Food, Alcohol, Pleasure, and Meds

The warmth during our trip to Asheville was my favorite thing…

I’ve written a lot (and still have so much more to write) about the changes to my brain since going on the right anti-depressant. (Here, here, here, and here.)

And before you read: Please remember that I am the mother of #ExperimentofOne. This is about what works for me. That doesn’t mean I think it would work for you. What I DO believe would work for you is questioning your own assumptions frequently and playing with variables.

To paraphrase Thomas Merton, we are built not for pleasure but for joy. The distinction is important. Pleasure is momentary and of the world; joy is deep and abiding and can be tapped into at any moment because it’s embedded in our operating systems, so to speak. It’s always there, waiting for us to notice. It’s not dependent on anything else.

Pleasure is good. I’m not a puritan. But it’s not the point and it can’t be our primary motivation. Or you can easily end up with a nation of high-functioning addicts. (Oh, wait…)

Pleasure is important but it’s secondary to the depth of joy.

Pleasure is easy. Go eat a cupcake. (Now I want a cupcake.) Joy takes devotion and awareness.

And eventually I’ll relate this preamble to food and my depression…

Though the anti-depressants have removed the Chemical Asshole from my brain, there is still work to be done.

I am still responsible for my own health, wellbeing, and happiness.

A pill can take care of the biochemical issue — and thank god for that — but there remains first, old habits developed out of coping with chronic depression, and second, a desire not just for “good” but for AWESOME.

The pill allows me to spend my energy where it belongs — on joy and love and writing and dance and relationships and learning and growing and all the good things that used to get eaten up by the energy it took just to live with my depression from hour to hour and not succumb to a deep desire to give up.

But the pill does not do All the Things. It does not suddenly make me a different or new person. It does not change who I am on a basic level. It simply gives me access to myself again.

I could decide this is good enough, but that’s not my nature.

I know there’s more to life even than this. I have Big Dreams and goals and desires. I have dance to teach, worlds to explore, books to write.

Because I’m not fighting Chemical Asshole, I have the power to dream again (I had recently totally and truly lost that capacity and that’s when I knew I had to seek help because I’ve ALWAYS been able to IMAGINE), and I have the power to go after those dreams. (None of this can be overstated. I’ll try to write about how this FEELS on a basic level at some point but the words aren’t available to me yet. I’m still adjusting.)

One of the most fundamental ways that I know to make my brain even happier and healthier is through my diet.

For example, in the past, when I’ve been pretty darn strict about being paleo (with occasional treats), I have had less brain fog and less systemic inflammation issues in general. I had more energy. I slept better. I felt more rested.

I also do better with VERY little alcohol in my life.

But I’ve noticed something: when I tell people that I am going back to eating like this and only drinking a beer once in a while, I get met with a lot of objections along the lines of…

But you like beer and wine…

But food is yummy…

What about fun and pleasure…

Life is too short…

First, thanks for the sabotage.

Second, life is too short, indeed, and that is my whole reason for doing this.

I’m much more interested in joy than pleasure.

I will eat the occasional cupcake, but I want the energy and focus it takes to do great and good and big things in this life.

I want adventure and learning and curiosity and excitement and experiences of awe.

Wine with dinner that gives me a headache the next day or somehow numbs me to the now? No, thanks. Depression numbed me for 20 years. I want to be HERE in the NOW; I want to FEEL this life.

Food that makes me feel sick and throws off my system and leaves me creaky and exhausted? Nope. A side effect of my depression were chronic pain issues that left me pretty darn immobile and thinking I needed a cane by the time I was 35. (For real.)

Why the hell would I choose yum over being completely in my life?

And why is it not enough to enjoy a simply perfect peach? What about a square of dark chocolate?

Why are we slaves to foods and beverages that do not uplift us and sustain vibrant life? These questions are important and our resistance to answering them can be telling.

I want more joy and if that means eliminating a bit of momentary pleasure here and there… well, that is devotion to myself, to my purpose, to ultimate love.

To paraphrase that rather awful Kate Moss quote and turn it into something meaningful: Nothing tastes as good as joy/happiness/mental health feels.

New, FREE Circle of Trees Monthly Global Intention Dance

This new project is FREE and open to anyone anywhere on this beautiful planet, and I’m super excited for it to begin TUESDAY, MAY 7th. Please follow instructions below for joining.

