Rethinking small.

I have a story I sometimes tell myself. It begins, "This town is too small." I dream of faraway places. Of belonging somewhere else.

This morning I attended a breakfast fundraiser for ArtWorks. I piloted the True Body Project with them 10 summers ago. I return to them this summer to help me out with City Silence with a bit of back-end logistics know-how.

I sat at the table with Heather Britt, Julie Sunderland, Victoria Morgan, Ron Lauck, Sara Vance and others. Heather and Julie and I dance together at Heather's DanceFix at the Cincinnati Ballet, with Ron and Victoria and many others. My ex-husband and my son's father, Michael Sharp, danced with the Ballet when I met him. My son was on stage at 3 months old during the party scene in the Nutcracker as "the baby."

We watched Pam Kravetz rev up the crowd and speak on behalf of ArtWorks. We dance with Pam. Plus Pam and I worked together at the Diner. I met her when I came back home to Cincinnati in 2001, when she was my son, Nick Sharp's, project manager for an ArtWorks summer program at Children's Hospital. Pam has supported my projects for years. Sara supports more arts project than I probably even know about and has helped out True Body Project along the way.

We watched Tamara Harkavy talk about the program she has grown. I met Tamara when I moved back from Cleveland and Dale Lamson said, "You two HAVE to meet." A few years later, I helped out with some fundraising at ArtWorks and True Body Project was born, nurtured and sent out into the world. Tamara's husband Matt Kotlarczyk was there too. I had just seen his gorgeous work of art in Scott and Diane Durban's home. I met Diane an hour later to work on the designs for the City Silence t-shirts. I met Scott in the 80s when we worked at Uno's in Clifton. That's where I met Allan Berliant too.

At the ArtWorks event this morning, Mu Sinclaire made a generous matching grant - matching dollar for dollar any donation made at the breakfast. I met Mu when my mother, Sheila Sims, was dating his father-in-law, Bob Orton.  I was in high school and Mu and Robin were living and working on a farm, making a difference on sustaining for the future in an entirely different way.

I could go on and on and on and on. In one and a half hours, I saw no less than 50 people whom I have connected with, worked with, been inspired by, and supported by. 

So I am rethinking my story. 

This small town is filled with people who stay connected to each other and to what matters. We make art. We teach each other's children. We dance together. We invest in a better tomorrow.

That is my kind of small town.

8:30 am, April 3rd. On losing my mother.

7:20 am, April 3rd, 2015

Two years ago, at this exact time, my mother was still alive.

It was Wednesday morning. I woke up first. My brother, Dave, Aunt Betsy and I had slept on chair/cots in her hospice room at St. Elizabeth's in Northern Kentucky. Both Dave and Betsy had arrived earlier that day after the doctor reported in his Monday morning visit that my mom had only a day or two left.

The night before, we sat around the bed of my dying mother. I think there was pizza (my brother will remember. He remembers everything I don't.) My vital mother would have loved it. She loved laughing. She loved family. She loved silliness. My morphine-filled shell of a mother would have hated it. She was so restrained. So proud. So private.

We didn't know what else to do.

7:34 am, April 3rd, 2015

Two years ago, at this exact time, my mother was still alive.

I woke up first because I had been trained over the last many nights to be vigilant to her needs. The night prior, before family arrived, she had called out "Pauline!" - her mother's name - and I had responded, "What, honey?" If those were the last words we exchanged, it would be a beautiful story. But in truth, the last words we exchanged, before the morphine dose increased, went something like this.

"Mom, you can't get out of bed."
"Shut up!"

She had never in her life said anything hostile to me. Based on my daughterly assholeness, I figured she deserved a dig in her last hours.

I woke up because her breath had turned to rattle in the night. For the last month of her life, I read the list of "death signs" pretty much every day: feeling her extremities, watching for her to pick things out of the air, looking for a burst of energy. Like labor, once it is the real deal, there is no mistaking it.

The hospice nurse confirmed it. She had a few hours left.

7:41 am, April 3rd, 2015

Two years ago, at this exact time, my mother was still alive.

Soon after my brother arrived, he took over the role of hospice inquisitor, asking the nurse medical-sounding questions about my mom.

"Are you a doctor?" she asked earnestly, charmed by Dave's competence.

