Why Slow?

““The times are urgent; let us slow down.””

— — Bayo Akomolafe

When we practice slow in the Peony Method, it's not just to practice being physically slow. Though it is that to some degree, as slower physical practices are, truly, more challenging.

Why? To start, you can’t “cheat” with momentum. Going slowly, you’ll also feel more — including if you’re pushing past a limit of some sort that could lead to injury.

You’re also able to observe your body’s strengths and deficiencies more closely.

If you DO have an injury, you can take your time working around it… flirting with its edges, deciding what to work with and what to let rest.

Slow practices also allow more focus on good breath work but also on different types of breath work. (If you’ve been in my classes, one example would be when we only move during suspended inhales or exhales.)

But beyond all of this (and I’ve really only started to touch on the physical advantages of slow), the slow in the Peony Method is about the emotional/mental/spiritual aspects of your BodyMind.

We hear our body’s messages more clearly. We hear where things might be stuck — whether old trauma, recent grief, or any emotion that is in need of your attention. It’s all in the body, of course.

We hear our heart's truth better when we slow down. The heart can speak in whispers and our busy, chaotic world is often too much for it.

We hear/feel our connections when we’re slower — whether to ourselves, our wiser self, something bigger, each other.

Truth, wisdom, the next move, the right idea… it all has the space it needs to arise and get your attention when we’re moving slowly.

This is not to say that faster movement doesn’t have its own set of pros. But our culture — including our movement culture — prizes FASTER, BIGGER, BETTER.

The Peony Method is the antidote to all of that.

SPECIAL! Four week, 70 minute Kundalini Plus session!

It’s that time again!

Reminders:

• you can participate live or you can just use the videos which are available the following day

• you can participate live AND use the videos all you want because they stay up for all four weeks

• there is a music list that you can use or not

• it’s easier to have music on one device and your video on another

• you’ll all be muted and my music will be on earbuds

• times are Eastern United States

• we meet on zoom

If you’ve never experienced Kundalini Plus as taught by me, go read over here for more information.

I’m calling it Kundalini Plus, because one, as I’ve written about over here, I don’t want to say I’m teaching yoga any more. And two, if you know me, you know I never teach straight up any system. I mix stuff together and see what happens.

So this class will be lots of circular movements and natural movements and tons of breath work and just that deep sense of shared ritual that we’ve all come to love.

You’ll be guided the entire hour, so if you’re not into free movement, there isn’t any.

DAY and TIME: Sundays, 5:30 to 6:40 PM (class “opens” at 5:25)
DATES: October 2, 9, 23, and 30 (no class on the 16th because I’m traveling)
COST: $75 (if this is an issue, please never hesitate to say so and we’ll work something out)

The Scent of the Past

Me with Nana and Pap in Florida

When we’re little, adults often tell us how much we will miss certain people or times when they are gone, and of course, we can’t possibly understand what they mean even when we are a tad bit more introspective than the average child.

We just can’t.

Until we do.

And then it’s heartbreaking.

There are moments in the last few years in particular (is it something about turning 50?) that it hits me (really HITS me) that I will never see or be around my nana, for example, ever again. That that was it. I can’t sit with these feelings for very long. They could easily become overwhelming in a negative way.

For me, a lot of these realizations come with a deep desire to smell something again. Weird, right? But then so much of our memory is tied to smell.

My Great Aunt Ardelle’s house smelled a very specific way. When I used to have a bricks and mortar studio in Erie, it was mere feet from where her house once stood, and once in a while, that scent would be on the wind. It would take my breath away — the flood of memory and the longing.

My papa smelled of fresh cut wood and coffee made in a percolator. My nana smelled of bread, sticky buns, fresh squeezed orange juice, and too many others to list. Together they smelled of Florida to me (even though they lived in Erie for a very long time) and sometimes the weather even in Ohio will make me say to Craig, “It smells like Florida after a brief rain…” and he says, Huh, not really understanding.

My grandmother on the other side smelled of church basements and gladiolas and a scent I can’t name that floated around anything she sewed.

