Where did this come from?

Summer. 2016. I was struggling in my eating habits. My performing career stalled. I needed work. I was sleeping late daily. I didn’t know where my life needed to go at this point. I have a tendency in my life to stand in one place and look in many directions. I can see possibilities, but I am hesitant to take a step. Paralyzed.

As the summer progressed I began to have strange manic sessions. Risky behavior crept in. Aimlessness, fatigue followed. I couldn’t get it together at 46. I had experienced dry spells in my career, picked up various jobs, but I needed a larger road to travel. Things felt precarious in my marriage. My friends seemed so far away but in truth I had done what most of us do, I had avoided them because I didn’t feel presentable.

On the health front, I had psoriasis flareups constantly, other inflammatory flare-ups, wild mood swings, utter fatigue, and I just felt like I had reached a similar place that I had before in life.. I felt grief and despair creep in. I didn’t know it yet, but I was heading into a full-blown depression. My father was in his last few years of Parkinsons and dementia. I had been spending so much time with him and my mom. I had been slowly worn down. I didn’t regret any of the time with him, but I also wasn’t progressing in my own life. I didn’t want to focus on my own life, because I didn’t want to turn away from my father, and frankly I wasn’t sure what to do anyway. Can you feel both panicky and fatigued? Yes, yes you can. My body was in full rebellion. When you are crying in your bathrobe at noon on a beautiful day, you understand your brain and body are just not being reliable.

My best friend in the Seattle area let me know he was doing a production of Fiddler on the Roof at Arizona Theatre Company for their 50th season. So jealous! But wait! There was a chance that not all of the cast would be making the trip. I put out a few feelers about being available for the show. In truth, I needed work desperately, and wanted to run away a bit from my family and my marriage and have a show to work on. But, alas, it looked as though there was not room for me.

Did I need therapy? Yes, both me and my marriage needed therapy. I made some important calls. Got a therapist, went to see her. After an hour of me struggling and laying out what I could, all I remember her saying was to make a choice, take a step in some direction, any direction. That just spinning my wheels, fretting that I would make the wrong next step in my career, wasn't going to get me anywhere. I needed therapy with my husband, my own therapy, meds probably, and I needed to figure out how to keep progressing forward in life with the glitchy jalopy of a body I had. I was so stressed, but I had at least called a therapist. I was finally getting started on a major bout of “the work”. Those times in your life when you know you are stuck. Old issues and patterns cling to you like barnacles. Trauma and grief left unattended. I was so tired, but I was tired of being tired, and so I put some calls out and found a therapist. One session for me, one session for my marriage, and appointments scheduled beyond. I felt relief that I was seeking help.

Exercise is hard when you are depressed. You may know you need exercise, but frankly when you go to the gym and you don’t have the energy to even do the work, it becomes hard to reap the benefits. One thing that helped was accidental. I hadn’t been told an official no for the show in Arizona, so I worked out because I was too deconditioned for singing and dancing in a professional production. Musical theatre work is challenging. High energy, eight times a week, 8-12 hour rehearsals for weeks on end. It required strength, stability, cardiovascular readiness for dancing while producing strong vocals. I did not want to be caught unprepared, and even if I didn’t get the show, fear of being a weak link gave me the impetus to train. For some reason, even in my depression, I wanted to be prepared to do a good job. I was uninspired at the gym, but I showed up when I wasn’t too fatigued.

Then the call came. Ten days before the show was to begin rehearsals I was hired! The solution to my immediate stresses! And yet…Suddenly, the reality that I was leaving my marriage therapy, my ailing father, my own personal therapy became complicated. I realized that while I would have a show to turn my attention towards, I was still struggling. I was leaving my therapeutic “work” unattended. Shame and guilt over leaving replaced the stress and anxiety of remaining in town. I still went. I needed the work, the space, the money so I could continue unpacking my stress and past trauma when I returned. I was so excited to be doing a show with my best friend Adam, I was ensemble with no understudy tracks. There was housing, good pay, and three months of doing a brilliant piece of art.

Five days later, as I was putting clothes and items in bins and suitcases for three months away, I got a text from my friend Adam. Doctors had discovered a brain tumor in his 3 year old girl. He would not be coming. Shit. Of course I knew he had to stay home, but his company felt like it would have been a balm for my weariness. Within minutes, I got a call from the assistant director who asked if I would take over Adam’s responsibilities as the dance captain and associate choreographer. Shit. I wouldn’t be escaping my stress. I had wanted time to destress and chill in Arizona. Instead, I was going down to a major regional theatre for a 50th anniversary production of a huge show. With much more responsibility than before. More work, more time. Adam had already done the show in Seattle. I had not. I drove down to Arizona tired already and slightly overwhelmed. .