When we dance together, there is an instant sacred connection created. We all feel it — whether in a club or a studio or a friend’s living room.

It makes sense since dancing, after all, along with lighting a fire and drumming, was the first way we created ritual.

It’s in our genes; it swims in and around our cells. It travels forth on our breath and soaks earth with out sweat.

From running online projects for many years now, though, I know that you don’t have to even be in the same room — or the same town or even on the same continent for this connection to occur and be palpable, to have full effect.

To have full effect all there needs to be is shared awareness and intention and group directed action.

So once a month, I’ll lead a global intention dance.

HOW: You have to be in the Facebook group, Circle of Trees. Period. This is where the event will be initiated. I won’t be replicating it anywhere else. Just tell me to add you by going to my Facebook page and saying, HEY! ADD ME TO THE TREES! (If you’re not my friend yet, start by friending me there.)

WHEN: I’ll start the process in the Circle of Trees on the first Tuesday of every month.

WHAT: I’ll start by asking an intention based question. Answer. The more people who answer, the more the thread of intention will connect all of us and the more we can each become part of the awareness web that will support those intentions.

I’ll also provide music AND A TIME for us all to try to participate.

PLEASE NOTE: I’ll alter the time month to month, considering we all live in different zones all over the world.

ALSO: If you can’t participate because the time ends up being the middle of the night for you, do it the following day at that time. Just focus your awareness. You’re still with us.

That’s it. It’s that easy.

Free Stuff: Playlists to Help You with Your Personal Practice

One of the difficulties that can arise when we’re trying to develop or deepen an at home personal movement art practice is music. Not everyone has the time or the inclination to find music. Not everyone knows what kind of music would work best for different kinds of movement work.

So to help with that, I’m starting to share some freebies, including some playlists over on YouTube.

Go to my channel, click on “playlists” under the banner, and you’ll find three to start: one for working with anger and frustration, another to ground and center, and another for growing more joy and play.

Each list is under 30 minutes but can, of course, be used in even smaller bits of time by just doing a random shuffle and using the first song or the first couple to come up.

ALSO please be sure to SUBSCRIBE to my channel so that you get updates when I start to share more.

On Vulnerability

Recently I watched this documentary (that’s available right now on Netflix) and I think about it every day. I’ll probably have to watch it again.

At first, I couldn’t understand this dancer’s appeal to anyone. Ohad Naharin adored her… took her to Israel out of university so that she could learn from him and be a central dancer in his company. OHAD! The dude I adore.

And then… then… she does her first solo piece. It’s in the nude. I’ve never seen a reason for the nude thing until this moment. It had to be in the nude. There was no other way for the piece to make sense, and within moments of watching her, you’re so captivated by her body’s ability to be truthful, that you stop noticing the nude aspect.

She is freaking amazing.

But one quote caught me:

“I wanna get to that place where I have no strength to hide anything.”

— Bobbi Jene Smith, Choreographer

The level of vulnerability… what a warrior she is.

What a warrior we are all called to be.

Have you ever gotten near to this idea in your own life?

Are you willing to get near to this idea in your own life?

I’m sharing this and hoping it brings about a conversation because my mind is still spinning from it.

Yoga is not of the body and how the body can take us into yoga

Yoga is not postures. And the postures you think are yoga are very young, especially compared to yoga. Was that confusing?

We keep figuring out that yoga is so much older than we think we know it is. Let’s just assume it’s 3 or 4 thousand years old at this point. Those asanas you do? Some of them are under a hundred years old.

So what the hell is yoga, then?

It’s the underlying philosophy (which is meant to be experimented with and LIVED), and some of it did include postures but that was for the sake of people who need a physical entry point.

I need a physical entry point and I think right now, in this day and age, most people do, because most people now think the body is just a vehicle for the mind and that’s about as un-yogic as it gets.

But the physical entry point is not meant to be solidified. Yoga — the real yoga — is way too smart for that. Yoga is all and all is yoga, and each human is a unique expression of that so why would we think that downdog was somehow necessary to a yogic experience? And who would think that headstands were “advanced?”

People mistaking the material for the all, that’s who. People STILL living in a world of dualism where we are separate from the flow of the divine.

But we ARE the flow of the divine and so we come to what I really want to write about…

I’ve been studying yoga for 25 years. I’ve been teaching for 10 years.