Back to my Great Aunt, she smelled of the old school Oil of Olay which you can’t get anymore… I’ve tried. They’ve changed it too much. And she smelled of Mr. Bubble bubble bath which my sister and I would take in her giant clawfoot tub.

My Great Aunt and Nana both smelled of Christmas… well, the way I want Christmas to smell anyway and a way that it will never again. (And just writing that made me cry.)

There are other scents tied to grade school, especially the little round school I went to in State College for 2nd grade. There’s the smell of waxy crayons and sand from when we’d make those bizarre bits of art with colored sand in baby food jars. (Do you remember those?)

There’s the smell of fresh fallen leaves that every October takes me back to early grade school and certain long ago friends.

There’s the smell of plastic barbie dolls and Christmas gift baby dolls that came every year.

There’s the smell of the cheap paperbacks from Scholastic books and the newsprint that was the order form.

But mostly, to my point, it’s the smells around those people who were our whole worlds when we were little, so many of whom we’ve already said goodbye to.

When we’re little, we just can’t know. I think we’re built that way on purpose. The knowledge of so much coming heartache could easily steal joy from the little people we were … as yet unequipped to process that kind of loss and still so full of trust that it all will just go on and on…

Empathy isn't just for the hard stuff...

(I wish I could find the study I was reading because it was important but you know how … SQUIRREL!… And I’ve tried to find it again and just can’t. If I do find it some day, I’ll come back to this and update it.)

Onward… I was reading a study recently that came to the conclusion that perhaps — perhaps — almost 50% of the human population lacks the brain connections for true empathy.

Read that and weep. Or not.

If that stat is even close to true, it explains a lot about our world. It explains a lot about the seemingly endless struggle between people who focus on their own concerns and those who wish to better the world for everyone. (To put it all in compact and polite terms.)

That’s the macro look at it, but on the micro level, it can explain struggles we have with family and friends and even strangers when it comes to understanding motivations, the extension (or not) of care, the tangles we get in to over expectations, and on and on.

We are truly playing with different decks.

But with all of that, I bet in your mind, you’ve been focusing on the idea of empathy around difficult challenges.

There’s more to empathy than that and I’ve always sensed it but didn’t have the language for it.

It’s something I have been conscious of doing in my work since the beginning. I intuited that a huge part of what I do is really about making space for people to feel their feelings including BIG JOY.

That picture at the top… I love that moment between the two women on the right (Mara and Julie). They aren’t talking. They are simply finding shared joy in their playful embodiment.

Turns out there is language for this: Empathic Joy.

You can listen to a short podcast about the science of it right here.

Science, schmience… as usual it comes from an ancient philosophical/”religious” system: Buddhism.

And in Buddhism, it’s a practice. Of course, it is.

Mudita: sympathetic or unselfish joy, or joy in the good fortune of others. In Buddhism, mudita is significant as one of the Four Immeasurables.

(The other four immeasurables are: love, compassion, and equanimity. You can read more about them all over here.)

When someone gives us good news, do we start to think about our own lack of good news or are we just totally present to them, reflecting their experience back to them?

When we see a happy person out in the world, does that make us feel grouchy or judgy? Or do we take the opportunity to feel good with and for them?

This is the practice: all day long, watching for those moments of knee-jerk reactions that are grounded in jealousy or malice and checking them and replacing them.

I love this.

The body is the mind

I’ve been wanting to write about this for some time now but I kept stopping myself because it feels more like a book than a blog post. I finally decided it’s better to at least start getting these ideas down somewhere so here we are.

We’ve been seeing and saying the words “body, mind, and spirit” for so long, and we’re starting to wake up to the fact that that is the start of the problem: this idea that those three things are somehow separate.

Most western religions believe in some level of duality, as does most of what passes for “spirituality” and “wellness” today.

People speak of their meat suits as if they are somehow separate from them.

They are not. We are not.

Whatever you believe about what happens after you exist on this material plane, you don’t actually know. (Belief is not knowing no matter how much we want it to be.)

So starting there, we can assume that the body is us. This is the experience we are having, regardless of what — if anything — comes next.