He looked at me with a wry smile. I groaned. My brother's one-ups-man points had tripled. He had just won hospice.

7:47 am, April 3rd, 2015

Two years ago, at this exact time, my mother was still alive.

When I say alive, I mean that more as a technicality. Betsy, Dave and I stood around Mom's bed as her body prepared to shut down. I had the impression that her soul had vacated her body (probably when we sat around her room eating pizza!) the night before and we were watching her body go through the final machinations of being a body.

I imagine that there is a spirit that helps the soul ascend and another one that stays behind to systematically shut down the lights.

Her mouth was agape. I had seen this before with Kristin. Maybe that is the way in and out for the spirit.

7:52 am, April 3rd, 2015

Two years ago, at this exact time, my mother was still alive.

It was a beautiful morning. Canadian Geese walked around outside her room, just beyond the porch where she had hoped to smoke. Before we left her apartment, on Easter Sunday, just three days earlier, she had said to me "Be nice to the hospice people." My mother was always concerned with my not-niceness. She told me once that she had heard Oprah say that being nice wasn't the most important virtue for a woman. This comforted my mother.

I assured my mother I would be nice. She was again comforted.  "So they will let me smoke," she reasoned.

8:00 am, April 3rd, 2015

Two years ago, at this exact time, my mother was still alive.

Coffee. No matter what, coffee.

8:07 am, April 3rd, 2015

Two years ago, at this exact time, my mother was still alive.

She had been diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer, metastasized to the brain and bone, four months earlier. They gave her 6-9 months. She never faltered from grace with her terminal diagnosis.

I had written Swimming Naked, my novel about a woman who becomes final caregiver to her dying mother (stage 4 lung cancer,) 12 years prior. It was published in 2004. In April.

8:14 am, April 3rd, 2015

Two years ago, at this exact time, my mother was still alive.

The human body is a miracle. Breath is a miracle. Pulse is a miracle. Consciousness is a miracle. A mother's touch is a miracle. A mother's laugh is a miracle. A mother's love is a miracle.

8:16 am, April 3rd, 2015

Two years ago, at this exact time, my mother was still alive.

She stopped breathing. Dave, Betsy and I stared at her, then at each other. We held our collective breaths. Then she started her rattle again, her lungs pumping like they were more machine parts then muscle and bone. Her eyes remained closed.

8:22 am, April 3rd, 2015

Two years ago, at this exact time, my mother was still alive.

8:25 am, April 3rd, 2015

Two years ago, at this exact time, my mother was still alive.

8:26 am, April 3rd, 2015

Two years ago, at this exact time, my mother was still alive.

8:27 am, April 3rd, 2015

Two years ago, at this exact time, my mother was still alive.

8:30 am, April 3rd, 2015

Two years ago, at this exact time, my mother died.

She turned her head toward my brother. She opened her eyes. She took her last breath. My brother fell forward across her, weeping. I was aware of his immediate and visceral grief. My aunt's too. I think I might have left my own body with her.

8:32 am, April 3rd, 2015

Two years ago, at this exact time, we didn't have our mother.

For those of you who have lost a mother, you know. For those of you who still have one, we can assure you that all of the beautiful complications of your relationship will make complete sense the second you lose her. So don't wait.

Share your love and gratitude.

Now.

Shiva and Shakti: The Sequel

The place. Photo by Jeremy Ragland.

My offering to Katie Silcox and the interventionists at our AMAZING Happy, Healthy Retreat in Kona, reprinted here.

Dear ones:

If you are already in repose, languid in your own sunset, I don’t have to remind you about the upheavals. Heavens no. You most certainly recall when the earth was scorched by both sun and greed alike. This is for you younger ones, you with all the Ojas, trying to understand the not-so-long ago time when all the sap in the world wasn’t going to help you or anyone win this mortal joy-battle we call life.

You already know the first story. About how Shiva sat, illuminating the world with consciousness and his lava lamp of semen, spinal fluid and secret sauce. He was a heavy hitter; a blissed out, tuned in, primordial dude. Shakti, with her fan dance and toe rings, kept herself amused for a good long time. She sipped on air and spun silk in and out of the trees. She innovated the tides. She devised fantastical choreography for the stars. Think Pina Bausch by way of a once famous band called The Monkees. That will get you close.