We started rehearsals on Nov. 9 2016, the day after Donald Trump won the presidency. Sadness, worry, disbelief crowded our thoughts. We took a few minutes to honor our feelings and got down to work. Within days I realized that I would be staying up late working own my own material while also making a show Bible because within a few weeks, I would be running understudy rehearsals. Depression doesn’t go away because you are busy. I already had been sleeping 10-12 hours a night, and suddenly I was getting 6-8 hours. I started freaking out a bit in my studio apartment. I had jumped out of the frying pan into the fire. My cast was amazing, but it took every ounce of effort to keep upbeat in person. Never mind that depression makes it hard to memorize and retain information. I felt like I was going to go home more tired and stressed than when I arrived. I was a Russian dancer, a Jewish bottle dancer, and had to do puppetry work with a puppet so large(15 feet tall), that I injured my shoulder the first day working with it. My knees and shoulders were not going to survive. I had already had three MRI’s in the last few years. Both knees, and one shoulder. I knew I would need to do my own therapy to continue working and make the money I needed to make for my family. Forget therapy at home. I was in an acute crisis and there was no way out but through.

Why not yoga? Portable. Mindful. It promotes strength, flexibility, connection to the breath. It can be profound in its discoveries. I had been going to yoga on and off for years. I loved it, but I had never found myself in a steady practice. My relationship to yoga seemed cordial and supportive, but not persistent and embracing. I remembered being in a recent yoga class and we were doing a pose called Warrior 2. I was leaning into the stretch but completely detached from the pose. I couldn't figure out what kind of warrior I was exploring, or why this pose was called Warrior 2. I wondered what my warrior pose would look like. Just like that, the doors started opening in my brain. I thought long and hard about what had kept me at a respectful distance from a full embrace of yoga.

I came to understand a few things about my distance. One, there were poses and bodywork that just didn't interest me. I had no need to touch my foot to the back of my head, ever. I was a dancer and choreographer. Surely I could find ways to stretch, work on alignment, practice my breath, attempt difficult things, and be engaged? Two, yoga was operating with language and poses from another culture/history. Why couldn't I use my own stories/culture/history/knowledge/language? Perhaps if I rooted around in my own language, culture, and story I might find connections that I help create. Three, I needed more strength and resistance than yoga provided for the current show I was doing. So many yoga practitioners I knew also did strength training. I needed progressive resistance training. Myself, I found long periods of time would go by in life where I wouldn't exercise, and I realized that weight/resistance training had always been incredibly beneficial, but incredibly boring. So, so boring. So four, I needed the work to be engaging enough that I could do it for the rest of my life, something the various approaches I encountered didn't provide. I didn’t want just five power moves, or ten foundational moves, or even a thousand discrete exercises that I learned from someone else to repeat. I needed to be engaged in a different way mentally. Five, I needed to create some space in my joints to keep them from grinding. I expected surgery eventually, but I wondered how long I could hold the surgery off. I liked the speed of yoga and the calm it gave me, but I needed a wider regimen for my body. So six, I needed to do something in the gym that had the mental health benefits of yoga. I would always love yoga, but in Arizona I had no time to go, and I needed some unique therapy and training for the acute needs I currently had.

Please don’t get me wrong. Yoga is ancient, sacred, physically demanding, and research shows how valuable it is for so many parts of our overall health. I needed to solve some problems in the present, and I had a few spare moments in the day to work on my various needs, so I needed to accomplish a lot. Physical therapy for shoulders and knees. Stress management. Anxiety reduction. Emotional and psychological self-care.

So it was a challenge, but I had a few blessed indulgences. The housing I resided at had a pool. Not a big one, but a pool nonetheless. It also had a very small gym, maybe 10x10 with 3-4 pieces of equipment. I knew I needed to warm up before I worked, and de-stress after work, with radical self-care throughout all of it. So at seven in the morning, I would wake up with a swim, but since the pool was shaped like a kidney bean, there would be no laps for sure. But I wanted to figure out what things my warrior would do. I started to play with being a warrior.

I would swing a sword under water. Back and forth. spinning and thrusting into my opponents guts. As I did pull-ups, I imagined I was a fireman pulling myself up over a ledge to rescue someone. I would pretend I was a bomb-defuser and would creep towards a heavy dumbbell and carry it safely out of harms way. Shooting arrows, holding children above a flood, pretending I was a Spartan wrestling with a wolf. I would stand on my tip toes with weight and imagine I was a seven foot tall drag queen fighting at Stonewall. Of course, I am not the first to use imagery. But I was drawing on my own imagination and background, trying to imagine as many different kinds of warriors as possible.

