December, 3 One Hour "Kundalini" Yoga for Restoration Classes that you can use into January

Peony…

Though we will have live one hour Kundalini yoga for 3 Sundays (and you don’t have to be live; you can just use video), starting this Sunday, December 5th, the videos will remain available to you for the remaining 2 weeks of December and into January to use as much as you want/need.

Please note: The next session of one hour yoga will not start until mid to late January.

This session will be focused on my mix of ALL THE THINGS yoga to restore you after this hellish year. (Or was this year actually 20 years? I can’t tell…)

You’ll still recognize the basics of a good kundalini yoga class but we’ll be doing other things to help reset your nervous system. For example, we’ll practice a special sensory-deprivation breath with savasana.

There will be lots of goodies to help you feel more grounded and stable and READY for a new and DIFFERENT year (oh, please, make it a different sort of year!!!).

DETAILS:

DATES: Sundays, December 5, 12, 19
TIME for LIVE: 5:30 PM (Eastern United States) to 6:30 PM (and I get online at about 5:20 if you wanna chat)
COST: $50 (for 3 classes that you can use over and over into January)
*As always, if the cost is a stretch, just message me and we’ll figure it out. Please don’t miss out for that reason.

The Lie of Effort Bringing Reward

I’m pretty used to chronic pain. Or I should say that I’ve had a lot of time in my life where it was the norm. Then I started to dance at 40 and I got rid of most of it for the majority of that decade.

Something might come up here and there but I made a little effort around it and it was gone in no time.

Because that’s how things work, right? You put in effort and you get rewarded.

No.

SOMETIMES that is how things work. Sometimes rewards simply are not on their way no matter what you do.

My strong and very healthy shoulders six years ago.

There can be a million reasons for this, unique to each human, but when we assume that effort brings reward, this leads to the moralizing of effort which then leads to judgement of humans we think are not “efforting” enough.

It’s the basis of all ableism (and of toxic capitalism that says enough effort can bring wealth to anyone no matter what but I’m focusing on body issues here and that is a whole book in and of itself).

This year, I’ve been dealing with a shoulder tear. Not bad enough to warrant surgery (which I want to avoid and my doctor agrees) but bad enough that I lost a ton of mobility and was in constant pain and had a hard time sleeping etc. I got a shot and that helped enough to let me start doing serious P.T. on myself.

Which has increased my mobility but I’m still only at a B grade.

Now, I’ve always been extremely mobile and very strong, so my idea of an A grade is different than a majority of humans, but I’m not willing at this age to give up on that. Because that’s a slippery slope right there.

All of that brings me to a few nights ago when I was crying to Craig about the progress I was making not being enough and not being fast enough and what if this is IT!?!?

That’s when it really hit me that I’ve always bought into the ableist crap of effort = reward.

Any doctor I’ve ever had for issues like this can’t get over the effort I put in. They say “no one does that. People want pills and surgery.”

I work hard and I’m consistent. And I stay consistent over long periods of time. I am stubborn in those good ways (and some bad ones but alas…).

And still… with all my stubborn consistency, hard work, and the knowledge I have about what to do and how, I am still not healed.

There are two things here that I want to emphasize.

First, sometimes we think we’re not getting the reward for our effort because it’s happening too slowly and in too small increments to notice. So we give up or we dilute our efforts and this then proves to us that we are not succeeding and “SEE!?!? This is why it’s not worth it!!! NOTHING is happening!” Self fulfilling prophecy type stuff.

I myself — Ms. Stubborn — have been tempted to give up in this very way.

Second, sometimes we’re simply not going to succeed. Sometimes things are worse than people can know. Sometimes there are circumstances that simply cannot be overcome.

This is hard. As a culture, we want to believe that there’s always the possibility of success.

But sometimes the success we need is the redefinition of what that looks like for us, the altering of expectations, the release of a strict goal so that we can move forward and start in a new way.

