lot of people playing. But I got on the court and the second I bounced the ball, I was in it.

And I kinda sucked. OF COURSE I DID. It’s been about 25 years. But I also kinda… didn’t.

We play about three times a week and here’s the point of this long blog… I am relearning all the things that dance taught me at the age of 40.

First, play is the most important thing we can do for our mental health. Do something you love but here’s the kicker… do something that makes you LAUGH. I LAUGH a lot on the court.

But also? Do something that you love that brings out your inner “warrior.” I growl and yell on the court just as much as I laugh. Guess what? I am having just as much fun whichever I am doing.

Second, when I am moving on the tennis court, there is NOTHING ELSE IN MY WORLD. And in those moments, I am ABSOLUTELY FREE.

Dance taught me that at 40 and I was a bit shocked when I realized that tennis was teaching me the same lesson. Again, do the things you love… the physical things… because it is this level of embodiment that brings us into a state of total alignment with ourselves and this life.

Third, I am built to move. So are you. So are all of us. But I am really really built to move. I mean, there is no depression, no anxiety, no anything but the true me when I am moving. (Again, same for you. You just need to find right things.)

Fourth, I love life when and after I move. Because we are bags of chemicals and movement stirs up all the good ones.

I’m sure there’s more but that’s enough for now.

Go play! Now!

Why Slow?

““The times are urgent; let us slow down.””

— — Bayo Akomolafe

When we practice slow in the Peony Method, it's not just to practice being physically slow. Though it is that to some degree, as slower physical practices are, truly, more challenging.

Why? To start, you can’t “cheat” with momentum. Going slowly, you’ll also feel more — including if you’re pushing past a limit of some sort that could lead to injury.

You’re also able to observe your body’s strengths and deficiencies more closely.

If you DO have an injury, you can take your time working around it… flirting with its edges, deciding what to work with and what to let rest.

Slow practices also allow more focus on good breath work but also on different types of breath work. (If you’ve been in my classes, one example would be when we only move during suspended inhales or exhales.)

But beyond all of this (and I’ve really only started to touch on the physical advantages of slow), the slow in the Peony Method is about the emotional/mental/spiritual aspects of your BodyMind.

We hear our body’s messages more clearly. We hear where things might be stuck — whether old trauma, recent grief, or any emotion that is in need of your attention. It’s all in the body, of course.

We hear our heart's truth better when we slow down. The heart can speak in whispers and our busy, chaotic world is often too much for it.

We hear/feel our connections when we’re slower — whether to ourselves, our wiser self, something bigger, each other.

Truth, wisdom, the next move, the right idea… it all has the space it needs to arise and get your attention when we’re moving slowly.

This is not to say that faster movement doesn’t have its own set of pros. But our culture — including our movement culture — prizes FASTER, BIGGER, BETTER.

The Peony Method is the antidote to all of that.

Empathy isn't just for the hard stuff...

(I wish I could find the study I was reading because it was important but you know how … SQUIRREL!… And I’ve tried to find it again and just can’t. If I do find it some day, I’ll come back to this and update it.)

Onward… I was reading a study recently that came to the conclusion that perhaps — perhaps — almost 50% of the human population lacks the brain connections for true empathy.

Read that and weep. Or not.

If that stat is even close to true, it explains a lot about our world. It explains a lot about the seemingly endless struggle between people who focus on their own concerns and those who wish to better the world for everyone. (To put it all in compact and polite terms.)

That’s the macro look at it, but on the micro level, it can explain struggles we have with family and friends and even strangers when it comes to understanding motivations, the extension (or not) of care, the tangles we get in to over expectations, and on and on.

We are truly playing with different decks.

But with all of that, I bet in your mind, you’ve been focusing on the idea of empathy around difficult challenges.

There’s more to empathy than that and I’ve always sensed it but didn’t have the language for it.

It’s something I have been conscious of doing in my work since the beginning. I intuited that a huge part of what I do is really about making space for people to feel their feelings including BIG JOY.

That picture at the top… I love that moment between the two women on the right (Mara and Julie). They aren’t talking. They are simply finding shared joy in their playful embodiment.

Turns out there is language for this: Empathic Joy.

You can listen to a short podcast about the science of it right here.

Science, schmience… as usual it comes from an ancient philosophical/”religious” system: Buddhism.

And in Buddhism, it’s a practice. Of course, it is.

Mudita: sympathetic or unselfish joy, or joy in the good fortune of others. In Buddhism, mudita is significant as one of the Four Immeasurables.

(The other four immeasurables are: love, compassion, and equanimity. You can read more about them all over here.)

When someone gives us good news, do we start to think about our own lack of good news or are we just totally present to them, reflecting their experience back to them?

When we see a happy person out in the world, does that make us feel grouchy or judgy? Or do we take the opportunity to feel good with and for them?

This is the practice: all day long, watching for those moments of knee-jerk reactions that are grounded in jealousy or malice and checking them and replacing them.

I love this.