I was having so much fun suddenly. I started in this little tiny gym space just being creative. I knew I needed grace, strength, and to be engaged. I started playing at being characters. I started slowing down my moves to really engage the muscles that needed help. I figured if I could work on the stabilizer muscles around my joints, then I would have less pain, and perhaps prolong my dance career, even at 46. I started using the equipment in as many ways as I could think. But the most important thing I did was the storytelling in my head. I found that I could stay three times as long in moves or body work if I gave myself some creative story to play with. James Bond. A seven foot tall drag queen in heels. Robin Hood. At the ends of my stories, I would find myself breathing deeper and stronger. I found myself laughing when I was done, or crying, because I had been engaged in storytelling and imagery work that certainly was not boring. I found myself diving deeper into topics, or stories. I found myself puzzling over how to make a theme/story work on a piece of equipment, but finding my brain, my creativity, as the way to solve the puzzle. I found the work creative, spiritual, therapeutic, so entertaining...it was like going to see a movie, having a therapy session, having an amazing workout, all at one time. My body started responding so much more than I had anticipated. I saw that different words, different themes, different stories, different intentions, different focuses all could produce slightly different effects on the physical move being done. I was thrilled, because work continued to be ridiculously stressful. I was finishing workouts and I felt like my brain had been massaged, my body strengthened and stretched, my breath deep and comforting. I was creatively exhilarated, absolutely exhilarated. My body followed suit, I hardly even had to think about it.

I went on to have an amazing run of the show. Tiring. Collaborative. Rich in friends and coworkers. Successful in leadership. I decided in Arizona that I would take four years, until my 50th birthday, to practice and develop the work that I had begun. I would continue to go see doctors, therapists, all the while creating my own practice that was personal and productive.

When I went back to Utah, I was exhausted, but I discovered that when I went to the gym and tried to channel my creativity first, I was always rewarded with something far more than what I expected. Even just using the equipment in novel ways was satisfying. I couldn't always be specific in my storytelling. Sometimes I would just be free to wander the room, discovering new ways to use my body.

I started writing down what I was doing. Little text notes to start. Then taking notes after a session. Then I started searching for topics to play with. Often I would just start with “what do you need today/this week/in life?” Sometimes I would take off and 90 minutes would fly by. Sometimes I would exercise for so long I had to tell myself to stop. I was so stimulated by what I was doing. Often I would start with an idea, a word, a focus, and sort of lose it along the way. Perhaps I would return to it again. Perhaps I would just continue enjoying what I was doing. But having something to play with always helped if I just got stuck. This work was joyous, and damn if my body didn't just feel amazing.

So I called them body stories. Little nuggets of fun and therapy. Even as I headed deeper into therapy that would shake my soul, even as I headed into trauma work that was….surprisingly devastating, I kept trying to get to the gym when I could. I was drinking too much. Eating too much. After getting back from my job in Arizona I returned to substitute teaching. That’s super good for stress don’t you know? Yikes. But I kept throwing my clothes in the car, and 2-3 times a week I would have the urge to go play with a body story. I continued this for the next three years, through being becoming a special education teacher for a year(amazing and difficult), through my father’s deterioration and death, through my mother’s car accident that was months of recovery, through my continued seesaw with addiction and recovery. I went and played around at the gym using creativity as my catalyst. It kept me afloat until I could start really flying.

I have been going on a long time about this. I appreciate you reading this far. Without giving away too much of what I do, let me recap. I found myself in crisis, I needed solutions that in the moment I had to provide. I found creative work in the gym to be transformative and powerful and deeply interesting. I have learned that using language, story, and novelty can be the layer I put over any space, any equipment, or any need. It can be just mindful, novel use of equipment. It can be fictional character work. It can be playful exploration of abstract language.

I just turned 50. This isn’t the leanest, tightest body I’ve ever had. But it’s my favorite body that I have ever had. This journey to reach this place has been more fun and rewarding than I ever imagined. I want to share what I do and how I think about my body work because it has been so valuable to me. I just want to be valuable.

I have laid down new pathways in my body. I can do things now that I never could do 25 years ago, and I was strong. Using creativity, I have worked across the hemispheres of my brain. I feel better. I think better. I react less. Along with medication, family, a dog, nature, and love from my husband, I continue to feel encouraged, rather than discouraged with my life. I invite you to book a session and come explore. Regardless, go to the place where you feel you can move. Whether home or gym, inside or outside, and try doing something new. Walk along the edge of a concrete sidewalk and imagine there is a 200 foot drop on either side. Maybe you’re Indiana Jones. Maybe Harriet Tubman as she crosses a log at night on a Chesapeake waterway(shut your eyes for a second). Slow down your movement. Specify, notice, adjust. Can you feel the work in your ankles? Foundation, connection, trust. Can you tighten your core? Stability, center, gathered. Can you stop and crouch down on the edge of the sidewalk and listen for danger? Hesitancy, caution, stillness. Can you stand back up and continue? Resilience, thorough, tenacious. Anytime you wobble can you gently try and still your body? Core, alignment, settle. Raise the stakes as high as you want, you are on the sidewalk. Who cares who sees you, just enjoy the work/play.

I look forward to meeting you.