The Meaning of Life, as taught to me by peonies

When people go through the illnesses of loved ones, they often speak of all the loving and wonderful lessons they learned.

When my father had his stroke and then needed a feeding tube inserted into his stomach and then three weeks later coded and then had to have a trach and then had to have a different feeding tube and then started having hospital psychosis and then and then and then… I didn’t think there was anything loving or wonderful I was learning at all.

I was angry.

And I got more and more confused and lost and despairing and cynical. I’ve always been skeptical, which I think is healthy, but cynicism was not my usual mode.

Fast forward over three months later, and he is home, tube free, and making more progress at a faster pace every day.

In the meantime, I started my deep dive into tantra yoga philosophy, and I really committed to that after the new year.

But I kept landing in the same dark, nihilistic corner… painted in by the banality of it all.

Wondering what could possibly be the point of being human if all there is is pain and suffering awaiting each and every one of us sooner or later.

Life is cruel. That was the only conclusion I could come to, and if there is some sort of thinking/creating God, he/she is even crueler.

I do not believe in a God or Universe who “sends us lessons.” Bullshit. First, that’s mean and if I believe in any God it is LOVE. Second, it’s illogical in the context of free will. Life happens, and if we are lucky, later, looking back, we can create meaning from suffering, we can write stories of our own making about why what happened was ultimately important or “right” or whatever, because that’s what humans are at their core — story making machines.

Thank goodness, because this capacity to create story saves us, I think, from going insane.

I’m stubborn. It’s one of my more positive traits, I believe. I believe it has saved my life over and over and this time, wrestling with these ultimate things, it would prove itself my strength yet again.

In trantra yoga, the ultimate underlying reality (worshipped as Goddess but just for the simplicity of anthropomorphism that humans respond so well to) is awareness.

All is awareness, and we, then, are ultimately that same thing — awareness.

Awareness then has experiences through our individuated material bodies.

But ultimately we are already that awareness.

And here I am sitting in that dark corner, thinking, if we are already that awareness, WHY DO THIS!?!

But I had an intuition that the answer was in this tantra stuff… if I could just pull the right thread.

Here’s the thread: Awareness is two fold and a lot of people forget the second part.

Firstly, awareness is the noticing that we expect it to be, but the second attribute of awareness is actually about ACTION.

Awareness is, by its nature, constantly creating, destroying, resting, starting over.

Sound familiar?

I STILL wasn’t getting it, until…

I was lying in bed, sick, and my husband was gently rubbing my back so I could fall to sleep, and instead I entered into a deep and peaceful state of meditation.

Suddenly my skull was full of the universe, and I realized, oh, right! It has been there all along. If awareness is this cycle of creation, destruction, rest, and starting over, it’s literally written in the stars.

And from that cycle — from the very nature of awareness — eventually we, quite simply, get to the evolutionary point from which humans arise.

Lying in bed, the universe in my head, suddenly, a PEONY flower arose and unfurled in my skull.

The peony can only be the peony. Period.

I can only be this human.

I’m not here to “be taught” or to “ascend.”

I’m here, simply, to be awareness and to allow for the natural cycles that are born of the nature of that awareness.

My peony self is teacher/dancer so that’s what I’m here to be awareness through.

And when I die, I will simply continue being the awareness I already am, but, as Ram Dass says, I will remove the too-tight coat of this human experience.

Dreaming the Body

From early in a piece during Bodypoetics class in which I asked them to dream their bodies, to imagine they’d never met this body before. They’re encouraged to start on whatever plane feels right, and so Annie chose a chair for her experiment. I keep these classes small to ensure a depth of intimacy and safety.

I don’t know about you but I am cruel to this body. Even after 10 years of teaching this work, after 25 years of yoga studies, after so long of battling depression and making it smaller and smaller, after telling hundreds upon hundreds of women that beauty is ANY body moving…and being completely sincere in those statements.

I am still so cruel to this body.