Eventually she fatigued of her lonely dance. Only a handful of stars would agree to her idea to “shoot across the sky!” and the rest made clunky formations and refused to move. “Uh, boring!” thought Shakti.  

You know the rest. Third eye NOT blind and all.

What is not often discussed is that when gods and goddesses study human lives carefully, they can’t help but to try a few things out. The internet wasn’t even invented when Zeus consorted with a swan! So stuff happens. And you need to understand that it wasn’t just the sun and the money zealots and the medieval modern terrorists. It was just so noisy with tantalizing offerings.  Who doesn’t want to watch at least one season of  House of Cards? Who doesn’t want to try at least one massage “wand”? Gods are not totally immune to cat videos, Advil and pumpkin spice lattes. Come on!

I’ll be frank. Between you and me, Shiva had eaten so many frozen pizzas and quarts of ice cream that he forgot his own consciousness and Shakti went on a Tinder binge. It was kept pretty quiet but since it wasn’t the first time, there was an intervention of sorts.

You are also aware that Shiva and Shakti had many children, so many in fact that they needed to assign humans the pretty cushy job of parenting them. It wasn’t without challenges though. Just ask Vera, earth mama to Katie. Katie was one of the of feistiest goddess bunnies of all. Yet Vera had been warned that too much meddling with Katie, even during those Tequila-fueled days in Spain, would not allow Katie to thrive so she prayed and reorganized the furniture instead. Can you say Sophisticated Living? Vera is a pro.

Katie and Vera.

It is not exactly clear when Katie got the call, or even who notified her - Rod maybe? - but when she got the text that Shiva was living in a trailer park in Vegas with Shakti out doing buddha-knows-what on the strip every night, well that was a real blow. So Katie hunkered down and fast-tracked her study. She jotted down all the ayurveda details in a best selling self-care book, then set a course to reset the Sangha.

Her first step was to find a secret sacred place.  She wanted it to be an eternal secret but since she was not able to abolish the internet, Reddit threads eventually unthreaded the veil she and her cohorts had placed over the north Kona locale at the Hawaiian Island Retreat.

Her second step was to call in a group of humans to initiate for the mission. While Katie had asked for a Genie Lamp and a hunky MacGyver dude from Shiva and Shakti and her earth mama Vera for years, they had yet to help her manifest them so she had to choose just the right group of people to rapid prototype a total ayurvedic, tantric reboot for the planet.

The first person she called was Kim. After a frank explanation of the situation, and assuring Kim that she would be able to complete the mission of consciousness rebirth before she had an actual, human baby, Kim said “Truck, yeah!”  Then came Paulo, a handstand master and an engineer. Who better to devise a way to turn the world over and then right it again? Sara T. signed on early too. Katie had to warn Sara that she may need to use Sara’s extraordinary abilities as a caregiver as it seemed that Shiva and Shakti were both in need of some major TLC.

Kim, afloat. Photo (c) Michael Rubin. 

Paulo.

Sara T.

Kelly and Autumn. Photo bombers Ruben and Stacy.

Katie then went through her contacts, looking for vedic-friendly soldiers of the new sacred. She turned to her luminous friend Danelle for her rock-solid ability to hold space and befriend all. She reached out to Amy, a contortionist of the mind and body, for tactical support and laughter as needed. She called on Rosie and Autumn, who understand the specifics of how to care for Shakti. She called on Janis, who held space for Vera, sometimes with a glass of red wine and sometimes with her own wisdom medicine. Vera? Of course she was there! Luckily there was no cat leukemia medicine disguised as candy on this mission so she was in good shape to assist as earth mother and friend to all.

Danelle!

Janis

Amy

Rosie.

Katie called forth Catherine and Jeremy, intrepid souls, who brought a sense of empathy for the temporarily unwell in the form of head colds and fevers. It is a huge gift, those who remind us that our wellness is never guaranteed, even when you’ve booked a freakin’ flight to paradise. Scott was recruited for his photographic memory and his capacity to listen, synthesize and deliver kindness at every turn.

Jeremy, feeling better.

Scott.

Catherine

Katie rested for a few days as she considered who else was needed for the mission. She sipped ginger tea, devised potions, and asked the cave of her heart during Yoga Nidra, “Show me the beauty, the strength and the emotion we need. Show me the light.”