I believe that there’s ALMOST always room for improvement and space to create new mobility and strength, but sometimes this will look different than we want it to, and that’s got to be okay.

Landing in Your Body and Not Separating Your Self into Parts

I love this quote not because of its accuracy but because it makes us think about how much we separate all of our parts -- physical, spiritual, emotional, psychological, and intellectual.

And when we separate, we create instant cultural based hierarchies of those parts with bodies and emotions usually thought of as less than and intellect and spirit/soul as "higher."

Nope.

NOPE.

It's all one. We're all one. There's no transcending any of our parts or any of our experiences. There's just being brave enough to be IN. IT. ALL.

When we dance or practice physical methods, we might for an instant think we've gone "above" or "out of," but what's really happened is we've finally landed.

If you want to explore all of this more directly, registration is open for December Quickie Yoga and Peony Method classes.

I’m extra excited about the Tuesday class (or whenever you want to use the recording):

Fundamentals of Narrative Based Movement Art to Rewire the Brain for Joy

We’ll be exploring how to strengthen the positive connections in your brain via happy memories. We’ll use guided meditations, sensory awareness, and focused breath to bring the memory fully into the body and then practice different movement prompts to solidify the positive sensory information and corresponding memory stories.

If you’ve never taken a class with me before, THIS will be a great place to start.

To register for this or yoga or the Thursday FASCIA FOCUSED class, go here.

The Betrayal of Self and The Rebuilding of Trust

There are a lot of reasons we can't "hear" our body's wisdom anymore. One of the most common? Learning from an early age that our desires/needs weren't to be our primary concern/responsibility but instead that we were supposed to focus on being a certain way to fulfill others' needs.

This happens to almost everyone in one way or another, but for some, it’s more directly intense and much more destructive of the sense of self that’s crucial to individuation and a sense of fulfillment.

Learning to listen again can feel scary, for sure. It can feel totally overwhelming. We can feel like the emotions that come with it are too much. Or perhaps we have simply decided we aren't worth the effort.

The Peony Method is gentle and it takes time but eventually? All of this can and will change.

We must start with simply allowing the body to be what it is in this moment. We spend a lot of our lives in this culture trying to manipulate the body into a certain form or action, only to then get angry at the body for not doing so or not doing so quickly enough.

We are betraying ourselves in those moments and so trusting starts right there.

Trusting starts with acknowledging, noticing, allowing, and eventually? Being fascinated. I’ve seen it thousands of time — women thinking they’d never be able to feel fascination within their own bodies “UNLESS…” (fill in the blank… they were thinner, stronger, had this or that…). But they’re always wrong. And delighted to be so.

It won’t happen over night, but over time… with patience and commitment to practice.

In Person Erie Workshop: Loving Kindness and Movement

WHEN: Saturday, December 4th
TIME: 11:30 AM to 1:30 PM (or a bit after…)

WHERE: Pranayoga: A Little Breathing Room (Next to Virgil’s Pizza)
1001 West 6th Street, Erie, Pennsylvania

WHAT: The (Un)bearable Lightness of Being: MOVING METTA

BRING: Pen, paper, water, anything that comforts you (blanket, crystals…)

NOTE: PLEASE BRING A SMALL CANDLE IN A CONTAINER.

REGISTRATION: $40 (If this is difficult for ANY REASON, please contact me and we’ll work something out.)

There are limited spaces available so please register as soon as you are able.

Also Note: this is a MOVEMENT workshop. It’s neither dance nor yoga. We’ll be using a lot of natural, primal movement, and very simple movement prompts supported by music.

WHAT THE HECK IS METTA?!?!

Very likely, you don’t know that I spent a lot of years studying Buddhism. I even helped bring a western Lama to Erie for the first time so many years ago.

I haven’t been studying it since I found Tantra Yoga but wow… they are related big time.

And after Peony’s death, it was actually Tibetan Buddhism that helped me in those initial dark hours, so perhaps I’ve started up again.

Regardless… metta… ((FOCUS!!))