And if anything does come next, I will still assert body’s primacy. Firstly, if we are somehow “other spirit,” there is something important about embodiment or why is it bothered with? Secondly, whatever comes next could simply be seen as evolutionary in nature and not separate from what came before. Again, it will be body that gets us wherever we are going.

All of that said…

“Mind” is the word we often use when we’re talking about some sort of higher/wiser knowing that we can feel (FEEL) does not come simply from brain — brain being an organ like any other.

But we are deceived by this language. Mind and body are not just one as in intertwined but they are one as in the same thing.

Here’s how it works:

Body is constantly receiving information and input from the world beyond your skin but also, of course, from everything within that skin.

Body is the antenna, if you will.

But then body also decides what to do with that information/input and to whom it might be delegated internally.

So body is simultaneously the processor of all the data.

After that, of course, body does what body does — it takes action; it remembers; it represses; it stores, and on and on.

All of this is happening to you all of the time in the background and in the foreground, depending on your awareness and your capacity for noticing (which can be increased consciously).

Every time you think you have “intuited” something, you have actually just received informative conclusions that have come from all of this receiving and processing that you are not aware of you. You can’t be. You would go insane.

(This also explains the difficulties that people with sensory processing disorders are living. They ARE aware of TOO MUCH and/or too little.)

Every time you think the “universe has granted you an answer/idea/etc.,” you have actually simply received that from yourself.

For example, you suddenly get a big new creative idea. You think suddenly because you’ve not been aware of all that data collecting that body has been up to and the storage it has assigned to brain and the background “thinking” that has been going on until you took that shower and yelled “AH-HA!”

You did that. It’s no Great Mystery but it is mysteriously beautiful in that we don’t totally understand the power and capabilities and wonder that these bodies and the wider ecology they exist in really have.

Another example: You know someone is an asshole the first time you meet them and you think that’s because you’re “empathic.”

Nope. Your body just happens to be extra damn amazing at collecting data like micro expressions, tone, etc. that other bodies may be missing.

What does this all mean?

It means that the more you are in your body, the more you practice listening to your body in its fullness, that the more your sense of self will grow. Your sense of agency in your life will expand the more you clear the static from your antenna. Your emotional health will increase as you defrag your processing.

It means that your body is the key to everything and that any kind of denial of that fact will only increase difficulty, challenge, and pain.

And no matter where you are in your body’s journey, its capacity for this clearing and defraging (the best metaphors I could come up with right now…) is always there but we must stop trying to “transcend.” That will happen quite naturally and eventually for all of us.

Dance is NOT exercise

No matter how much I talk and write about this, the wider culture’s use of dance is louder than me, so I guess I’ll simply be saying variations of this for the rest of my life. ((ha))

This is something I wrote recently on my linkedin (and it’s followed by another clarification so jump ahead if you’ve already seen this italicized part):

I just saw someone, on a trauma related post, write "exercise/dance," and it made me wince.

To start, I can't stand the word or idea of exercise. Our culture has turned it into half/part of various punishment equations (and these are just off the top of my head):

Exercise = being allowed to eat something yummy

Exercise x Self Denial = being a size that we find acceptable

Exercise x a lot of luck related variables = health as a virtue

To equate dance with any of that just makes me grrrr...

Because the dance world is already steeped in self abusive behaviors and the encouragement of self hatred if you don't meet certain criteria.

Beyond that, our wider culture has turned dance into something only done by certain bodies in certain ways.

Or we think of it as something that we do publicly if we've had enough to drink.

Dance is a sacred human endeavor meant for expression and connection. Period.

Dance is literally in our genes, as it was the first way -- along with drumming and fire -- that we made ritual.

It was also, very likely, how we came together and created the illusion of something larger to scare off threats.

It is written into us to move to music and sound and with others.

And THAT is why it's so damn effective when treating/healing/exploring trauma.

I rarely use the word “dance” when I’m talking about The Peony Method because there’s so much about that word that can trigger so many humans, including really negative experiences with dance teachers in childhood.

So I often say movement or movement art, but we are dancing, just as the whole universe dances itself into and out of the cycles of destruction and construction over and over and over…

But there are MASSIVE differences between what I do and what most people think of when they hear the word dance, and there are just as huge differences between what I do and what a lot of what’s called “conscious dance” looks like.

