why taking the time to learn about and practice expressing Anger is an Important part of Healing

In my work I often use a visual tool called the "Feelings Wheel".   Although I've never been able to find out much about the creator of this wheel or her logic in its creation, this has not stopped me and my clients from developing some pretty amazing practices based on this tool.  Over time I have come to understand that the top half of the wheel (Sad, Mad, Scared) are what I call "depleting emotions."  They are valuable emotional states that can become damaging if experienced too much or for too long.  If we give ourselves time to explore and understand our experiences within these states, we can learn a lot about ourselves and our world, but most of us spend lots of our energy either repressing or justifying, ignoring or explaining, without simply being in the experience of being mad, sad or scared.  We don't give ourselves the opportunity to comfortably be present with the uncomfortable.  There are often good reasons for our reluctance to be with our body as it experiences these states; however, there are also ways to allow this to happen that can be healing and therapeutic. 

This blog is specifically about the emotional category the Feelings Wheel identifies as "Mad".  I tend to call this Anger because I think it is more accurate.  I am focusing on Anger at this moment because I have been invited to offer a workshop exploring Wrath and Aggression.  Wrath and Aggression are the more intense variety of the Anger emotion and its resulting (re)actions.  Since I prefer to explore from the less intense place first I will start with just plain old Anger.

I have discovered in my observations of my self and others that the pattern for most of us is that Anger engulfs our senses with such intensity and discomfort that we act on the urging of our body without much mindfulness, either by releasing it outwardly with great force or by repressing it inwardly with great force.  

If we are one of the  folks who expresses action outward,  we then often try to discuss or explain from a place of logic afterward what happened to us that justified the action. We try to make SENSE of the action without including Sensation at all.  In our society we rarely have the opportunity to safely sense into the experience that so quickly led to our actions.  Express Yourself offers this.

If we are one of the folks who expresses our anger by holding it in, we often try to never directly discuss or explain our experience, but then it comes out of us in other ways that we don't recognize as Anger because we haven't allowed ourselves the opportunity to SAFELY sense into what Anger FEELS like, to recognize the components of Anger when it appears in other forms.  Express Yourself offers a space to notice these sensations in the body, to give you room to be curious and process safely.

To support my exploration of the more intense form of Anger known as Wrath and the more intense form of action known as Aggression, I have been asking myself these questions:

In the palette of emotion, what are the "flavors" of anger including wrath?  Is wrath the most intense?  What is slightly less intense than wrath?  What is the least intense form of Anger?  Is there a constant that your body recognizes as anger regardless of the intensity?  What changes inside of you as the intensity increases or decreases?  How is something like Irritation similar to Wrath?  How is it different?

What is the balancing emotion that anger fuels or supports? 

Based on the Feelings Wheel, my suggestion is that Anger's dynamic partner is Empowerment.  Over time I have come to understand that the bottom half of the wheel (Peace, Powerful, Joyful) are what I call "recuperative emotions."  These are the emotional states that feed us, nurture us, bring us comfort and balance; however, they are not separate from the depleting emotions at all.  They are actually the resulting state of experience that comes with mindfully noticing and being present with those emotions we so often try to ignore or repress or fix.   Likewise, the threat to or absence of these recuperative emotional states is communicated to our bodies when we experience Sadness (loss of Joy), Anger (loss of Power) or Fear (loss of Peace).  To understand Anger, it is important to understand your bodily relationship with Empowerment.

Anger often leads to action or re-action.  Aggression is one type of action. 

 
What is involved for the body to move aggressively?   What moves Outwardly, what gets held Inwardly?   If you move with the exact opposite qualities of the pattern of Aggression, what is the name for this type of action?  What emotional state do you experience when you move in this type of action

I believe that learning about and practicing expressing the "depleting emotions" in a safe, supportive space is important because it is part of healing.  This is one of the inspirations for my work with Express Yourself.  Sharing this with you when you feel called to this sort of healing work is my life's passion. I offer this to this community because I have experienced and observed that it has the power to transform deeply. 

Thanks to those who read through this.  I appreciate your interest.  I welcome your comments!