Metta means loving kindness, goodwill, benevolence… It’s one of those concepts that doesn’t just have a one to one word translation equivalent in English.

Metta meditation is a way to turn our hearts toward loving kindness. We can aim that at ourselves or others. Ideally, both.

It’s a meditation that comes with scripts, like the one in that meme right there. But there are a lot of variations.

HOW WILL WE MOVE METTA??!?!

We will be bringing the ideas of metta to our movement practice. That might be the more correct way to look at it. Though I think it also works to think of moving the metta itself.

This idea came to me at least a year ago.

But I wasn’t sure exactly what it all meant.

Then Peony died and I renamed my movement arts practices after her.

Even before her death, though, the idea of delicacy and gentleness had started entering my teacher vocabulary in new and kinda (to this teacher) startling ways.

I mean, I’ve always been pretty… assertive in my practices.

But then when Peony passed, something really truly surprising happened.

I got softer. I wasn’t expecting that, though many around me would say it had been happening especially since I met Craig and started to live a life in which I felt so very safe.

But what will we DO?!

Sorry… there’s so much to cover!

We’ll be learning a bit more about metta itself and its place in the four Buddhist immeasurables (and what the heck they are).

THEN we’ll start to explore moving in ways that are consistent with those ideas. This movement won’t look like DANCE so don’t be afraid. It will even include simple things like super slow walking.

We’ll then increase the reach of the ideas by working in partnerships and as a group.

As usual with my work, there will be a BIG emphasis on breath, and we’ll be creating ritual together. Duh… that’s what all my stuff comes to. ((ha))

If you still have questions, as always, just ask.

Remembering to use The Peony Method on MYSELF because... it works (duh and oy)

From pre-Craig in my Girl on Fire Movement Studio, Erie, PA

There has been so much change over the last six years that I don’t think I could list it all. It started with meeting Craig and then from there it has been this wild roller coaster ride from moving to Vermont to moving back to Erie to experiencing some really painful things to moving to Columbus and then buying a new house and then losing my sweet Peony most recently.

That doesn’t even really begin to cover it, and in the meantime, I lost my daily dance practice. ME. The teacher of daily dance.

For about 8 years, between teaching and then doing my own practice, I was dancing anywhere from 2 to 6 hours a day. You read that right. It typically was around 3 but it could easily be in that 2 to 6 range depending on the day.

Let’s back up even more…

About 13 years ago ((!!!)), when I first started to dance again, just putting on my favorite music and moving was enough. There was so much joy in my body that was aching to be expressed and I had been away from dance due to that shitty chronic depression for so long that it took very little to get me going again.

Then I started to train and I realized I was really missing moving with other humans so then just being with other humans in a class was enough to get me going.

Over time and through working with so many different populations (from traumatized children to people living with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s and everyone in between), through all my studies in somatic psychologies and different movement modalities, I’ve composted and then synthesized and recreated and grown new ways of working with people to process trauma and grief and move into their joybodies.

This has evolved into the newly named, Peony Method.

After Peony died, I knew it was more important than ever to get my personal dance practice back. I’d been trying for a couple of years but it wasn’t clicking.

Then I had a big AH-HA moment… just the other day…

I’ve been just putting on good or interesting music and then expecting myself to, well, move.

And I get bored or distracted or just feel lethargic and apathetic.

But not when I teach. When I teach, I also move. And I never have a hard time getting going or staying moving.

Why?

BECAUSE I’M FOLLOWING MY OWN DAMN PROMPTS.

Which are GOOD and serve a damn purpose! (I’m yelling at myself there and laughing at myself at the same time.)

Telling people to “just dance” isn’t the answer.

People are stuck. They feel numb. They’re tired. They’re sad. They’re disconnected. I include myself there.

They’ve lost any understanding of really being EMBODIED, of being able to find PLAY.

It’s the whole freaking reason I have designed the work I have.

Now my dance practice will move forward because I’ll TEACH MYSELF. I’ll use my prompts.

