Movement Bliss Studio Movement Bliss's mission is to provide people with a safe and non-threatening environment to experience joy, healing and community through dance and movement while reaping substantial physical health benefits and emotional well-being in the process. Fri, 02 Aug 2019 23:26:24 +0000 en-US hourly 1 Movement Bliss Studio 32 32 emovere Fri, 02 Aug 2019 23:26:24 +0000 I just completed another step in my self imposed learning journey, a step called Viewpoints. There’s so much to unpack. I mainly experienced great awe watching one group of people after another improvise with a specific set of rules and with an overarching intention to take care of the common space. All the focus and intention that people brought to these group improvisation situations created such beauty, well beyond anything that anyone could have choreographed. I wish you could have seen it. 

I wanted to share a connection I made after our last session today to something that I’ve been exploring a lot. I think my focus as a whole, through my training so far has been revealing itself more and more as trying to answer the question of how to create situations that allow for transformation and healing through the body and movement. 

The Viewpoints technique is often used for artistic purposes in staging acting or dance performances to convey a specific message or a story. In my recent workshop we also used it as a compositional improvisation practice. I learned that by playing with different compositional elements in movement improvisation such as the tempo I’m choosing to use, the shape of my body, my relationship to the architecture of the space or to other people, the gestures or tone of voice I chose to use, I can affect my emotional state. 

I found that I was thinking about how I could use those ideas today in my emotional healing practice. I was talking about an experience that I had that brought up some sadness but I found that just talking about the situation didn’t allow me to connect to the sadness on a deeper, body level, which is the goal in my practice. 

I thought about what the shape of my body was in (sitting on a chair) and I changed it into curling up into a little ball on the floor. I changed my expression, my tone of voice and the rate that I was speaking. I was mainly quiet. Soon enough the tears came and I was able to embody the sadness more fully. 

My healing practice is a two way practice so it also involves holding space for someone else to heal. It can be easy to fall into listening to them talk and get carried away in their story but I often find that what is more conducive to healing is focusing on the body rather than the content of the words. In my turn to hold space I found myself thinking again about the Viewpoints and when “my client” was talking about something that they were conditioned to be ashamed of I suggested they take a proud tone and posture. Again, I could tell that doing this allowed something to shift within them and move into a fuller experience of their emotions. 

I’m finding more and more the connection between movement and emotion to be undeniable. Isn’t it intersecting that the word emotion comes from the Latin word emovere: e=‘out’ + movere ‘move’? I think it takes applying awareness to the way we move to create situations where we can “move out” our emotions and heal. I’m really looking forward to sharing and offering more of what I’m learning around this with you. 

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Transcending “either or” Dilemmas Sat, 20 Jul 2019 15:43:33 +0000

Do you ever feel like you have only two opposite options in various situations in your life and then you realize somehow that in fact it doesn’t have to be either or? 
When I went into my Authentic Movement training that just ended yesterday, I noticed that had a lot of ideas or questions, as often happens when I’m trying to figure out something new, about how things “should” be done. 
As the days of this training went by I learned more and more that these kind of self imposed decisions that I “need” to make and the tension that results from them are exactly what this type of practice helps bring relief to. 
One of the many treasures that I’m taking away is that transcending the questions of “either/or” that I so often play out in my mind and that often color the way I see so many things in my life, is not a linear process. 
It turns out that I can’t actually solve these questions with my intellect. That there’s a way to arrive to a “both and” possibility, which allows for what seems like two opposite ends to coexist. This can only come from engaging and cultivating practices that involve what Jung calls Active Imagination, practices such as Contemplative Dance and other forms of expressive arts. When one is engaged in these kinds of creative activities an image can arise that is capable of connecting between the “either” and the “or” or the “black” and the “white” or the “good” and the “bad” etc. The image is the connector and conjuring up images is not a linear process. 
Being able to live in this space of “both and” more is what I wish for myself because I know it will allow me to experience more of my whole self.

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Mindful Driving Thu, 11 Apr 2019 22:03:57 +0000 Don’t have time to meditate? No sweat! Here’s something you can do instead. Like many of you, I spend a long time in the car. As part of my resolve to lead a more intentional life and my deep interest in somatic practices (practices that integrate body and mind) I decided I’m going to dedicate every time I get in the car to practice mindfulness. 