Blessings, Victoria

Expressing Myself - ch,ch,ch, changes

This is a blog about some functional changes that I am making to one of the workshops I offer regularly in my hometown of Columbia, MO.  The changes are inspired by my experience while offering a workshop based on this same movement form, Express Yourself, in Willow Springs, MO at the women's meditation retreat center Hearthaven.

To folks in CoMo:  Please note that this will be the last month that registration for Express Yourself will be handled by Heart Body and Soul.  This is also the last time I will be offering this particular movement form when the number of early committed participants is less than five. 

Starting in August 2018, I will be asking folks to commit with payment a week in advance and will offer that specific month's workshop only if I have a core committed group of at least five.  The fee for those who pre-register will continue to be a non-refundable $15 for the 90-minute workshop.  (If I get a core committed group and the event happens, anyone who has not pre-registered will be asked to pay $25 for the luxury of waiting to drop in!) 

This decision to change the way I approach this particular movement form is, in part, because of my recent experience with offering it to a sizable committed, curious group - and the experience made me realize that I do a disservice to myself, my craft and you, the participants, when I try to "wing it" for one or two people.  (I do use this form in private and small group sessions, however,  this is possible because the session is thoughtfully planned specifically for the individual(s) involved.)

The experience that brought me to implement this change was this:  I was recently immersed into the energies of the Goddess Bast for four days with 20 or so women at the annual summer retreat of Hearthaven in Southern Missouri.  For those who might not know about Bast, she is the Goddess of Cats.  She is playful, sensuous, mischievous.  She is the embodiment of contentment & self-care as well as the embodiment of wild aggression in her protection of innocents harmed by abusers.

As a part of this retreat I lead the group in an exploration of some of the dynamics of Bast: Tame/Wild and Angry/Contented.  I used the movement form of Express Yourself and the template I had developed for last month's exploration of Shedding the Tame that did not get used because there were only a couple participants.

This workshop at Hearthaven was powerful and transformative.  It was awesome for me to witness it unfold.   Over the course of 120 minutes, I watched women change the way they lived in their bodies, carrying themselves with more ease, less tension.  I heard women shift their understanding as they discussed their experience of the prompts.  Several of the women involved told me after that they had been able to touch their wildness and/or their anger in ways that they had never before experienced.   

Some have called Express Yourself an embodied movement class. This is true, however,  it's also more than that. The intention of this movement form was and is to be a vessel that supports embodied, safe healing around living fully while in relationship with concepts like Anger, Desire, Power, Trust.

Unfortunately in my well-intentioned desire to make this workshop happen however I could for whoever showed up each month, I kind of lost hold of what my own creation was all about.   In this recent experience at Hearthaven my vision of this movement form as a healing modality was re-ignited!

And so, here we are:

I am beyond excited at the possibility of bringing this supportive, safe, kinesthetic exploration to you, my community of Columbia MO.  My life's work is about finding embodied safe ways to support all of us in our process of exploring and healing our relationships with difficult subjects and concepts.  If you haven't done so already, I do hope that you will soon join me in an upcoming session of this unique opportunity for conscious, mindful, embodied healing.

Eco-poesis: A Journey to NY and to my Self

Good morning, my community of Embodiment seekers, to all those who invite, strive, welcome and savor being more fully in their bodies and in Life!  This is one of, I hope, several posts about my journey to the 40th Anniversary celebration and conference of the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies (LIMS).  I hope to be writing more in the days, weeks and months that follow, about the people I met, the inspirations I’ve experienced and the ideas that I’ve touched or caught these past few days.   To extend my felt-sense connection to this incredibly empowering experience and to share this valuable wealth of knowledge with you my plans are to write often about what I have observed, learned, felt and explored. My goal, dear reader, is to also share with you as these experiences become more deeply integrated and embodied into the rhythms of my more routine daily personal and professional life.

