Help Is on the Way...and in the Meantime, A Very Important Video

People are in pain.

Real, serious, every day, every hour pain.

The more I teach, the more I see this.

And the more I teach, the more I notice that people are not getting the help they need from conventional health care.

For most people I teach, the answers are so simple, it makes my tummy ache that they haven't been given the answers before. It makes me mad.

Learning this, seeing it so clearly, is certainly giving me a different level of motivation in my work, and so, very soon, you will be able to work with me more directly in a couple of different ways.

As I start to scheme, watch this. Its importance cannot be overemphasized.

When I Almost Had to Buy a Cane

Becoming this person I was born to be seemed to have happened in an instantaneous and magical moment, but as I have explained, that moment only was able to happen because of so many other moments that had woven together and created the opportunity for my epiphany on the dance floor.

For example, in my mid to late 30s, Marcy and I were already cane shopping for me.

I was born with some structural difficulties in this body and have inhabited and acclimated to a pain body from the time I was pretty young. I always woke up feeling stiff.  I often would trip out of the blue because one or another joint would give. I don't remember a time when my lower back did not hurt.

I walked with a funny little gimpy limp.  Marcy found it endearing.  I found it ... weighty.

Into my 30s, I developed another frustrating symptom of God knows what: I would be walking and my front inner thigh would just suddenly give out.  It hurt like hell.

I thought I knew pain...

Then one evening, I was walking through our living room, and I stepped onto my right foot and felt a searing, blinding pain like never before.  I screamed.  I started crying.

I could not move and I dared not look at my foot, because I was absolutely 100% certain that somehow, some way, I had managed to step on a nail that was standing straight up out of the floor.

There was no nail, of course.

I was convinced that if I looked down, my foot would be GUSHING BLOOD.

There was no blood.

Over the following months, this happened more and more.

There were days when I could not walk in our house.  I would pull myself up the stairs with my arms.

I started to think that a cane was in my future and I figured if that was that then it better be cute.  So Marcy started cane shopping.

Then one of those magical threads that needed to be woven for me to one day be able to dance again happened.

We went to dinner at a friends. A lovely outdoor dinner.  A woman whom we'd never met was attending.

I was going on and on about my love for martial arts films and she very intuitively asked, "Do you think you love those films so much because you want to DO that?"

"Well, yes, but you see, my hip..."

"Yes, I see your hip. I've been watching it all evening.  I can fix that."

Whatever.

Freak.  Like, I was born this way and this is it for me.

Also? Hello! She was not a DOCTOR.  Just some freaking know-it-all physical therapist type.  (Note: I was raised by a physician who taught us that only physicians know anything about the human body and everyone else is a QUACK!)

The dinner evening progressed.

A couple weeks later, the friend who had the dinner told me she was going to see this woman named Sunday for some issues of her own and she would love to take me.  (Sunday's practice was in another city.)

I don't know why but I went.

I paid many hundreds of dollars that we did not have for an hour and a half of Sunday's time.

And Sunday changed my life.

She taught me how to walk from my core and not my thighs.

So simple yet so not.  (To understand how the majority of people are actually falling when they think they are walking, see this post.)

I spent weeks taking slow walks around the park near our house, training myself like a toddler how to walk correctly.

And now?  Now I dance more beautifully and stronger than I ever did as a pain-body teenager.

Now I tell other people, "Yes, I see that...and I can fix it."

Lent 2012: This Body is Your Temple

For those of us who have suffered from disordered eating or full-blown eating disorders or body image issues or actual dysmorphia, taking care of these bodies can be downright difficult.  I mean, even noticing that we have bodies is a huge step for many of us.

To someone who has a healthy relationship with their body this idea for Lent might seem selfish, self-indulgent, even sacrilege.

But if Lent is about entering our interior desert and facing our demons, this couldn't be a more frightening, head-on sort of call for those of us to whom this idea is directed.

I am going to spend Lent treating my body like the temple for my spirit that it is meant to be.

I have been having a wee dry spell spiritually so as Lent was quickly approaching, I was feeling a bit panicked about the approach I would be taking.

Then I read this post by Becky (and check out that tattoo photo she posted!), and it became clear to me what this year's Lent would be all about.

Lo and behold, I already had a massage scheduled for Friday after Ash Wednesday.

