Pausing to Consider My Medicine

A photo from almost ten years ago

If you’ve read my about me page or known me for any length of time, you know that chronic depression ate my love of dance by my mid to late 20s. It wasn’t until I was 40 that I returned to the very thing that was the medicine for my depression.

We are all born with medicine. It’s the thing that makes us US. It’s the thing that makes us lose all track of time. It’s the thing that when we’re doing it, we enter the flow of eternity and infinity and know exactly who we are.

But our medicine is attached to the thing that will challenge us the most in this life. Thus its necessity as medicine.

Furthermore this medicine is not just for YOU. You’re meant to find it, use it, and then share it with others.

This looks as many ways as there humans on this planet.

And this is the root of the importance of community connections in our lives and the importance of shared community experience and ritual.

All of these most essential things have been lost to us in the competitive structure of capitalism that teaches us we are only worth what we can do and turn into dollars.

When other humans are seen as competition for limited resources, the divisions get deeper and the depressions spread wider.

We are, for the most part, I believe in my soul, not mentally ill but emotionally starved.

As I look back over this ten years where I’ve had the privilege of moving with thousands of (mostly) women, I am thinking of how to expand the community over the coming ten years.

As I look back over this ten years and the work and the processes I’ve developed, I wonder what direction that work can be taken in that will touch even more lives, create even more beauty, deepen our accessible well of love even more.

It is seed starting time where I live, so contemplating exactly which seeds to plant and what types of fertilizer to use seems like a good use of this time.

But even more, this 50th year of mine, seems like it deserves this sort of pause and breath-taking before leaping into what’s next.

And So Begins Spring: Imbolc

Today, February 1st, though it can be hard to believe, is the first celebration of spring in the pagan wheel of the year. It’s a time of subtle hints, but if you pay close attention, you’ll find plenty that mother earth is saying about what’s to come.

The light in the sky is different, for one.

And there are moments, even when there’s still snow on the ground, that I can hear the ground waking… trickles of water wending their way through dirt to find seed and root.

In the Celtic tradition, we celebrate Brigid. She’s one of my favorite goddess archetypes, overseeing FIRE and POETRY and creativity in general.

These are the things of spring, are they not? The sun is strengthening and soon heat will again penetrate skin to bone, igniting fires within, often showing up as a desire for more activity — and thus cabin fever and spring cleaning and the mountain of garden catalogs as we dream bigger and bigger the longer the cold winds blow.

It can be quite simple to celebrate this time:

Light a candle and center yourself with long deep breathing.

Take a pen to paper and write out your dreams for what you’d like to create or nurture over the coming months.

Place that paper on an altar or in a dreaming box, and when it is finally and actually time to go out and plant something, place that paper in a deep hole with seeds or plant it at the base of a favorite rose bush or favorite tree.

And take a few moments today to nurture your heart with some poetry in Brigid’s honor. In particular, you could spend some time with Haiku… little seeds that can work some big magic.

"Managing Depression:" Why This Approach Fails

One of my favorite photos from our brief time living in Vermont.

I’ve never flown a plane but the metaphor is too good to resist.

When you’re flying inside a storm system, you have to work extra hard to maintain flight within that system. All your energy goes to getting through.

But if you fly above the storm, you have energy to look around, to enjoy the flight. The storm might be doing its thing below you, but you’re in blue sky.

Either way, you’re using the same instruments, doing the same sorts of checks, etc.

In situation one, you’re stressed, getting exhausted, not learning anything new, just surviving.

That’s been me since our move to Vermont and back home to Pennsylvania again.

Being away from everything and everyone triggered my depression in a way I hadn’t experienced in some years. When we returned home, I told everyone this version of things:

“Before Vermont, I had achieved a high level of management of my depression. That’s how I got so happy and functional.”

And so I went back to trying to manage all the bits… like the pilot in the storm.

I had checklists. I was doing “all the things.” I was going through the motions.

And I was not getting back to where I had been… I was in survival mode. There was no thriving and no sign of it to come.

My frustration, as you can imagine, was profound. WHY was this not WORKING? My management skills had not decreased. I knew the “things” that worked.