Here’s what I do:

1. Setting an intention: I start by setting the intention to quiet down my mind so I can practice a state of “being-ness”, so I can live from a more wholesome and satisfying place, a heart-centered place, and be the person that I want to be. It’s important to say to myself why I’m doing it: it helps me stay focused by having a goal. 

2. Noticing the chatter: I then make a decision to notice every time my mind wanders, label it and gently and non judgmentally bring it back to the practice of mindfulness.

3. What is happening now: The first thing I do is I ask myself what is the most noticeable thing NOW? What stands out the most? I don’t stay with each input for long so I don’t give my mind the opportunity to get distracted. The idea is not to go into a completely internal place (no accidents please!) but to sense while staying connected to what is happening on the road. 

I move from one stimuli to another pretty quickly. I try not to look for it but let it come to me. It can be the sound of the motor and it’s vibration, the sound of the air-conditioning, my breath, the taste of my chai tea in my mouth, the air on my face, the warmth of my seat heating on my back, my legs touching the seat, the position of my head in space, my hands holding the wheel, the cars passing by, the stripes on the road and so on. 

I count to ten and connect to a different stimuli on every count. Then I repeat it 3 or 4 times. I find that this process helps replace the chatter and gives my wandering thoughts the signal that I’m in charge now. Before I can sink or let go into a place of being-ness, I need to give my mind something to do that is similar to what it’s already doing habitually: skipping from one thought to another. The difference is that it’s paying attention to things that are happening outside of itself. 

4. Slow it down: the next step is to keep noticing things but slowing it down. Staying with the stimuli for a couple seconds longer. I find that this is more possible now because the chatter has quieted down quite a bit at this point. 

5. Allowing: After doing this for a while I invite my body/mind to step into a place of being-ness and experience the enormous sense of well-being that comes with this. It’s a place where the awareness is not focused on one particular stimulus or one sense. It’s a state that involved many senses. There’s a sense of being here and everywhere at the same time or “zooming out”. There’s great satisfaction in being in this place and I make sure to acknowledge how good it feels to signal my brain that I want to come back here. If the road is clear and I’m cruising freely it can connect me to a universal sense of flow. I can also say to myself the words “I’m allowing”. If there’s traffic, it may magically open up all of a sudden. 

The challenge that I give myself here is “try to notice every time you get into this place and stay there for as long as you can. Notice when you snapped out of it and try to step into this place again. Try to go in an out for at least 5 times”.

Depending on how long the drive is I might decide to repeat this phase a few times but I find that if I manage to drop into this state even once, for even just a few seconds, the rest of my day goes much better. 

6. Connect to spirit: at this point I can go into a more spiritual practice of gratitude and asking my source or higher self what I need to remember in order for me to step into my best self and have a great day. I make sure to remind myself to connect with the sense being-ness and the road every time I notice I go to a more mental place. 

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Jumping off an airplane without a parachute and choosing to enjoy the ride Thu, 14 Mar 2019 16:09:56 +0000

Those of you who have been paying attention to my journey might know that I am on a quest to define and understand the relationship between mind and body for myself. This is what is motivating me in my newly launched individualized continuing study program called “Somatics, Improvisation and Embodied Pedagogy”. It’s great fun because I get to continuously conduct experiments on myself as well as taking in information from the outside by taking different classes and workshops, as well as engaging with intriguing ideas through reading and viewing materials.

I am asking questions:

  • Am I fully using my potencial for awareness?
  • Are there different kinds of awarenesses?
  • What is being embodied like vs. being disembodied?
  • Why understanding this distinction is so important (to me at least)?
  • How does one live an embodied life?

One perspective that I got from my beloved mentor is that disembodiment is when we’re cut off from sensing our physical self and it is not really useful to try to figure out anything in our life when we’re not simultaneously sensing our body.

Is this true? I have to admit that I haven’t been able to stop trying to wrap my mind around this idea and I’ve been experimenting with it ever since in every opportunity.

As I’m sitting down now, engaged in this highly intellectual task of writing this blog, I find myself thinking

  • How is it different to write when I can sense my body in comparison to being cut of from it?
  • How is it different to think about anything from this place of embodiment?
  • Is the process itself different?
  • What about the results?

One thing that I can tell for sure, as far as the process goes, is that it’s much more easeful (and therefore more pleasurable). It feels more spacious, more satisfying, bigger, more grounded. That, in and of itself, is worthwhile.

It’s harder to determine the results, because there’s not always an alternative to compare with, but I can share something that happened yesterday that might be an indication that being embodied is valuable.