Is this a joke?! Someone may have just yelled, but no, it's not. To be touched by another human being, to be cared for, is beyond difficult for me.  It scares me.  It pushes all of my buttons of shame and unworthiness.

This body has given me so much -- it gives me the gift of dance every day and I share that gift -- but I still, far too often, do only the minimum required to care for this body.

Every time we appropriately care for something, we are praying our thank you.

Time to dance some gratitude in my daily life.

Love & Anger Guest Post

Today, you can find me writing about the relationship between love and anger over here.  What does the phrase "love and anger" make you feel?  Do you have an immediate response?  Go and join in the conversation.

Tina at Open Roads has been curating an entire month of posts about love so you can just keep reading!

Needful Things

My brain is of the sort that is very happy -- happiest, really -- when it is very focused. My brain loves to have a "special interest" in which to deeply dive.  Deeply.  Like, to the point that it's really all I want to think about, talk about...ask Marcy.

It can be rather...exhausting to live with a brain like mine but it is also a brain of excitement and passion which can be infectious.

My special interests have been pretty consistent over my life.  From the time I was little, I was dancing and asking questions about God.

Severe depression took me off this trajectory but now I am back.

Since October, though, God has fallen off my brain's radar as I focused everything on opening my studio and trying to figure out how to do the best I can at that.

Brain is not happy with this sitch.

Yet even thinking about trying to fit in God (and this sounds utterly ridiculous but alas...) seems impossible.

My schedule is so full -- where the heck is there room for anything else much less something quite so large as the God thing!?

Well, I have, it seems, hit some sort of breaking point.

Two nights in a row I have had long and detailed and aching dreams of Mass.  Aching in that needing way.

So I went.  To Mass.

And my brain was still, all through it, freaking out over the idea of fitting one more thing in -- to brain, to life, to days, to hours.

But I also started to think about how tired I get from teaching and how the thing that is missing is this...this refilling of my soul.

My soul has grown needful.

I am good for no one from such a needful place.

It turns out that my brain and my soul have good timing -- lent begins next Wednesday.  As you may know, 40 days of desert time is not something unique to Catholicism or Christianity.  40 days is a classic length of time to delve into spirit and needs.

What might you be needing and how might you explore getting it?

Heigh-Ho, Heigh-Ho, It's Off to Work/Dance/Write/Paint We Go...

Whether we work in the mines or work at our own dream business, at some point, we realize that it is, well, work.

The other night after coming home from teaching my blend of Kundalini yoga and free movement, Marcy and I settled down to eat while watching 20, the Pearl Jam documentary (which was excellent!).

Documentaries that draw back the curtain and show you how creatives do their thing are some of my favorite films.

The level of passionate dedication and focus never ceases to amaze and inspire me, and Pearl Jam is no exception.

To love what you do so much that it takes you to such heights of admiration from others...well, it's no simple feat no matter the medium.

The artists/thinkers/dreamers/doers who get to these heights are also rarely aiming for them.

They are, day to day, simply aiming for the best they are capable of on that day, building on the days that have come before, sticking to it even when inspiration seems to have left the building.

There it is...did you notice?  W. O. R. K.

No matter how inspiring/inspired successful people seem to us, they are where they are because of the day to day.  The work.

The heigh-ho of it.

The going-to-the-mine even when it feels like you might just vomit if you simply say the word mine one more freaking time.

Appreciating and loving and celebrating the days you uncover diamonds but always mindful that those days are one in many days.

You see, everyone besides you sees only the diamonds.  They don't see the days and weeks and months when there were no diamonds but only the digging and the digging and the more digging.

For me, the digging is dancing.  Dancing on days when I feel like the Queen of Slugs.  Dancing on days when the music is somehow not reaching my feet much less my heart or soul.  Dancing on days when I would rather nap.  Dancing when it feels like I am 83 in this body rather than 43 and rather than the 23 that I normally feel like.

And finally, the digging is going to the mine all by myself, putting on music, and pushing into and past old ideas of me.

RABBITS! ART! FILMS!

I have some rather exciting news today!

My partner, Marcy -- artist, writer, super-smart-helper-of-me, most sane animal in this house, best cook ever, and lover of all things rabbit and cat -- has started a new site full of major fun-osity.

Go visit Rabbit Room Arts.  Named after our room that has rabbits...and art.

You can check out her pet portraits and her not-pet-portraits.

But the newest, coolest thing she is doing is making hand-drawn, animated films.