In celebration of the 40th Anniversary of this educational institution, LIMS invited the Laban dance community to reflect on what role dance and performance art might play in shaping appreciation of cultural differences and creating equality between humans, other species and the natural world.  They adopted the term Ecopoetic as the inspiration.  This term combines “eco” from the Greek “oikos”, meaning family or house, and “poetic” from “poiesis”, meaning to make or to create.  This term was intended as an expression of the legacy LIMS represents, the care for the movement field that we as Certified Movement Analysts (CMA) all share, and the desire to collaborate in nurturing escapes from standardized modes of behavior.  Although this was the umbrella term used for the comprehensive collaborative multi-centered movement art performance in Washington Square during the conference, they also invited us to consider, conceptually, ecopoetic as a practice. Ecopoetic practice being one that relates to “an ecological way of thinking with a multifocused and open-ended perspective”, a practice that invites us to dialogue with our environment, its activities, and the other living beings in it in non-standardized ways without imposing ourselves over the surrounding spaces, or hindering their normal uses.

The material about the performance art piece ECOPOETIC (conceived and directed by CEO of LIMS Regina Miranda) explained that it was evoked by the concept of the early 20th century Movement Choirs created by choreographer/movement theorist Rudolf Laban (1879 – 1958) who believed that this collaborative structure promoted and satisfied core needs of human society: “sharing, relating and creating together.”   Some of you may recognize the influence of Laban on my own endeavor, the Mandala Community Movement Project, which was "birthed" on Earth Day of this year in Columbia, MO's own Peace Park.

Being in Washington Square on Friday evening, observing my professional peers immersed in their individual and collaborative creations of their unique ideas of ecopoesis, was profound.  I hope to be sharing pieces of video from these performances in the coming days so that you, too, can get some chance to witness this experience.

I also am having a resonant and very personal response to this concept of Eco-poesis, this idea of actively acknowledging the value of an activity in which a person brings something into being within their home space that did not exist before.  This resonates so strongly because it describes the drive within me that has always and continues to compel my work with Embodiment, a passion to bring to my community a way of exploring and being with movement in ways that I have not experienced in my time in the space that I call home.  I speak to this a bit in my previous blog post "What Do You Do and What Can I Expect?"  

The two ideas that really stepped off the page and jumped into my body when I read the material from LIMS about Ecopoetics are these: the action of caring for the movement field and the action of desiring to “collaborate in nurturing escapes from standardized modes of behavior”.  These  both speak so clearly to my heart’s desire that fuels my offerings.  Eco-poesis. Creating within my body, my home, my community, my family something which did not exist before  - and support the act of living life more fully.

I look forward to sharing more as it unfolds!

What Do You Do and What Can I Expect?

The title of this blog is a question I have heard in various forms over the last year.  "What is it you do?"  and "What can I expect if I come to one of your events?"  It is not uncommon for me to hear from folks that they find my work interesting and intriguing, but are reluctant to take part because they aren't sure what will be expected of them.   I understand this hesitancy to show up for something that seems new and, possibly, foreign.  I also know well that those who have overcome this fear and joined me in my various workshops have reported to me that they have had valuable and unique experiences that have then rippled through many aspects of their lives.   

SO, if you are one of these folks, intrigued by me and my work, but a bit hesitant to join in any of the many events I offer, please know that I have created this blog and the list of guidelines shared at the end especially for you.

WHY IS WHAT I DO CONFUSING?

My theory is that what I do is confusing because I do NOT offer a recognizable structured movement modality.  Movement opportunities offered in our culture, especially in the Mid-West, tend to be more structured and formalized like Swing Dance, Yoga, Belly Dance or Tai Chi or they involve some sort of sport or exercise regimen.  People seem to understand movement classes as a way to learn a specific movement modality for a defined purpose. For me participating in these practices is similar to putting together the contents of a Lego kit that was designed by someone else and has all the necessary parts to build a specific thing like a rocket ship or a barn.  In this sort of movement experience we are invited to learn the pieces and how to put them together in a fashion to get the end result specified by the modality or the teacher. This can be very rewarding.  Each of these movement forms I listed are all great opportunities to move!  I enjoy doing all of them. I know many wonderful people who practice and teach these forms.  They can be fun and valuable exercise, wonderful to watch and to be a part of.  All of this is true, however, this is not the kind of movement opportunity that I offer.

