A Bit of a Movement Manifesto

The only thing we know for sure is that we have a body. That's it. We have a body. For whatever reason (or for no reason), we are here having an experience through these bodies.

And we know these bodies are meant to move, not just carry around our brains. This truth is contained in our very cells and demonstrated by the action of those cells.

These bodies are meant to move a LOT and in the widest variety of ways possible.

Movement is LIFE. That is not a metaphor and it IS a metaphor.

We must, first and foremost, bring CURIOSITY to these bodies. Then we must bring AWE and GRATITUDE.

When we carry those three things within us, we'll move more from those places.

I constantly talk about how we canNOT move from a sense of punishment or negative consequence -- as in, I ate cake, therefore I must exercise.

EAT THE CAKE.

Then go and PLAY.

Balance is not about evenness... it's about containing opposites.

We can't "balance" 8 hours in a chair with 30 to 60 minutes of "fitness."

Imagine being angry and violent for 8 hours and thinking your nervous system will be completely okay with that as long as you are calm for 30 minutes.

Movement is NOT exercise.

Movement is being in your body and USING IT.

Movement ART is being conscious of your body's ability to express something truthful and then doing that.

When will you start giving this body its due? Will it take a catastrophe or a loss of some sort to convince you that this body is worth your time?

Let's all dig a little deeper, shall we?

COMMIT. DEVOTE. LOVE.

Here's what my digging deeper will look like: I am 50. I'm not "supposed" to take myself seriously as a dancer. It's time.

And you?

Dance, core fluid strength, a #circleoftrees, and the world: how it’s all connected

As women age, more and more, we become the keepers of the heart’s wisdom and it’s our duty to this chaotic world to be our most powerful, to stand planted and deeply rooted in our truth, and to be able to clearly express that truth in whatever form our calling demands (this will, of course, look different for each and every one of us which is where the beauty of it lives).

But we cannot be the keepers of the heart’s wisdom and we cannot be powerful agents of change if we are not in our own bodies, if we don’t know the strength and capacity for action that resides in our own bodies, if we are constantly at war with our own bodies.

Enter the work of dance and breath and attention and the support of a community of women (for we are not meant to heal and become whole on our own; we are built to do this work with the support of others).

In order for the wisdom of the heart (that is compassion and love and courage above all else) to rise up and out the throat/expression energy center and enter the larger world, we have to constantly re-activate and stoke our inner fire that resides in our core -- the whole of it from the pelvis upward and all around and including the spine.

We don’t want hard, rigid muscle-only strength in this area or we become hardened and rigid in the world. We want soft, fluid, changeable, responsive strength which comes with breath and acts more like water in the world.

This space in the body then must be connected to our grounding so that our active energies are not scattered, weakened, and wasted or sent out in the wrong direction, misunderstood in their intent.

That grounding allows us to connect, rooted, to the women in our #circleoftress so when one is feeling weak, the others hold them up; when one is feeling extra strong, they might simultaneously hold others and fly.

THIS...this is how it’s all connected and THIS is the core of the work I do. If you need a #circleoftrees, if you need to stop the war with your body, if you want to explore your powerful self and then take her out into the world, you might be interested in the work we do with Bodypoetics. 

Embattled No More: The Invisible Exhaustion of Depression

And now quotes like this no longer feel like these unattainable wishes but instead feel like a call that I can answer.

Since starting on this new anti-depressant, I feel… capable.

For the first time, I think maybe ever, I feel what people have told me about myself for my whole life: that I am someone who creates stuff out of thin air, that I get an idea and then I act on it, that I walk into visions.

I never believed those words, or more accurately, I felt like a fraud who was pulling wool over the eyes of the speakers. Like, if they only knew all the things I was NOT doing, all the hours wasted in self-doubt and self-hatred, all the time spent thinking but not doing, all the days paralyzed in my bed or on the couch or staring off into space.

Even at my most productive, I never ever felt productive.

I felt embattled.

How could people not see that I was suffocating and drowning and that I was barely surviving, much less thriving? I would think this not in judgment of them but in judgment of myself. How could I pull off FOOLING so many?

Because you see, no matter how much I might have managed to do, there was one thing that I was doing 24/7, and because my brain has been like this for so long, I no longer saw this thing as unusual or “extra.”

I was fighting for my life. Fighting for every square inch of it. Fighting every second of every day.

I was fighting, as I’ve mentioned before, the Asshole in My Brain, and that Asshole was a NINJA.

I was convinced simultaneously that I was ill AND that my brain was normal, therefore this internal fight was normal and why couldn’t I get my shit together!? (Try untying THAT knot. It has everything to do with shaming my own spirit rather than acknowledging my biology.)

I was so used to living like this that I didn’t notice the energy it took. I would judge myself for not getting enough done from day to day, not noticing this huge thing I was accomplishing every single day — not defeating the Asshole outright, but winning each day’s battles so that I could live to fight again.

