About six months ago, I was phone-dreaming/collaborating with Jenny Macke http://presence-studio.com/?page_id=204 about Harbin Hot Springs https://bodyjoy.net/5Rhythms-workshops-sacramento.html#harbin, throwing ideas, visions, intentions into the juicy soup pot between us, stirring it up. We both want to lift us out of the sticky day-to-day ensnaring web that consumes us, creates a barrier to truly knowing who we are and what we really need. Words were flying all over cyber-space until, almost in the same nano-second, we uttered “cultivating space”. That just nailed it: cultivate space, inside and out. It’s always there, inside and out, it just gets obscured in the daily fray.

We all need deep personal support and sometimes it comes from sources way less visible. There is unspoken sustenance that may need to come out of the closet: stillness, withdrawal from the exterior world, turning inward. Heartened by my three days of silence at the end of 2014, I made a resolution. I never make resolutions. But I did. One day a month in 2015 for complete and utter unplugging. The only rule? At home with no screen time: no phone, no computer, no TV X 24 hours.

I first heard the term “holding space” when I dove into dance as a moving meditation. Curious how this phrase tenderly moved through me and informed every bone in my body. I knew immediately that this was the ineffable language for what I had been doing as a medical professional all my adult life. I just didn’t know there was a name for it. It’s a skill I’ve honed over a lifetime and still I fall short time and again, get up, dust myself off and keep learning. It comes most naturally for me when I’m at work one-on-one seeing you for physical therapy. It is more challenging to refine in the classroom setting, for me, easier in yoga than dance. Actually it’s a life craft we all practice, whether we know it or not. For most of us it shows up in our work lives and in our personal relationships as well.

Wind sheds chaos in the trees, light is a subtle shade of brilliance and 67 people are acutely aware of how precious the time remaining is. For that I am humbly grateful. I am one of them. Very few are privileged enough or even see the point in carving three days out of time to focus on the biggest perspective. Most of us are so busy making a living it is easy to forget what a sacred and rare thing living is.

I hadn’t been feeling well for several days. Yet it was Saturday afternoon and this commitment to teach Intro to 5Rhythms was long-standing and I am too much a professional to do anything other than show up. Maybe you’re like that too...a woman of my word, sometimes to a fault, for sure. As the first sounds filled the space, I felt my spirit lift on wings of music. And what to play and what to say and how to impart my deep love for this practice in a quick two hours, to the diverse variety of experience present in the room…well it all just began to flow. By the time we were complete, I felt immeasurably better. It is so obvious that movement is medicine. Look for the next Intro to 5R in this perfect space on April 11.

“Really? That’s just an old story.” Ever been on the receiving end of this condescending comment after baring your naked soul? Confiding hard-earned insight, true childhood root of why your all grown-up self just behaved like that? Maybe you actually censored that insight all on your own or maybe this pearl dropped from your own lips in response to a friend’s revelation. It’s a pop culture catch phrase. “That’s just an old story.” As if our old stories have no value. Ah but they do, they deeply shape us.

I had opportunity and loving support to bathe in deep silence for a long-short two and a half days. Long enough to know my busy and future-oriented mind, which is not new information. In the quiet frigid days there was beauty sprinkled, as well. I walked across forest floor meditating into an eternity reflected in plant decay at my feet, enjoyed the pure and intense physical pleasure of just breathing, marveled at delightfully easy heart access. And for about an hour, well into the second day, a clear sense of teaching territory spontaneously revealed itself.

“We are the ones we have been waiting for...”

The origin of this phrase is controversial but its inherent, powerful truth resonates deeply. Hopi elders used this expression to conclude a well known metaphor: a river flowing swiftly, letting go of the shore, seeing who is with you and celebrating...creating your community, being good to each other...and to not look outside yourself for the leader.

We are all so very human and more or less aware of our inherited and self-generated interior cast of characters who show up for those better or worse curtain calls depending on what’s playing out in our lives...a personal population evolving from a very tender age. Recently, someone who knows me all too well named one player in my internal troupe: “the good little soldier”.