And only just a couple of weeks ago did I feel like, as a teacher and as a student, that I had finally come to START to know “my” yoga.

“My” yoga being the yoga that is natural to this body and that allows this mind and spirit to engage on the same level as body. “My” yoga being a way of moving that integrates awareness and allows me to BE ME. (Language is so constraining right here… I’m struggling to express this.)

I am a student of Tantric Yoga, and in that system of nondualism, the ultimate reality is Awareness.

Awareness has two parts: noticing and then action based on clear sighted noticing and that is unencumbered, that is free and only in the moment and of itself.

For me, to even get close to that sort of awareness, I have to dive deeply into body.

For me, to dive deeply into body, I have to enter into the most easeful flowing state of movement possible.

And so my study of yoga, my experience of yoga, is much about breath creating fluid and strong movement.

This is too big for standing in down-dog or pushing my students into triangles. We are not triangular.

We are water.

And the key to our water state is in the mobility of the spine.

And so, I bring to you what I will henceforth refer to as Water Spine Yoga. You can read more about it here.

No Sanskrit… I do not want to use language that might push people away who need this work.

(I could go into a long rant, too, about how current yoga is very heavily masculine energy yoga and how that’s not what we really need right now and how the yoga I teach is meant to strengthen our feminine energy so that we can go out into the world and be the warriors of love and compassion that we are meant to be, but I don’t really want to go into that right now. HA)

This, too, is a dancer's body

From a demonstration years ago in our city arboretum. Betty was almost 80 in this photo.

This, too, is a dancer’s body, because all bodies that dance are dancer’s bodies, and all bodies are meant to dance; it’s in your genetic coding. Dancing is an expression of being human, no more and no less.

I got to teach Betty for a couple of years before she passed away. That’s the very happy part of our story together.

The sad part is that it was only during these couple of years with me that Betty felt like she was truly embodied, that she felt her feelings deeply, that she got to know her body. This is not my story of Betty; this is what she said over and over again.

She was a nun for a lot of her life, left that, and became a nurse practitioner. When she came to this work, it was not something she ever thought she'd be doing, but she'd tell you that it's never too late and then she'd add with great passion and seriousness that IT'S NEVER TOO SOON!

So much of Betty’s life, like a lot of women her age, like too many women to this day, was in her head. She walked through most of her life as if just a head or as if the body were just a vehicle for the head.

I spent a great deal of my life there, thanks to chronic depression. I know how easy it is to stay there, how “comfortable” it can be — it you think it’s comfortable to only be partly human, to only know a tiny bit of yourself and this great experiment of life.

For the first time in her life, she FELT HER BODY. And she learned that she loved The White Stripes. 

I Thought I Knew the Difference: Thriving versus Surviving

I THOUGHT I knew what thriving was when I really was just at another, perhaps a bit “higher,” level of surviving. (I wrote about this a little bit in a post about managing depression, right here.)

At that time, now that I can look back with a clearer mind, I was mistaking not being suicidal with thriving. I thought because I wasn’t 24/7 thinking about death or passive relief that I was doing as good as I could. I thought the health I had gotten to was the best I could expect after so long of such darkness.

Here’s an important point that I want all people suffering to read a few times:

Because I was still actively depressed, I also thought it was the best I deserved.

I didn’t think I was worthy of true, deep, abiding, peaceful happiness. I thought I was broken, that something was wrong with me, that I had made such bad choices in life that I could only expect so much goodness to come my way. I was constantly expecting something bad to happen to prove that I deserved to be punished. I saw my depression as part of that punishment and so thought a mild form, at the very least, was always going to be with me.

This is a core lie of depression and I want you to know that you can stop believing it. I want you to know that you can stop hearing it.

That’s the part that I still can’t get over: I no longer hear this shit in my head. It’s just gone. POOF.

I keep saying to my doctor, to loved ones… to anyone … HOW was this CHEMICALS? However it was, it was. And that’s that.

But I digress…

Here’s a paradox for you…

Now that I have my brain chemistry issue on the mend, I’m downright confused what to do with it…. how the heck to live with this level of health that I’ve not known since I was very small?!

The vast majority of my life has been about surviving, so it’s been about hyper vigilance, awareness of symptoms, care-taking, watching everything I do, eat, watch, see, read… This kept me very busy with lists and tasks and efforts and plans and research and and and…

My life has revolved around this illness. How could it not? This illness threatened my life. I’m lucky to be here.