Back to this idea then that I wasn’t ever accomplishing what I knew I COULD deep down: perhaps, um, it was because I was using most of my fuel, most of my energy, for this war.

I was exhausted before I got out of bed.

I was done before I started on the lists of things that mattered to me.

This is the part of depression that those who don’t suffer can’t understand or see. It’s the part that is invisible to everyone around us because we might appear somewhat functional, but it’s also dangerously invisible to the person suffering, so no matter what we do or don’t do, we’re damned… by ourselves as ineffective, weak, soft-willed, disappointing.

This is the underbelly of an extreme cultural belief in self-sufficiency added to a multi-billion dollar industry called self-help.

Why can’t I fix myself? becomes part of the Asshole’s arsenal, really a nuclear-level weapon, which leads to a cycle of shame that leaves us attempting to hide our illness even more vigorously. Asshole wins.

And each day looks like this: I’m exhausted and so very close to the edge but somehow I function at a bare minimum level. It’s enough for people to remind me of “all the good work I do” when I say I am suffering from a crisis of meaning and purpose. Their cheering only adds to Assholes bullets of “see? they believe in you…but you’re nothing… you can’t even finish your basic to-do list… you can’t even ((insert the thing you want the most here))…” Shame. More shame. More hiding. Not getting the help you need because this is obviously not a “real illness” but something wrong with your character so I dive deeper into spiritual practices and exercise and wonder why the things I do help others but not me…

Rinse and repeat ad nauseam for the next couple of decades.

Somehow… SOMEHOW… I listened to my husband and got the help I’ve needed all along.

It’s taken until today for me to notice my increased energy.

Huh… isn’t that funny? No longer fighting an Asshole 24/7 means I have energy for other stuff.

It’s taken until today for me to notice that those spiritual practices weren’t a waste except for the fact that my brain was TOO TIRED to take it all in and that’s why I couldn’t seem to remember, couldn’t seem to keep doing it all, couldn’t seem to “ever freaking learn.”

Because now? My brain chemistry is being altered for the better and I can feel the power of that.

I can feel what “normal” really is and it’s NOT a daily battle for one’s life. It’s a sort of battling for a better life, for more art, for more love and friendship… but that’s not a battling of an asshole… that’s a battling for all that’s good and right and wonderful and beautiful in this world and that sort of battle feeds energy right back into us, invigorates us with meaning and purpose, and has us ready to get out of bed each day, grateful to be doing just that.

My Anti-Depressant Story, with Happy Ending (Middle...)

By the time I was in my early 30s, depression took pretty much everything from me.

It took my sense of self, a taking that started when the depression was really amping up to full-tilt in my mid/late 20s. It took my sense of self to the point where I started to walk a wrong path, be a wrong way, live a lie, and because of my stubborn nature, it would take well over a decade for me to admit this to myself. (My self was whispering the wrong of this immediately, and because depression taught me how to lie to myself, I shut it down.)

All of that self-denial eventually took me from my family, and every day now, I breathe a sigh of relief that that was not permanent, that I was able, somehow, to rectify that.

Depression took my passion, my fire, my loves, my likes, my curiosities, my will, my knowing, my moral center, my talents.

This is hard to write about and it’s even harder to look at — depression took the years of my life when I could have been building a family, when I could have been creating the kind of future I had dreamed of in my teens.

But regret is poison so let’s move on.

When depression first started to get bad, I went to a doctor and got some pills. They turned me into a zombie.

In my early 30s, I tried again. After 3 doses, I got very sick.

What I took from this: there is no help; you can only do this yourself. Pills are bad. I will never take another. (Please note: I always have believed in “experiment of one” and would never ever tell someone NOT to get help if they felt something could help them. I have even guided friends to physicians to get prescriptions and been there as they adjust. “NO PILLS” was a rule for ME ONLY.)

Needing to do this ourselves… What a LIE that is… it’s a core lie of our culture, whether you suffer from mental illness or not. It’s a core lie that keeps us all so much more separate than we are built to be, so lonely, so angry, so fearful.

Fast forward… SOMEHOW I get to a point where the lies are no longer sufferable. I get to a point of inner strength.

I get there thanks to dance and to a million other things I put together in my life. Thanks to the whole “design my life to elevate my mind” approach.

But then more things happen and depression lately has been something more acute for me. This was hard to admit after everything, after how far I had come.

It took me many months, but I found a PCP and then lo’ and behold, I liked and respected her so I opened up about all of this.

She prescribed another SSRI (which seems to be their favorite class), and as I have written about, I landed in the ER with a really bad reaction.

It felt like the same rollercoaster ride. I said NO MORE. NEVER AGAIN.

Then I was back in her office and we decided (due to some research I did) to try another class: SNDRI. (I won’t get into details but this drug works on a cluster of brain chemicals as opposed to one.)