Obviously Anna made the next cut because of the beauty thing. When they finally render the portraits from this moment of history, it will be hers you see (after Katie’s of course) - this goddess love child of magnificent, painted flesh. It occurred to Katie that LIndsay should come along too, deliverer of light, laughter and hair-based adornments for Anna and others. When you are realigning tantra, you cannot skimp on beauty and pleasure.

Anna and Katie.

Lindsay.

Lindsay came with an extra bonus, cohort-wise, in that she was confidant to the extraordinary Kirstin, osteopathmaker, healer and all-around cool chick.  

Kirstin.

Next, Katie really wanted someone who could hold a fiery, Kali-esque space, if even for a few days, even with a radiant smile, so Kelly was recruited. As luck would have it, another brave Kelly was able to hold the space of sadness and surrender for the group. You have no idea how powerful it is - even for the Gods - to watch a human have a glorious, authentic emotion. Weeping is one of the few things with the power to stop the world and remind us that RIGHT NOW is the only time that matters.

Kelly. Black sand beach. Fire meets water.

There were a few final positions open. Katie was getting worried at the last minute that she didn’t have someone with equal parts light beauty and formidable changemaker, someone in their own nascent stage of transformation - the Vata quotient. Luckily, a workshop was held and Heather showed up, ready to take on the task.

Heather. 

“These people are pretty devoted to what I have to say.  If I ask them to shoot across the sky, they’ll do it,” Katie reasoned. But wise daughter of Shiva/Shakti/Vera that she was, she reasoned she better have at least one human who was dedicated to reason, clarification, skepticism and humor, someone who could look at a the world in all its technicolor trickery and boil it down to essence in black and white. Rubin signed on for the task at hand.

Rubin.

Dear ones. It is for another day and another tale when I tell you precisely how this band of merrymakers, dreamers, lovers, mythmakers, yogis, hula dancers, circus-workers, polo players, firebrands and friends came to rehabilitate Shiva and Shakti. It is safe to say that it included dancing, shaking, breathing, touching, laughing, listening and loving. It is even rumored that they brought baby monkeys and kittens, bowls of color, and objects of devotion to the final circle.

Ceremony. Detail.

I will tell you this. The real magic happened in the not-silent silence, where those who were called to Kona by Katie got to bear witness to the essence of Shiva and Shakti in the sound of the ocean breeze, the comfort of the black nights, the wonder of the leaping whales, and the soulful surrender of each to the ineffable beauty of the other.

With gratitude, the scribe.

Hope for Justice. Hope for healing.

This is my fifth year bringing True Body Project techniques to the beautiful, bold girls and the incredible staff that supports them at Hope for Justice - formerly Transitions Global.

Each year, I have found the system of support stronger than the year before. James and Athena Pond, plus the committed staff from the U.S. and Cambodia, work to understand how to bring best practices in the field of trauma recovery, and to merge them with the particular challenges and opportunities of this culture. Phnom Penh is burgeoning with development; every other block has a high rise coming (jack hammers, barefoot workers, bamboo scaffolding - a true miracle that it works) while it remains "developing" in so many other ways.

Many of you are right now watching the 40th Anniversary Show of Saturday Night Live. SNL started in the same year as the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, where for over four years approximately 2 million (1/4 of the population) Cambodians, particularly the intellectuals, artists and professionals, were brutally murdered.

Trauma is in the DNA of every living Cambodian living.

Luckily, so is hope and resilience.

Most of the things I get to experience here, working with girls and staff, are not easy to articulate. I can't really share anecdotes or many photos because this is an intimate and private process.

The photos below are the ones I can share as they don't reveal the identities of these stunning girls. In the first photo, where sweet, smart and hilarious Vanna is showing us how to do a game, is representative of how our time together works. In short, we have a total blast. We find joy together. We listen to each other. We find ways to feel happiness.  We ground, center, orient, connect, breathe and nourish each other.

I am forever changed and forever grateful.

Seventeen years.

Seventeen years ago I walked up Fairmount Boulevard in Cleveland Heights to Jane's house. A month earlier, Tina had informed me that Jane - a luminous light of a human - was sober. We had stood in Tina's cold garage smoking, me with wine glass in hand, when I tearfully explained to her that I knew I had to quit drinking. She cried too as she had been prepping to give me her private intervention speech.