WHAT IT IS I DO

My education and the underpinning of all I offer is based on Laban Movement Analysis (LMA). LMA is a framework of movement, rather than a specific movement modality.  With the tools of LMA I can observe, analyse and explain any movement.  Because of my intensive training with instructors who are highly trained professional dancers, performance and martial artists as well as yoga and pilates instructors, I have the skill to create and teach structured movement with specific consistent actions, but this is not the way I generally choose to share my extensive training.  As Embodiment, I create and facilitate opportunities for you to explore yourself as a mover.   Because in my workshops the movement is about you, your choices, your desires, your attitudes, your environment, your abilities and your limits, it makes space for the experience to be uniquely rich, healing and exciting as well as unpredictable and sometimes uncomfortable.  My workshops are intended to support you as you LEARN ABOUT YOURSELF IN MOVEMENT, not teach you any specific actions or set of actions.  To continue the Lego metaphor from above, the movement events I offer are more like showing up to an event to discover Lego pieces from hundreds of different kits in piles all around the room.  Imagine being invited and supported to create something from all this possibility!  As you select and build and try things out, imagine being led to notice the themes or possibilities within the piles, and then invited to notice and be curious about the patterns of your choices within all of this!  Imagine then being invited to notice your experience of the act of making choices, noticing patterns and of creating something new with the information you have received from me, from the other participants and from yourself within the experience!  Imagine what you might discover!  This is a more apt metaphor for what I offer as Embodiment LLC.  My workshops are opportunities for you to practice in a safe, supported environment different ways of moving and being in your life! 

To help understand the diversity of the possible experiences you can have if you choose to work with me, let me give you a brief overview of some of the movement forms that I have created and currently offer: 

•  Express Yourself and Wild Women Wednesdays are more concept-driven events in which a criteria, intention or direction is given as a guideline.  This intention determines how we will explore and what we will create together.  As the names indicate these forms are more about exploring your personal creativity and expressivity.
• Mindful Move Groove and Movement Fundamentals invite you to more closely examine and explore your physical movement choices - what are the parts you tend to use, how do they fit together, where do they go in space and how can you most efficiently move in the way you desire.  In these forms I offer a blend of education, exploratory movement and choreographed movement sequences.
• Tranceformotion and Meditation for Every Body offers opportunities to explore Spirit and Embodiment using different healing traditions, such as mindfulness and trance work.
• In some of the movement forms I have created and offer we start with a more formalized structure, like Yoga, meditation, drumming or Tarot, and then together we take the structure apart piece-by-piece to learn more about the whole.   
• In the individual sessions I offer, we can explore any and all of these routes, depending on your needs and interests.

I hope that this helps to answer the question of what exactly it is that I do and what you might expect if you show up to one of my offerings.

Please know that I am also willing to take time to meet with you to talk about what I offer and what might be valuable to you personally; however, know that what I offer is experiential, so words will only give you a limited view into the experience!  For you to understand what it is we do in an Embodiment event will require you to join in, (and also be aware that your unique presence will, in turn, influence the experience of the event for all involved!)

GUIDELINES FOR TAKING PART IN AN EMBODIMENT EVENT

If you are still feeling curious but hesitant, I have shared a list below of guidelines established by me and some of my regular participants.  I regularly update these guidelines because I believe that curiosity and learning thrive best when we know the boundaries and social "rules" of our environment and those can only be determined by the folks involved.  Below is the most current list of what is asked of those who take part in any of the various Embodiment events:

• Suggestions offered or prompted by the facilitator or other participants should be viewed as invitations intended to INSPIRE and SUPPORT you in deepening the process of you of being you, rather than as demands or commands.
• Be curious.  Ask questions - of the facilitator, of yourself, of others.
• Allow yourself to experience your sensations for the sake of the sensations.  Be with them. Move with them. Try to not make a story about them. Be with them.  Move with them.
• Remember that PERFORMING is NOT being AUTHENTICALLY you.  Be curious and share with yourself and with each other, but if what you are doing begins to feel like performing, the suggestion is to stop, sit down, make it smaller, take a breath, decrease the intensity, find gravity or take whatever action you need to shift back into yourself.  The act of not knowing what to do next can be powerful.
• Remind yourself that the act of Breathing IS Movement!  Sometimes being fully present with our breath is the most powerful action we can take.
• Notice if you have a persistent desire to express yourself through verbal communication and invite yourself to resist it, to check in with your experience of your sensations and allow the desire to express connect into and out of you without words.  This might be movement.  This might be sound.  This might be stillness and silence.
• If you start to experience exhaustion, frustration or demoralizing thoughts, change something.  Change your position. Move yourself into a different level or place in space. Find a new body shape. Adjust the size and/or intensity of your action.  Stop. Breathe. Find your support. Allow yourself time to recuperate.
• If your experience of being in the present moment has become difficult, uncomfortable, fatiguing, irritating, or overwhelming and you are unable to transition or transform the experience on your own, communicate your need for support to the facilitator or to another a trusted person in the room.
• Don’t:
  • Push through it just to accomplish it.
  • Ignore sensations and internal information.
  • Fake it until you make it.  
  • Apologize for having your experience or being you.
• DO Notice.  Notice. Notice:
  • your relationship to your Breath
  • your places of support
  • what is happening withIN you
  • what is happening OUTSIDE that you can see, hear, smell, taste or feel on your skin
  • what is happening INSIDE of your mind that is not actually happening in the present moment
  • your curiosity.  your joy. your reluctance.  your desire
  • your patterns - of thought, of response and of action
• Give yourself permission to be curious, to take a risk, to be safe, to inquire, to try new things, to say no.

FINAL WORDS

Please join me.  I am passionate about this work because movement IS life.  My own experience with LMA has given me so many tools to be more present, to experience and move with my life, in dance and in every day activities, with the glory and the challenges.  I look forward to sharing this framework with you in whatever ways interest you and in supporting you as you move more fully in the ways you desire to move in your life!

The Miracle Child - a 45 minute film worth watching

https://.www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACueMhFVGHU

I urge you to take the time to watch this film. 

Why?  For one, because the story told is incredibly inspiring. 

Also, because it is an insightful look at the hard work that happens in the human body from the time when we are undifferentiated infant bodies to the time in our process when we become crawling babies and then, when possible, walking toddlers to walking adults.  Although this film is about one boy's experience, it also is a reminder that this movement stuff that most adults do every day didn't just happen by accident.  In Aiden's journey we can see the progression of skills and knowledge that are available (and important) to all of us as humans .   The exercises that these practitioners are using to help Aiden's brain and body learn are developmentally wired patterns of movement. 

As you watch the film I invite you to consider that the majority of us learned these extremely challenging skills long before we learned to talk.  Most of us learned them so early, in fact, that we don't consciously remember them and take their existence completely for granted until something - like injury or aging - forces us to pay attention.  The fundamental and foundational aspects  of our daily complex movement is usually invisible to most of us. And yet, as this film shows, they are still accessible to us to explore and learn from long after our first few years.

This film is such an awesome look into the relationship between physical movement and mental health, and the process of change.  Aiden starts from a place of significant movement deficit but with steady, titrated, personalized movement support and practice (and full support and belief by his mama), he transforms over the period of two years  He not only changes how he moves but also who he is!  I am in awe of the physical changes he makes, but even more I am inspired by how his engagement with life, with the world around him, is transformed.  As he is able to access more complex movements, he becomes more actively connected to the Outer world and as he becomes more engaged, he is able to physically move more freely!  A beautiful example of how Function and Expression in movement enliven and support one another!

It was affirming for me to stumble across this film and then to see in it parts of the work (Bartenieff Fundamentals BF) that I offer. In the film the practitioners are incorporating BF and the concepts of Laban Movement Analysis to support Aiden's re-patterning.  It reminds me to never lose sight of the bravery of those individuals with a wide range of challenging limitations who trust me to support them as they explore moving themselves more freely. 

Often, when people first talk to me about their impressions of my work as a somatic movement educator they, for the most part, focus on physical movement solely.   And my work does involve the physical action of movement; however, it is this enhancing people's engagement-with-life piece that is the core motivation for the workshops and private work that I do.   When I say that I offer somatic movement education to support you in moving with more integration and ease, I am not just talking about your physical movement. I am talking about the act of living life more fully through conscious, active embodiment!  As a somatic movement educator I am offering the opportunity for any curious, interested person at any age to safely explore new ways of moving and being, within themselves and in relationship with the world and other humans.   Because of this I am grateful and inspired by the work done being done by the somatic practitioners at the Spiral Movement Center.   I am honored and thrilled to be part of such an awesome profession!