Some of you know that I practice a form of peer counseling. I was counseling two of my co-counselors, one after the other and, as part of my experiment, I tried to remind myself to stay connected as much as I could to my own physical experience while paying attention to them. I think what followed was that I had a clarity, a strong inner knowing that I needed to guide them to go beyond the story that they were telling me, to get to the deeper feeling underneath it. I needed to help them make room for their story to exist in their bodies and stay connected to their sensation of the feeling. Then I had to encourage them to befriend this body feeling and bring heart to it as much as they could. That clarity led to some big emotional catharsis for them, which I equate as healing. They both seemed to have quite fruitful sessions.

As a result of this experiment and many others I can’t help but think: what if there’s a whole new way of being in this world, for me, that is very different than what I’ve known all of my life and it has to do with letting go of trying to figure anything out from a purely mental place?  I’m not even sure how to do that, honestly, but it feels like I’m onto something big here that could have huge implications on so many things: on how I dance, how I teach, how I make decisions, how I do every single thing in my life.

I think that I’ve already started experimenting with this new way of being but I’m playing with here now is with the notion of applying it to absolutely EVERYTHING!

I have to admit that when I had the chance to consider this possibility with the attention of my counselor, what came up in my body was this huge wave of sheer terror. It’s probably coming from the idea that I would have to let go of a big part of how I learned to be which is so closely tied into my sense of survival. Now that I’m consciously trying to change it, it feels like jumping from a huge cliff or from an airplane without a parachute and deciding to enjoy the ride. Wheeeee.

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You are trying too hard! Sat, 08 Sep 2018 11:41:38 +0000 They say that you can’t escape from yourself but there’s also something about being away and leaving your routine completely behind that can provide a fresh perspective on your life and motivate you to do things differently. I’m definitely feeling inspired and full of creative energy to embark in some new adventures, which also happen to wonderfully coincide with the beginning of my new year.

As I’m stepping back into my life at home I’m doing my best to allow for a soft landing by not rushing into Doing but rather letting myself  follow my inner guidance, letting  my actions be inspired and informed by these new perspectives.

Today, I  took a meditation class with the intention of deepening my connection to that inner voice and to experience even more clarity about my path. As I was listing to the instructor guiding the meditation I realized that the best way I can achieve that blissful state of mindfulness is if I don’t try to focus too much on her instructions. I smiled to myself as I kept hearing my comedic 12 year old’s catch phrase, which he likes to throw at everything I say or do: “you’re trying too hard”.

So I experimented with just focusing softly on her voice but not trying to hold on too tight to every word I hear so I can let my attention rest on my breath, the sounds and sensations at the same time. I realized that I can use the external guidance as a comfortable support but really let myself follow my inner guidance. It felt so sweet.

Then it dawned on me that this idea really applies for movement improvisation as well, which to me is a form of meditation in of itself. The best verbally guided movement experience for me is when I hear the instructions but think about them as nothing more than a recommendation, a suggestion. When I don’t try to figure out if I’m “getting it right”. When I let the words of guidance exist in the background and give the left side of my brain a break.

I love watching what my body does with the permission to use verbal guidance this loosely. It’s as if the body has a mind of it’s own and things happen unexpectedly, second by second. It’s also wonderful to watch what happens when others use my verbal guidance and how each person takes it to a completely different place.  I also love the creative process of coming up with those instructions, but that’s a different story.

I’m aware that it is not always easy to give in to our movement impulses and to lose ourselves in that process because of our life-long habit of heavy reliance on structure and early training to always do things right and never take risks. I think this is the reason why improvising in a group with some verbal guidance is so great. It can give us enough structure to feel safe but also the freedom we need to connect to our true essence and explore who we really are. I’m inviting you to follow me more deeply in this satisfying journey and you’ll be hearing more about opportunities to do that soon.


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Ride The Wave Sat, 21 Jul 2018 05:17:38 +0000 Question:  how can we transform and heal through dance? How can we move in a way that feels nourishing rather than depleting (like you might feel after taking certain dance/exercise classes)?

Try this: put on a piece of music that has real soul in it. It doesn’t have to be fast. In fact it might work better if it isn’t because when there’s a strong beat there’s a pull to motor it out in a big way which depletes energy stores.

Listen with your ears and with your body. Feel and sense into the music first and only then begin to respond to it with movement but in a way that is more internal. The movement might be so small that it would not be noticeable from the outside at first.