Jane brought me in to her solarium sanctuary and told me a bunch of brilliant and hopeful things but the one I remember was this, delivered in a way that made me understand the words "beseeching" and "grace."

There is so much love.

Then she took me to a meeting, the second oldest women's meeting in the world. Miraculously, I kept showing up. I cried for about a year of meetings and clenched my teeth the rest of the time. I started taking Pilates. I moved, I breathed, I did what I intended to do. Like I said, for an addict, these are miraculous achievements.

I have so many tools now that I use to stay as healthy as I can. Movement, meditation, service work ... these are all in the kit of parts I have put together for myself to stay relatively not crazy. But it is so important to me that I don't forget the addict part of myself ... my inner slick trickster who made me believe that the best thing I could do any given day was to have another Jack Daniels or glass of wine.

I am one of the lucky ones. Michael was not. Jen was not. So many others who are sick and suffering are not.

So with immense gratitude, I offer myself to any of you who may need a hand. Every single good thing I have today is the direct result of this moment, seventeen years ago.

I have added to Jane's promise.

There is so much love. 
There is so much fun. 
There is so much laughter. 
There is so much to do.

Who is ready?

Do the next right thing.

Holy smokes.

Has it ever been harder to figure out how to focus one's efforts for the greater good? Is the world falling apart more or do we just have more constantly updating, dopamine-inducing evidence of what has always been an epidemic of humans behaving badly like humans who need more support?

No matter what developmental model you follow, whether Spiral Dynamics and Integral Theory or Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs or cultural and/or individual trauma theory; even if you haven't studied about how human's behave when they are not getting basic needs met for safety, shelter, community, and purpose, it is pretty easy to see that our collective community is suffering.

When these needs aren't met, when our nervous system is aroused in the fight, flight, freeze response, we are virtually INCAPABLE of moral choice making, long-term planning, empathy and other higher-level cognitive functions. So whether our clarity is mucked up due to forces outside of our control like poverty and abuse or via our dedication to constant online updates and righteous responses, we are pretty much doomed to our current scenario of polarization, depression, violence, and disorder. We are disordered. So we act disorderly.

My mind is naturally inclined to disorder, to move in a thousand directions in search of something akin to excitement in the guise of clarity. I know now from my own study of movement, meditation and the study I call "getting my shit together" plus the wisdom of countless others, I won't find clarity by admiring the problem, again and again and again.

I can only take one step at a time. I can only do the next right thing. If I am lucky, right action leads to right thinking. In the end, that matters less as that the next right thing for me tends to be a place of service and community. That's where joy is. That's where order is.

So today the next right thing was to write. First this, then my play.

Tonight the next right thing is to teach movement, to teach a few others how to embody wellness and breath.

Tomorrow the next right thing is to celebrate the successes of women in recovery with the talented staff of First Step Home, to share the True Body Project with inspiring and challenged young girls in the West End, and to spend time with my son, who is making his own difference in a school-based health center.

And so on. It just might add up to something.

What is your next right thing?

I am what you are.

Before I became unwell enough to surrender to a 12-step program, I spent much of my time hiding my panic disorder and addiction from myself and others. In order to believe this gigantic lie, I had to spin isolating stories about how DIFFERENT I was from everyone else. Remarkably, as my behavior became less admirable, my self-talk became more convincing. 

They don't know what they're talking about.

They can't see the real you.

If they knew, they wouldn't understand.

I would take a bunch of anti-anxiety medication in the morning and bookend my day with a bottle of wine or its whiskey equivalent. In between those two rituals of need,  I would carry on what might pass as a normal human walking through a normal day. Parenting, partnering, working. It is astonishing how long one can hide their true self.

I am lucky. For 16 and a half years, I have had the gift of constant sobriety. Even though my dreams tell me otherwise, where I have been drinking and act like it is no big deal, I never turned back. Yet I continued to struggle with panic attacks up until recently when I finally, upon the advice of my doctor, tried out an anti-depressant for a sense of malaise I couldn't shake. It was as though my head was underwater. I had the feeling I would never by happy again. Was it grief? Was it hormones? Was it the depression my mother experienced most of her life until she died? The depression I loathed? 