Ever feel washed, wrung out, hung to dry? I spent yesterday afternoon couch-curled, sunk in recovery, a bit breathless from two over-the-top weeks. Many extraordinary things came to pass in a brief chunk of time and on this rainy morning stretching empty before me, quiet drapes my shoulders and I recall a Mary Oliver line: “what was that beautiful thing that just happened?”

hursday night 2003, Clunie Clubhouse, 8:30pm...again. After a full year dancing, I know the drill. Time to circle up after practice. Listen to the extraordinary shifts and communal realizations happening inside us on the dance floor. Time to articulate the ineffable. I sit there deeply identifying with each speaker, grateful they are communicating some (but not all) of what has passed for me. I hover trembling, so stirred and shaken, so much transformation and information revealed on multiple levels...and I say nary a word, never contribute, not dare allow fear or doubt to become visible, illumination or joy to spill over, become audible. Never.

Late 80’s, a chapter of intense orthopedic manual therapy training. One moment remains crystal clear: case presentation, standing before my peers, explaining each turning point in treatment, how multiple options narrow into singular choices. The instructor stops me mid-stream, asks why I chose that particular alternative. My reply...“It was intuitive.” He promptly seized that opportunity to call me on the carpet, to derail intuition as a guiding force, to make his own point about what guides a truly worthy clinician. Practical, functional, hands-on, logic. Total reliance on observation and palpation.

This morning I took my 90 year-old stooped papa to the airport so he could fly home. I didn’t want him to go. And I felt the profound shift this simple statement indicates. I grew up watching shows like Leave it to Beaver and Donna Reed and Father Knows Best. I ached to have a normal family like that. Where you can count on Dad to be politely reasonable and Mom wears an apron and pearls and everyone gets along and, most importantly, no one yells. We all have our family of origin stories and quite clearly, mine had been way messier than my T.V. viewing.

At least once a week someone corners me for a variation on the same urgent confession: how much or for how long they have wanted to come to a 5Rhythms class. This revelation is followed by some version of a fear story and, if they talk long enough, the word self-conscious usually emerges. They shrug their shoulders and wonder if they will ever get over it. I don’t say much in reply, just that it is a common story with no magic solution except to show up, be with it, watch it change...or not. Here’s what we know from experience: it almost always shifts after a class or three.

Periodically someone with dubious authority publishes an article about why it is dangerous to engage in yoga. The latest article, published in the New York Times last month, warns flexible women about serious hip injury if they keep doing this perilous practice.

Peppermint steam wafts between us, this friend seated across from me at Pete’s. Her whole being emanates open ground as she poises the $64,000 question: “How do you feel right now?” My body tentatively poises on the edge of detection, I watch my mind try to busy it’s way into territory it knows nothing about. I actually feel belly butterfly queasy, shallow breath...this is dread, this is fear. I am grateful to feel and name it.

Last night I was lifted ever so slowly from a dream sound-tracked by rhythmic flutter. I rose to a large butterfly, burnt toast in color, beating her frustration against the window-pane by the bed. A few tries, then finally, cradled in the gentle glow of a white t-shirt I had danced in all day, I carried her outside. Released her to the night speckled sky, the almost full moon calling her back home. Paused in wonder on the deck and then fell back into dreamland once more

Book Club last night, intrepid women fearlessly tackling sticky issues, personal travails, the obstacles on our common journey to our birthright home, our essential goodness. Last night we dove into Getting Our Bodies Back by Christine Caldwell, a somatic psychotherapist working with the seeds of addiction that lie in the body. Recovery that focuses on cognitive treatment alone will miss a big boat.

What are your thoughts on teaching, being a yoga teacher, or your desire to be a yoga teacher now compared to before you started this program?

The question is: What, most simply, can you surrender to this week? Maybe program related, maybe not.

This week I had to write a bio and did a list of writing prompts to get me started. “Where can we find you when you’re not working? What’s your favorite way to spend a weekend or a Sunday afternoon?”