We are never dancing or moving to check out or to “transcend.” We are moving to become more awake and to bring more awareness to this bodily experience life. We are moving to feel and to process and to open.

This really is the piece most people are missing if they are doing talk therapy. Talk all you want but eventually you have to come face to face with your lack of embodiment and you have to become embodied to move forward and grow.

If we really want healing and freedom, the body is the way, and you must be willing to move this body in the way it is crying/screaming/asking to move. And that won’t look like anything anyone else has ever done.

In that context, I give you “structure without stricture.”

This photo shows what I mean by "structure without stricture." Each person in this photo is both listening to the same music AND responding to the same exact prompt...

This is a practice that meets you where you are, day to day, and evolves with you over time. The Peony Method is freedom.

What next? What happens after we "understand" our traumas?

If we've spent time uncovering and honoring our traumas and we've gotten to a place of some level of understanding (there is never a perfect sort of understanding), at some point, we must start to intentionally/consciously shift focus.

This doesn't mean we aren't also still working through layers of trauma as they come up. That will happen forever; it's part of this being human thing.

And I think that's why people get stuck, actually... they sense that there is more to work on so they think they have to focus. No, you don't.

Shit happens. Shit will keep happening and it will trigger you into deeper understanding of previous shit.

In the meantime, we can and we MUST continue to work on the other focus -- the Joy Focus, to put it one way.

This is not bypassing because we aren't using joyful things to avoid the hard stuff.

We are recognizing that life is both the hard stuff and the joyful things and we're giving space to each.

At first, consciously shifting our focus will feel... almost fake, right?

Because we've gotten so accustomed to living in the crap and the unwinding of crap, focusing on anything else will feel like we are frauds. It will feel like bypassing, but again, it’s not.

But we must persist.

We are in charge of these minds/this life. We get to decide where we put our energy.

We are not here to just be bandied about by circumstances and memories.

We are the bosses of ourselves, including of our brains, and our brains are tools to create and experience that which we WANT/DESIRE/NEED.

How do we do this? You know the answer...

By BEING IN THE BODY.

We do this by moving, by noticing, by fine tuning our senses through positive sensory input like music and art and nature and good food and great smells and and and...

So... What can you start moving, noticing, fine tuning...

I’d love to hear from you. What are three small things you can start with?

Aging, user error, and movement play

A lot (not all) of what we refer to as "aging" could actually be categorized as user error. And again, I'm not talking about complicated process like disease, illness, injury, but the typical things we blame on aging.

We don't pay attention to water intake. There are physicians who would corroborate that a lot of our issues are around dehydration, from what happens with our skin to fatigue to brain fog/memory issues.

We stop moving so we stop being able to move. We say things like, “if I get down on the floor, I can’t get back up… age!” No. Did you spend any time on the floor before this age? So many just don’t. Stop relying on all that furniture; make friends with the floor and the ground.

We start seeing the cumulative effects of bad choices from earlier in life that we thought were okay because nothing bad was happening immediately. Everything from overeating sugars, etc., to drinking every day, to smoking, to never ever picking up a weight or trying to squat or or or... We say “my numbers are great!” until they aren’t and then what? AGE! But really in so many cases? Our choices.

Even the inches thing — we think it’s inevitable that we SHRINK! But as I’ve mentioned before, I have had elder dancers regain inches — INCHES — after mere months of this work.

Here's what I've observed from years of working with humans over 65 (and many other humans who were younger but already feeling effects that looked like aging):

It's never too late to start feeling better.

And as my elder dancer Betty would say, "tell people it's also never TOO EARLY, Christine!"

To be clear, this isn’t about “exercising” and it’s not about sweating your ass off (though that might happen here and there): it’s about joyful, flowing, natural, inquisitive movement in community.

It’s the sort of thing we should all be doing from day one and it’s the sort of thing that we naturally keep doing because it’s so easeful and calming and smiley. And it becomes, over time, the space where we process everything, the space where we honor and pray, the space where we rejuvenate and relax, the space where we connect to self and all and everything.