This will lead, of course, to learning new ways to teach and prompt because I won’t feel stuck, numb, lethargic, or disconnected.

Instead, I’ll feel interested, curious, fascinated, playful.

Duh.

And OY.

Calming your nervous system, diving into basics, and exploring connection

NOVEMBER CLASSES start next week of course:

For November QUICKIE Yoga, we'll be focusing on the parasympathetic nervous system so lots of breath work, including new practices, and lots of work with the vagus nerve.

For November PEONY METHOD, Tuesdays (and I'm excited about this) we'll be deep diving into all the basics. Whether you've been with me a long time or are new, beginner mind is such a fruitful space to inhabit!

Thursday PEONY METHOD will remain focused on the fascia. There's just so much to do with that material... we've barely begun!

REGISTRATION and more details here.

"Fitness" "Influencers" and Ageism

This meme has been going around. I think I even shared it in the Sanctuary just for the giggle of it. But it stayed in my head for a couple of weeks and I finally figured out why.

But first, let’s clarify some things.

The ideas of fitness and exercise, as they are currently packaged and taught, are repugnant to me. As usual, our culture thinks you can a) buy something that will fix all your problems and b) that the body is somehow this separate mechanism from our minds and hearts and culture and family and c) that certain kinds of bodies are the “goal” and d) that certain kinds of bodies represent “health” and and and…

It’s ironic (or a bunch of other things) that the person who made this meme go so very viral and who crossed out the 30 to replace it with 40 is a very, very, very thin, white actress. I’m assuming she doesn’t understand the layers of meaning she added when she, a representation of so many problems with our ideas of bodies and success and beauty and health, was the one to up the age to 40. (I could go on forever with this stuff but it’s not my point so I must move on…)

And the idea of “influencer” is just, well, GROSS.

All of that said, the reason, I finally realized, that this meme really bothers me is the ageism. And I don’t mean the ageism of assuming only 20 year olds are the epitome of beauty.

I mean the ageism of assuming that someone in their 20s doesn’t have something to teach us.

The ageism of assuming that just because you’ve gotten to… 40… means that you do have something to teach us. ((cough meme creator case in point cough))

Just because you age doesn’t mean you’ve gained any deeper self understanding.

Just because you are young doesn’t mean you don’t already have a deeper sense of self understanding.

Self understanding and the ability to challenge one’s self to grow are the prerequisites to good teaching and they have nothing to do with age but everything to do with experience and then what we do with that experience.

So here’s what I don’t want in a teacher or a guide on my body/mind/soul journey:

I'm not interested in being taught by someone who has not struggled and been challenged by and in their bodies.

I'm not interested in being taught by someone who has never had a serious injury and then worked their way back from that.

I'm not interested in being taught by someone who has never had to struggle with moderate to severe mood disorders and fought like hell to get back in their bodies to heal their minds and hearts.

I'm not interested in being taught by someone who doesn't have a deep understanding of not just their own trauma but of the myriad ways that trauma can manifest and the unique struggles of traumatized brain when it comes to getting back into our bodies.

And I'm not interested in being taught by someone who has not experienced heart shattering grief and still managed to breathe and move in some way through it all.

That doesn't fit on a meme so of course we distill it and think it has to do with age because that's simple.

It's not age... It's experience.

And it's not just experience but CONSCIOUSNESS AND EFFORT relative to those experiences.

And finally, the person I am interested in working with, learning from, or even teaching (as I do) is the person who gets that the body is no less and no more important than the mind and the heart….

…that mind, body, and heart are not separate but integrated and separating them does violence on a personal, cultural, and global leve.

…that the body is a vehicle to process life.

…that the body is an expressive tool to say things that can’t be said with words.

…that the body is not a story of your goodness or your badness.

…that the shape or size or condition of your body is in any way a moral proclamation regarding your personhood.

…that fitness is actually about wholeness and connection and has nothing to do with your abs or how many fucking burpees you can do.