I don't know. But I feel better. 

What "better" means to me is that I nurture relationships and moments when I can be present to listening to the true lives of others. Not the part of ourselves that is driven by new social media and business concerns to "brand" our personae and our lives in order to be successful. But the part that is vulnerable, hurting, needing to be seen, needing to heard, needing to just be truthful about how challenging life can be, regardless of your age, race, gender or social status.

When I am better, I feed better things. I feed the True Body Project. I feed my relationships. I feed the truth.

The truth of me is complicated, as is the truth of you. I am a writer. I am accomplished. I am successful in many regards. I am also a recovering addict. I am somewhere on the mood disorder spectrum. I can isolate myself and tell myself stories that are not true.

We need to see and hear each other's complexity. Otherwise, we can isolate ourselves into an eternal loneliness, the final despair.

As Mary Oliver says, "Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine." What I know from my True Body work is that in this same space of honesty lies all of the rest of our truth: our hope, our strength, our humanity, our light.

Let's find each other soon and tell each other our stories. 

Are you a yes or a no body?

Last week at True Body class at the lovely Shakti Factory, we considered a few lines from this beautiful poem by Pesha Gertler (full poem at bottom of post) called The Healing Time.

It begins like this:

Finally on my way to yes
I bump into
all the places
where I said no

We thought about and shared something in our current life we are on the way to saying "yes" to and all the places where we are bumping into "no." We considered whether the "no's" were internal or external or both. Then we dropped into a meditation to allow our bodies to feel "yes" and then "no." We repeated it a few times, trying to track further into our sense of ourselves to see where "yes" shows up (heart opens, taller, slight smile, pulse increases, hands tingle) and "no" (brow furrows, stomach tightens, head constricts, breath constricts).

We then did a few simple tasks from our "yes" body and our "no" body. We found the tasks easy and enjoyable in our "yes" body and frustrating in our "no" body. When we were in "yes" we saw each other. When we were in "no" our heads were down, caught in frustration, not in connection with anything except our annoyance.

And then we did some restorative poses to increase the feeling of yes in the body (my pal Baxter Bell is showing one of them here below because I learned this amazing sequence from him.)

After that, we did some writing to crawl a little under the surface of the day-to-day shorthand we come to believe as our own point of view. There are few better ways to come to understand how you feel about yourself and the world than to do a fast journaling exercise to a prompt like "My mother's body ..." or "My body has a secret and it is hiding ..."

After some partner work, we promised ourselves to check in this week to see where we lived - as yesbody or nobody, in hope or in fear. It was very telling for me as I moved through my day. I was able to shift to a sense of joy in mundane, simple and even slightly annoying tasks with a bit of a somatic, body reminder here and there.

So join us tomorrow night at 6:30 pm for another True Body class at the Shakti Factory and play with us a different exercise. Or do your own "yes" and "no" reflection and let me know how it goes.

         The Healing Time

                                                Finally on my way to yes
                                                I bump into
                                                all the places
                                                where I said no
                                                to my life
                                                all the untended wounds
                                                the red and purple scars
                                                those hieroglyphs of pain
                                                carved into my skin, my bones,
                                                those coded messages
                                                that send me down
                                                the wrong street
                                                again and again
                                                where I find them
                                                the old wounds
                                                the old misdirections
                                                and I lift them
                                                one by one
                                                close to my heart
                                                and I say    holy
                                                          holy.

                                                               © Pesha Joyce Gertler

True Body Leadership Training -- Why You Should Do It!

I am so happy to report we have an amazing group of women gathering on June 7th and 8th to take part in our second True Body Leadership Training. We have a few more spots open for women who are ready to learn more about themselves in order to be present to the needs of others.

I would love to tell you more. Please email me at stacy@truebodyproject.org for more info and we can chat or meet in person.

Why you should do it? 

Here's why. My guess if you feel called to this work - the work of understanding self and other, the work of presence, stability, sensitivity and healing, the work of listening carefully to fully understand, the work of bearing witness. If you feel called to it, this is the perfect gateway for you to deepen your understanding of how movement heals and how we can create safe spaces for others to step into their best self.  No movement training required. A willingness to learn and to practice and to share of yourself are the only prerequisites!

Here are the details. 