This body that can make such beauty in movement. That surprises even me sometimes with its abilities. This body that my husband finds perfect in all its ways of being since I’ve met him.

I am still so cruel to this body.

And I know I am not alone in this so I know I can tell you this and not be judged as somehow deficient or a failure on the spiritual path blah blah blah.

As if anyone ever gets to the damn finish line. As if there is a damn finish line.

No matter how much I work on this, there’s always another layer waiting for me, and I think that’s actually the point — finding that next layer, never stopping, always persisting, falling and rising.

Because even just ten years ago, wow… my head was full of cruelties that make my present head look all soft and fluffy.

Progress. It’s all we can expect.

If you have a fantastic love of your body, congrats. This isn’t for you. I’ve never actually met a woman in person who has that kind of love. I’ve seen it projected on social media… #Thingsthatmakemegohmmm

So I teach what I teach because I need it. Isn’t that always the case? And isn’t that who we want guiding us?

Even now, as a teacher who is always on the path of learning, I know I can lose my grip on the beginner mind that some of my new students come to me with. That’s a huge challenge — to always be remembering that beginner mind and not your current version.

But being in my own beginner mind allows me to constantly be creating new maps and tools for people to navigate this dark forest of small self and old stories and unproductive coping mechanisms.

Which brings me to dreaming the body… a phrase that came to me just about two years ago but would not have come any sooner because I was not there yet. I could not even imagine such a phrase.

And beyond the imagining of such a phrase, I could have never come to any understanding of it, much less explained it in a way that it be helpful to others, that it inspire some sort of change in their minds, some sort of new in their movement.

And as we practice these things in dance, so they eventually come to impact the entirety of our lives.

Dreaming our body eventually will become dreaming our lives.

Tantra Yoga, Magic, and Depression

Magic. Truth. Beauty. Love. None of this is easy stuff. It’s not pretty. It’s not fluffy. It’s not for the faint of heart.

It’s all rather like a large body of water, especially an ocean. It can look so lovely and yet it can kill you. And when it does, it didn’t mean to. It was just being itself.

Part of my intention for this year is to dive deeply into the philosophy and practice of tantra yoga, and already, only 14 days into this new year, it is revealing a huge and unhelpful chasm in my approach to life. This is stuff I’ve always kinda known was there — we all know it’s there. But like most of us, I danced around it. I thought about it here and there. I could talk about how I was unlearning it, but in reality, it was growing in size and threatening to swallow any happiness in its path.

And all happiness is in the path of this one.

I know I’m not alone with this. I see it at play every day all around me, in particular in the number of people suffering from lifelong, debilitating, chronic depression (like myself).

William Styron wrote a great and very personal account of his lifelong depression, and he wondered if a depressed brain is born or made and he decided that it doesn’t matter, that we can never know.

Here’s what I think: I think some of us are born with a brain that is more susceptible to depression, a brain that is more “sensitive” to stimuli, but also a deeply inquisitive brain that kinda… gets lost in its inquisitive nature… a brain that follows dark lines of thought and then can’t find its way out.

Over time, this starts to look like a neurological or chemical imbalance, but like all disease, it starts elsewhere, an elsewhere that current medicine is not able to locate or understand yet. (And do NOT read this as a “blaming” of the sick. NOT. AT. ALL. My point is that we are complicated, feeling, thinking organisms for whom those thoughts and feelings play a much larger role than we currently understand, but then those thoughts and feelings meet up with environmental factors — from family to community to earth — and that’s where the complicated comes in.)

WIth my study of tantra yoga, I’m coming face to face with this: I believe that life is being DONE to me.

But this begs so many questions: By whom and for what reason and to what end?

A God who “does things” to us, including all the difficult things, to “teach us lessons” just sounds like an asshole. A human made asshole.

Humans made that God out of their observation of human assholes writ large.

I don’t want to believe in that God, but deep down, in that dark chasm, I DO.