If movement were analogous to different expressions of water, this level of experience could resemble the gentle rippling of water when a pebble is being thrown into a quiet pond. After you let yourself hang out in this low amplitude of expression for quite a while, where you’re feeling nurtured and held by the movement and the music, some other levels of expression might emerge naturally and spontaneously but never through strain and effort. The ripple might turn into a small brook, a steam, rolling rivers or even crushing ocean waves.

The movement will become a true expression of spirit which is what dance is really meant to be and is in many cultures. The music is really key here because when it has soul it can support the effort of connecting to spirit and to your life force. You can use any music that touches you in a deep way and reaches your gut, heart and soul

This is a practice that can help match movement to any energy level so if you’re feeling run down you can always use it as a way to cultivate life force. When you meet yourself where you are energetically, surprising things can happen and you may discover you have new levels of energy.

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Goodbye Mon, 25 Jun 2018 22:18:52 +0000 It’s time to say goodbye. Too many of those. To the point where it’s hard to care. It would be very easy to brush it aside but something inside tells me that this one could be a golden opportunity to notice something.

What is there to notice? So many things: our connection, what a difference she has made to me and to the rest of us with her creativity, her bursting energy and her bubbly presence, what a wonderful community we were able to build together, how she’s helped me attract other beautiful free spirits like herself, how much love and openness we get to offer each other, how meaningful and different is the reality that we get to create every week.

It seems that I made a big difference to her as well. She says “how am I going to be able to go on without this” and I’m so overwhelmed by how potently I’m experiencing the same kind of feeling: “will I be able to go on with class without her?

I think that as much as it seems impossible at the moment to imagine, we both know that we will go on. We have to. Nonetheless, we can use the fact that these questions feel almost too dramatic as a way into feeling how connected we are.

It catches me by surprise that I’m so saddened but when I stop to think about it, it makes sense that I’m surprised. Our society does not place a high value on connection and by losing touch with how connected we are we loose touch with our humaneness so it’s as if I’m surprised that I’m so human. It implies therefore that every time we stop to notice how connected we are, we get to reclaim a part of ourself and it is a triumph to the human spirit.

The lesson is that you matter! You don’t know how much you make a difference to people. You think that if you don’t show up  nobody will notice but this is not true. Your presence makes a difference. Without you things are just not the same, That’s not because what you do, that’s because who you are. I want you to remember that (I certainly need a reminder). I want us to stop right now and take that in. Just take a moment to breathe, get into your body and say the words: “I matter”.

Every goodbye, every loss is an opportunity to notice what we’ve built with someone, We can stop and make room in our bodies to grieve this loss and know that things will never be the same without their physical presence. On the other hand, if you really think of it, all we really have of anyone is our perception of them and that is something that can never be taken away from us. In a way we get to keep each other forever.

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When In Doubt II Tue, 05 Jun 2018 00:29:10 +0000 What follows is a commentary on the creative process around  my latest piece “When In Doubt” which you can watch me preform here:

General description:
This is a personal piece that deals with the topic of doubt. It was created around my application process to a dance program and it describes the transformative journey that I’ve gone through in my relationship with my doubts. As personal as this piece is it’s also a general statement on the effects of oppression on women, dealing with the way that we unconsciously internalize, from early on, an attitude of not trusting our minds, which affects every aspect of our being, everything we are trying to do in the world, and how our world operates and appears to us.

About the topic:
As soon as I made the decision to apply to the program my doubts started to pop up. I consulted with one of my mentors to see if I’m on the right track and when I asked if she thinks there’s any real basis to my hesitations she suggested I make a dance about my doubts.

The choreographic process:
I researched and wrote my thoughts about the meaning of doubt, about whether doubts have positive or negative implications and under what circumstances, about the difference between doubt and self doubt. I asked myself where my own doubts came from. It was clear to me that it was something external that I had acquired as a result of my oppressions. For example, I had just come back from a workshop about healing from the effects of war that included a visit to Aushwitz which helped me understand more how my doubts are directly connected to the experience of being the target of systematic extermination.
In a conversation I was asked if I thought that having doubts has also something to do with being a woman and my answer was a very definite “I have no doubt that my doubts come to me from being a woman”. That was a good reminder for something that had occurred to me many times in the past but I have forgotten, or maybe my doubts made me forget. I decided to make this connection between doubts and my female identity the center of the piece.