Without this project, what now?

Furthermore, a lot of the things that I love in this world — dance, chanting, yoga, writing, art of all kinds — those things were drafted into the service of this project. They became “medicine” to the nth degree. They were no longer for creativity or expression but simply for my survival.

What were those things now? WHY were those things now?

I sat in front of my yoga class recently talking a bit about this. We do that at the beginning of class; we have a true sangha — awareness circle — and I am not above it or outside of it but in it and so I talk about my own challenges as much as anyone else.

I asked them about this what now.

A few of them answered all at once and said just about the same thing:

“You do things for FUN, for joy, for fulfillment, for peace…”

WHAT?!? For FUN? For JOY? For…fulfillment and peace…?

I squinted and then I laughed at myself for this was truly confusing to me. I could cry and be sad about this but my new brain chemistry is like, “what’s the point of that!?”

So I giggle instead and answer, “How delightful! A new sort of project!”

That’s where I’m at: watching for opportunities to redefine experiences, reframing, and simply allowing things to be what they are. I’m doing the reps, if you will… strengthening muscles that had been atrophied.

Brain Chemistry & Meditation

People who love meditation love to tell people how meditation is the answer to pretty much everything.

What these people don’t realize or don’t know or simply ignore is that different brains are, well, different and that difference counts with something like meditation.

As an embodiment artist and teacher, I’ve met and talked to far too many people who feel shamed by their “inability” to meditate.

Of course, the usual definition of meditation by which most people judge themselves is often too narrow and often simply wrong.

Meditation is not, for example, the attempt to eradicate all thinking. Good luck with that. Not possible. (Though you might get moments when it feels this way.)

Meditation is the nonjudgemental observation of the thought process whereby we train ourselves to not get attached to stories. This develops witness mind.

Witness mind can be developed in other ways than simply sitting and counting your breath or whatever of the millions of techniques you’re exploring. And here is where the definition usually gets far too narrow.

You needn’t sit on some specific cushion in some specific posture for some specific number of minutes.

For a long time, for example, the only way I could approach this sort of mind space was through vigorous and joyful movement. I would tell people that it was then that I could sit inside the “eye of the storm,” the storm being the normal overly chaotic state of my (depressed and anxious) mind.

And here’s where a limited understanding of and a shrinking of the idea of meditation actually gets dangerous, and yes, I said dangerous.

Jon Kabat Zinn, MD, and author of the very famous mindfulness book, Wherever you go, there you are, says that to teach meditation to people with PTSD with no body/somatic component is akin to malpractice, because sitting in the filthy nest of our not-well minds can actually make it all so much worse.

Do I ever know this from personal experience! When he said this, I felt so damn relieved. I was not alone.

When I attempted meditation, it simply allowed me to sit and observe all the depressed and anxious thoughts and in that sitting and observing, those thoughts GREW.

I felt like meditation allowed my mind to basically start eating itself with hatred and worry and fear.

But dance and play? That part of my mind, thanks to in-the-moment swimming-in-happy-chemicals, was shut down or at least quieted. I could see above those thoughts for those moments.

I moved enough and taught enough that those chemicals got a bit steadier and my mind got a bit healthier.

But… my mind was still not healthy enough to allow for the absolute stillness and quiet of seated meditation. That was still the danger zone for me, which was a big clue that my depression and anxiety were not just circumstantial but something much more.

Now that I’m well into the wellness created by (FINALLY!) the right anti-depressant (in my case one that not only blocks re-uptake of serotonin but also of dopamine and norepinephrine), I can see that all along my problem was not one of “not doing enough wellness; not taking the right herb; not eating the right diet; etc., ad nauseam.”

Nope. My base issue was a brain that had bad chemistry. Like a diabetic, I had an actual biological issue and it took medical intervention for me to finally see and feel and believe that.

I’ll try in more posts to write more about how different this is, but…

I can now sit in meditation. NO PROBLEM. Hello, healthy brain!

I now CRAVE moments of stillness and quiet.

My movement work is reflecting that in ways I could have never imagined.

See? That’s what I’m talking about. Different brains… meditation only is efficacious if the brain is already in some shape or form “healthy.” Healthy brain chemistry is needed, and sure, eventually, meditation can be a pathway to even MORE healthy brain chemistry. But you need a base to start.