If I’m sick, I must have been bad.

If someone dies, I am being punished.

What? It hit me yesterday that THIS — THIS — is the blackened heart, the very core of my depression. Who wouldn’t be depressed thinking that they had so little power in their life? Who wouldn’t be depressed thinking that their “God”, the larger universe was out to get them? Who wouldn’t be depressed when every little or big bad thing that happens (normal things that happen to everyone because this is LIFE) was a judgement of their value as a human being?

Tantra yoga, on the other hand, is a philosophy of nonduality. There is no “out there” God. There is only one soul of which we are all part. We are drops in an ocean of soul.

And life happens because life happens, and whether we evolve or not is about how we react to that.

Everything that happens is neutral, neither good nor bad. It’s only what we label it and our labels hold all the power. Our labels determine our experience.

I’m sick because I’ve been at the highest level of stress in my life for three months because I was helping my mother help my father to not die.

We know, more than anything when it comes to the disease process, that stress leaves us open to “catching” illness. We are not “unlucky.” or “bad” or “sickly.” We are stressed.

And THAT is something we have control over.

Again to refer to tantra yoga: the ultimate energy, the ultimate underlying reality is awareness itself. And we come from that and so we are that.

We can wake up, right now, to this reality. We can decide to embody that awareness.

It won’t be easy — there’s no magic spell here. It’s a matter of observing ourselves and catching reflex habitual thinking and asking, is that really how I see the world? Is that really the world I want to live in?

This is scary to me.

Even thinking about changing this way of thinking makes my stomach do flips. The known is comfortable. And what the hell will happen if I decide to live in a FRIENDLY and LOVING world? What will I do when “bad” things happen? If I let go of my grief and despair, who the hell am I?

I am the ocean, that’s who I am. I am the drop in the ocean, and I am the ocean.

And like I said, truth and beauty and love and magic — not easy and a whole lot scary but a life of freedom and no delusions and feeling what is and not labeling? Yes, please, because THAT sounds EXACTLY what I know when I am dancing.

An Invocation for Sensitive Hearts Suffering

I wrote this for a workshop, and then recently it struck me that I should share it wider.

Here’s a caveat: We are ALL sensitive hearts. We are all suffering.

There is magic in knowing we are not alone, in realizing that our hearts are all the same. When we differentiate ourselves by saying we are or we are not “empathic,” we are missing the point that all humans are empathic; some humans just tap into it more, allow for it more, nurture those skills.

So take care of yourself…. take care of each other… and feel free to use and share this.

Dance, Incantational Speech, & the Making of Reality

I understand myself through dance.

I understand the world through words, both written and spoken.

I also create myself through dance. Following breath and energy to allow my body to express its instinctive and visceral stories reveals to me, through noticing and big mind witness, what sort of me needs to be embodied.

Talking and writing is the same. By following threads of thought and idea and imagination, the possibilities of worlds outside of me take shape. Some of these possible worlds beckon me to step into them, to take the actions necessary to make them concrete. A large number fall away, making space for new possibilities to arise and entrance me.

This can all sound so… vague and metaphorical until you see it in action in seemingly simple ways, and if you’re not someone who creates their worlds — their very lives — through words, it is easy to miss.

It took a while for my father, after his stroke, to start future speaking, and when he did, my mother and sister and I felt some space to breathe. His will to live was strengthening (because after a very bad stroke, one’s will is tested, to say the least).

His future speak got more confident as time passed. The “if” fell away and was replaced by “when.”

The other evening my husband and I were getting ready to leave my parents’ house after having dinner with them, and my father was talking about how it was good that my husband only works 4 days a week because the other three days, they would be golfing and fishing.

My husband, a painter who is more of a visual and concrete person, started to speak of other scheduling conflicts that might arise. I teased him out of that line of talking and got us back to my father’s ideas about golf and fishing.