No side effects. None. I breathed and waited.

Not only no side effects but within 10 days there were noticeable positive effects, and yes, this CAN happen. It makes me think that this is the exact right pill that my brain needed all along.

Here’s one of the positive effects: I’m not spending any time regretting not trying this sooner. I don’t have time for that. Depressed brain would have had time for that…

But here’s a little list of what’s going on:

The first thing I noticed (because my husband asked me how it was going and then I was like oh…): I have had a part of my brain for as long as I remember that I call ASSHOLE BRAIN. This asshole does exactly what an asshole does — talks down to me, loves to contemplate death, nihilism, and meaninglessness, and is generally cruel. I spend A TON OF ENERGY fighting this asshole Every. Single. Day. You can imagine that it’s tiring. But…suddenly… ASSHOLE WAS SITTING IN THE CORNER. Quiet. Not saying anything. I realized I could lie in bed at night and THINK POSITIVE THOUGHTS and NO ONE WAS INTERRUPTING ME. I cannot overemphasize the MIRACLE of this.

Then the other night, Craig and I were watching TV and I was LAUGHING AT EVERYTHING. ANYTHING that was remotely SILLY made me laugh.

I heard myself and was yet again amazed. My mother would tell you that when I was little, I laughed so easily. She would tell you that I would sit in front of the TV and just laugh and laugh at the littlest things.

This was that laugh.

Another: any time there is ANY music — in a commercial, on the radio, in my head — I do little dances. That had completely stopped.

And another: I talk. I talk A LOT. I talk in vomitous rivers of excitement. This is ME.

Ten days. On a half dose.

IMPORTANT: Since I’m not exhausted fighting the Asshole Brain, I have energy to do MORE of the other things that I know help. More exercise. Better eating. More play. We can’t let a pill replace those things; a pill, if it’s working right, will help us DO those things.

MOST IMPORTANT: Don’t give up. Keep pushing for the help you deserve. Find a GOOD and KIND doctor. Find a CURIOUS doctor. Research for yourself; be informed. Ask a friend for help if you’re too depressed to do these things. Ask someone who has been there. Don’t accept “okay-ish.” Docs love SSRIs and maybe those aren’t for you. Try something else.

Reclaiming Feminine Mystery & Magic with Burlesque, Butoh, and Tantra Yoga

WHEN: Saturday, February 16th
TIME: 10 AM to 1 PM
WHERE: Pranayoga -- A Little Breathing Room, 1001 West 6th Street
COST: $45

You MUST preregister. CLICK HERE.

When I first started teaching 10 years ago, right after one of my first few classes, a wise, wonderful, beautiful woman came up to me and said this, which I didn't realize would be something that I would hear over and over again in the coming years:

"I was always taught that I had to pick between being smart and sexy...that I couldn't do both... So I picked smart... but now I feel like I CAN have and be both..."

Until that moment, I didn't realize how much I had internalized that same exact message.

Another woman would tell me that suddenly, after months and months of classes with me, she was letting herself buy things she thought of as "too pretty for her" and things with "sparkles!"

She was shocked and delighted by this.

So many of us have learned to turn off certain parts of ourselves to succeed or even to survive.

We've bought into so many of the myths of being a woman in a misogynistic culture: that to be pretty or sexy is to be vapid. To be "too sexy" invites "wrong attention." To be attractive means you won't be taken seriously.

To wear this article of clothing or this much makeup or this sort of shoe could even put your life at risk.

Even more insidious, of course, is that only certain types of bodies are even ALLOWED to THINK of themselves as sexy.

And it's reflected in the dance and movement arts world: only certain types of bodies are ALLOWED to perform, or on a more basic level, to even consider themselves dancers at all.

Bullshit. We all call BULLSHIT.

And yet, these parts of us HAVE been silenced and to reawaken them can be difficult and even a bit scary.

But in community it all becomes so much easier, so much more fun, so  much more joyful.

With the witness of #Treesters in a supportive circle, we can grow into our fullness in every way.

We can embrace our unique beauty and our uniquely wonderful moving bodies.

We can embrace our softness that is another kind of strong.

We can sink into the flow of our innate body wisdom, our intuitive knowing, and our empathic intelligence.

We can OWN all that has been either taken from us, hidden from us, or looked down upon as less than.

In this workshop, we'll move into these spaces within us and explore how they want to be expressed, how they NEED to be expressed, and what these desires are telling us about the kind of world we want to create around us.

We'll be using methods from Burlesque, which promote an assertive sensuality, but we'll do so with no regard for the male gaze. This is for YOU.

From Japanese Butoh, we'll use mindfulness techniques along with breath to discover the deep wells of strength that flow under the skin.

And from tantra yoga, we'll learn of our power of awareness and the paramount importance of and ritual approaches to experiencing through all of our senses with no shame.

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.