Then I was reading the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying one night. Re-reading some passages, to be exact, and after, I got in the tub, the place where I do some of my best thinking.

And this sentence went through my head: “DESIGN YOUR LIFE TO ELEVATE YOUR MIND.”

Otherwise: fly this damn plane out of this damn storm and get into blue sky.

In a lot of meditation circles, they even say things like, “get into Big Sky Mind… mind above small mind… small mind always has problems but above it, all is clear.”

This was the KEY: when I had gotten to a place of peace and joy in my life, I was NOT “managing my depression,” I was LIVING IN ELEVATED MIND.

I was not “doing things off of a checklist to feel better.” I was doing things that helped me to live from my higher mind.

Depression was always still there… below me…

I knew this at the time. Daily, I could sense it, see it, smell it… lurking. But I didn’t fly down into it. Even on rough days, everything I did helped me to stay in elevated mind. Everything I read. Everything I watched. And soon, subsequently, EVERYTHING I THOUGHT.

Depression — true mental difference depression as opposed to circumstantial depression — is really like Diabetes type 2. You never get rid of your diabetes type 2 but you can live above it by eating and exercising and taking your medicine. It is always there but it doesn’t DEFINE you; it doesn’t RULE your every day.

Managing my depression was really my depression managing me, but creating a life and an environment that elevates my mind, well, elevates my mind.

And PS this is NOT magical thinking. I’m not “thinking my depression away.” I’m thinking above my depression’s mindset, and in that higher space, I know I am MORE than my depression and from there I will always make better choices for myself which then feeds that higher self and on and on … a positive cycle created and maintained that is more powerful than the negative cycle. No more wasted energy… no more FIGHTING it. Much like the Japanese martial art, aikido, I defeat it by not engaging.

Year of Magic 2019: Mountain Monks in Japan

This 10 minute documentary is a sparkling jewel, a meditation, and an inspiration that I can feel has entered into the bloodstream of my own work after only one viewing. I can already sense it leading me into my own sort of mountains…and there will be unexpected climbs ahead.

This makes sense, as these monks practice a religion that is a combination of Buddhism and Shinto, both of which are strong underpinnings of Butoh, the movement art that transformed my own practice years ago, when I had the opportunity to study with Maureen Fleming who studied with the founding family of Butoh in Japan. Lineage matters and I am proud this is part of mine.

The Magic of Right and Good Questions

From this past summer. Photo by Mr. Handsome, of course.

“Why do you think you’re depressed?”

I was spending some time with my father so my mother could do some things. He’s on a new medication during his post-stroke rehab and he’s just getting used to it so being alone for long stretches can be challenging.

And because he’s my father, an inquisitive and caring and smart man, he took the opportunity to try to talk to me about this depression cycle I’ve been so damn stuck in. He wants to help. As a dad and a physician, he wants to make it better. Of course.

“Why do you think you’re depressed?” It seems like a question I should be able to answer after all these years of suffering these cycles, but I can’t answer it. It’s complex and maybe it’s also as simple as “this is my brain.”

Whatever the reason, here I am.

But that question stayed with me into the evening when I had my choreography group. We sit and talk a bit before getting to work, and I shared this story.

And I heard myself saying this:

“Maybe we need to turn this around. Maybe there’s a more helpful and more productive question… why are we still here?”

If that sounds macabre, it’s not. At all. It’s very life affirming.

Because every day, each of us, whether aware or not, really do choose to be here. We choose to get up and out of bed and move through our days. We choose to be around people we care about and to do things that matter to us.

And for those of us suffering from depression or any other mental health challenge (and let’s get real… that’s a huge majority of us), this decision to stay can get clouded by the effort it takes to cover the basics.

But what if we started each day or ended each day with this potentially magical question:

WHY AM I STILL HERE?

Why, in this state of suffering, do I keep going?

Because the list of beauty and love and truth that that question would elicit from me… it would startle this depressed brain.

It would CHANGE this depressed brain.

It’s a twist on the scientifically backed practice of writing down things we’re grateful for.

It’s a twist in that it asks a direct and important question that those of us who suffer MUST remember:

We are here, because regardless of everything, we keep saying YES.

And isn’t that an amazing, strong, courageous, and magical thing?

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.