Afterward it hit me that this was something my father and I share, along with his father, my papa. There is some DNA level need for us to speak out loud about what “could be,” and we need to do so in very definitive and “it will be this way” terms.

We are not exaggerating. We are not blowing smoke.

We are life making.

We are sending ideas and convictions and prayers and hopes and wishes and dreams out into the world in the form of words.

Some of those will come to fruition, for sure. They gain momentum when they meet up with something needed in either us or the world. They gain momentum the more we speak or write of them. They gain traction when our intentions get more weighted and clear.

Eventually I can’t tell if I am acting on the idea or the idea has become powerful enough to act on me.

Years ago, I was standing in my movement studio at the front windows. A big celebration was going on behind me and I was watching the lights of the cars passing on the busy streets below.

A friend walked up to me and said this, “You are the only person I have ever known who gets an idea… and then makes it happen. You make something out of nothing. Like this… this space and all these people… How do you do it?”

I just stared at her. Doesn’t everyone do that, I thought.

At the time, I hadn’t put together that I was raised by a grand wizard. My father… a human so full of dreams and even more filled with the capacity to see them through.

Not every single thing he dreamed of came to be, but everything that came to be was something he dreamed of, something he dared to speak out into the world.

And I am his daughter, here to make magic with words.

Introducing #YearofMagic2019, with thanks to Blisschick

I don’t know exactly the years because in a frenzy of cleaning out the old to make room for the new, I deleted old blogs, including the entirety of Blisschick ((UGH)), but approximately 12 years ago, I started to blog under that name for the first time and my life was changed in ways that are indescribable.

I started to blog simply to improve my writing habits, and it certainly did that, but so much more grew from that instinct to create. I made connections that are maintained to this day. My mind was sharper and clearer and eventually all of it led to the biggest change of all — dance, which led to a life that was not completely free of depression but was free of most of the debilitating symptoms, a life that was managed so well that it was comprised of the most joy I had known since I was about 4 years old.

Blisschick’s purpose was, quite simply, to track bliss — in small, daily ways and in those occasional big ways that come along so unexpectedly.

Fast forward to now…

I am doing work that I love. I have my family in my life and that is huge love. I am married to a man who is kind and strong, and with him, I got more family.

But lately, that old depression has taken over again. For many complex reasons, including a big one: I turned 50 just after my very healthy father had a horrible stroke (he’s recovering), and existential depression took over my heart.

With the work and all the love in my life, I still feel a lack of meaning and purpose. Life feels cruel.

My heart asserts otherwise, but this depression is the stuff of brain, and brain, as I like to say, can be a real asshole.

I have been managing this tendency toward depression for so long that I have practices in my life that have given me the capacity to still hear the higher, wiser voice of Witness Mind, and in that space, I can hear things like “Remember that depression is a LIAR. When depression says life is cruel, look for evidence to the contrary.”

Finally, after fighting this beast and sometimes feeling like I was truly losing again, on this second day of this new year, that Witness Mind showed me the path, and the path, no surprise, is writing.

Because good writing is all about noticing, and noticing is the antidote to existential depression.

And like Blisschick was all about noticing bits of bliss, this year I will be writing about noticing magic.

Magic is a word that encompasses everything that is important to me, everything that drives me in this world: beauty, awe, wonder, curiosity, playfulness, mystery, surprise (of the best kind), experimentation, freedom, wildness, sensuality, femininity, connection, and flow.

To give myself a start with this, I’m participating in this 40 days of magic challenge that has a low level of woo feeling to it (which can be important to me at this stage because this sort of depression brings out the cynic in me).

I’m also awaiting the arrival of this book on a recommendation from a dear, wise friend. The chapter headings were enough to convince me it was worth ordering.

Mostly, though, I’m opening my eyes and my heart. I’m listening to that inner four year old who thinks the stars are populated, that chocolate milkshakes cure everything, that dust motes in sun beams are actually fairy lights, and that when I dance, I am infinite joy.