TRUE BODY LEADERSHIP TRAINING

June 7th and 8th, Shakti Factory, Cincinnati, OH, with Stacy Sims, Founder, True Body Project

About the Training

The True Body Project (TBP), piloted in 2005, has been conducting workshops, residencies, camps, afterschool programs and staff trainings in the U.S. and abroad. This is TBP’s first leadership training to authorize and license the use of the True Body Project curriculum and workbook. Part experiential, part lecture/demo, the TBP Leadership Training will focus on helping counselors, therapists, teachers, yogis, dancers and others understand the somatics of stress and trauma, and how to create a body-centered experience in an integrative setting.
It is recommended that participants who wish to include TBP in their programs participate in the entire weekend. However, the Redefining Trauma workshop focusing on how stress and trauma habituate in the body, has a few spots open for those who wish to begin to explore the topic.

Pricing and Structure

$295 per person for entire weekend, four sessions
$95 for Redefining Trauma session only.
NOTE: In order to be eligible to license the workbook materials and run your own True Body classes, workshops and/or after school program, you need to attend the entire weekend and do follow-up work with True Body Project. Ask Stacy Sims for more information. stacy@truebodyproject.org

Schedule

June 7th – 8:00 am – 4:00 pm
8:00 am – 12:00 pm
True Body immersion, experiential session including somatic sensing work, meditation, writing prompts and partner work.
12:00 – 1:00 pm
Lunch break
1:00 – 3:30 pm
Curriculum study and workbook detail. Integration in a clinical environment. True Body leadership skills.
3:30 – 4:00 pm
Questions/Review

June 8th- 8:00 am – 4:00 pm
8:00 am – 12 pm**
Redefining Trauma – how stress and trauma habituate in the body and essential somatic exercises to do help clients integrate mind, body and emotion
12:00 – 1:00 pm
Lunch break
1:00 – 3:30 pm
Curriculum study and workbook detail. How to use the materials in therapy, one-on-one and in groups. How to fund, plan, implement workshops, after school programs, classes.
3:30 – 4 pm
Questions, closing.

Attendees who are approved to teach following this course will receive a license to the PDF of the workbook for a year and/or be given opportunities with the True Body Project after school programs (locally) as apprentices or full teachers or teaching partners and be listed as a True Body Project partner.
**This session can be taken independently

Trading emails for inhales.

A couple of weeks ago, I was teaching my True Movement class to my regulars who visit me in my home a couple of times a week. We tend to end the class the same way. They hunker down for a Savasana-style meditation, I add some Reiki to the mix, and then I return to my mat and become ready to bring them back up to seated for our final moments together.

So every session I say pretty much the same thing, which begins like this:

"Okay ladies, let's take a big inhale ..."

Only this time, I said it like this:

"Okay ladies, let's take a big email ..."

So we laughed our way out of meditation, which is plenty good medicine all on it's own.

But there was so much truth in that moment. My subconscious spoke to me and demanded I say the words out loud. "You have traded inhales for emails."

The last year has been amazing. In what could have been a lonely time, I was invited to take on a role at the Contemporary Arts Center, where I also worked 25 years ago. I started as a temporary consultant and never left, becoming a full time employee in the late summer. The CAC became my ritual, my family, and my sustenance. I let the work consume me as I am sure in many ways it was a way to avoid grief. And fear.  Needless to say, we got a lot done and I am very proud of my work there with some of the best colleagues I could ever imagine.

Punctuating this year was also a return to Cambodia to do True Body work with the clients and staff of Transitions, overseeing the work of True Body leaders I trained last year, and preparation for a second training June 7th and 8th, plus an upcoming trip to Nairobi to work with urban refugees. When I get to do this work, when I am free to listen to others and provide them resources to restore their sense of safety and confidence and hope, I am my best self doing the work that means the most to me.

I also have a novel to write and a short film to make with some incredibly talented people. Plus another play that is calling my name.

So this summer I will be transitioning back to my life as a teacher, writer and connector. I may be reaching out to many of you to reconnect. I am not sure exactly of the structure of this (and in some moments I am not even sure of the sense of it) but I have to believe that in the end, I will prefer to have focused on joyous inhales and connecting deeply with others over my daily hundred+ emails.

I look forward to dancing, breathing and connecting with you soon!