The embodiment of doubt:
Some of the material for the dance came as a result of improvising on the idea of doubt and trying to see how I could embody it. I tried different things and I kept getting feedback. it was challenging to embody the doubt. The feedback that I got was that I naturally have a very grounded presence and movements which are the opposite of doubt. It was interesting to notice the discrepancy between what goes on in my mind and how I’m perceived.  I had to keep working on the embodiment to get it right.

“The thing”:
While working on the piece early on I was wearing a jacket and I kept taking it off and putting it on because of my changing body temperature. At some point I decided to incorporate it in the dance. The decision to incorporate it seemed accidental but it made me wonder if this isn’t an example of true intelligence, intuition guiding the creative process. It seems so because it gradually started to acquire more and more meaning. One of feedbacks that I kept getting was that I need to decide what is my relationship to “the thing” and it became clear to me that this is my doubt. The next idea was that if this is indeed my doubt i have to relate to it as such as much as I can throughout the dance in the realest way possible.

The transformation:
It was important for me to portray the joinery of:
Contemplating where my doubts come from
Realizing that I had subconsciously taken on “wearing” my doubts as part of being a woman in our society
Noticing how the doubt is holding me back
Feeling distressed and desperate about it’s existence in my psyche
Trying to figure out what to do with it
Separating from it physically and emotionally. Noticing that there’s a real me underneath the doubts,
Deciding what I was going to do with it.
Acknowledging it’s there for a reason, embracing it, but not letting it run my life. In other words: dancing it.

Dance It
In the piece this phrase allows me to step into dance as one of the only places in my life where the doubt doesn’t have a hold on me. It also has a deeper meaning in my life because of my decision to allow myself to cast my doubts aside and take myself more seriously as a dance artist.

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What’s the point? Fri, 27 Apr 2018 22:43:30 +0000 Excuse me if I’m being too philosophical but do you ever ask yourself what you’re here for? I know you need to come up with your own answers but I’ll share that I’m finding a lot of satisfaction these days in noticing how my consciousness is expanding through living my everyday life and coming up against different challenges that teach me with greater clarity what I want and what I don’t want. This is very much a new and different approach for me than the old attitude of defeat when things get bumpy.

Speaking of bumps, I just came back from a gig at the local community college. I didn’t know what to expect but I had a feeling it would be much different than the regular set up and, let me tell you…. Lets just say that the situation required a lot of flexibility on my end. The scene: a sizable number of young people who could not be more different than I, age-wise, culture-wise and every other-wise that you can think of, all lounging in the student center, around a big open floor and I’m supposed to be in the middle. They were all seemingly uninterested in what I had to offer. This kind of situation would have been the perfect set up for me to give myself the hardest of times in the past.

Not this time however. As I was driving to the event, I had some time to meditate on the question of what I’m here for and the answer that came was “to experience well-being and joy” That’s it. Well, actually, maybe not just to experience those things but to embody them. The way to BE joy and well-being is to think about what brings me joy and experience it as much of my waking hours as possible.

Normally if I say that my goal is to connect to joy and well-being the automatic response would be: “really? that’s it? that’s enough? You don’t have to do something that others value as important for you to consider yourself worthy? You don’t need more credentials or titles or something else to show for yourself?”

On the other hand it seems that these days the knowing of what is really important is getting more and more solid by the day and is winning the battle. I know that when I AM joy people respond to that and not necessarily to what I do. In other words, when i’m trying hard to do something it can get in the way of who I really am. When I let myself BE my joyful self others can let themselves be themselves as well and that’s a tremendous relief to everybody. Who knew that the biggest service I can give doesn’t come through effort but through sheer fun!

Back to how things unfolded in my story: in the beginning there were only a couple of students that I felt were kind of made to participate by the organizers and everyone else was sitting around and doing their own thing. I was so solid in my intension that i didn’t care. I just did my own thing too. The crowd started to grow, some standing, some sitting but still not directly engaged with me. Soon enough people were tapping their feet or moving in their seats. I picked up on those movements. More connection with the audience. Somebody joined and another and another. Now there were requests to put on specific music and at that point I knew that I got what I came for.

So what comes up for you when you contemplate the idea that the whole point for being on this planet is for pleasure and joy? If you disagree i won’t argue with you but I would encourage you to look at the messages that you’ve been getting since you got here. If you do agree I would encourage you to become more acutely aware of what brings you joy and be more intentional about creating opportunities for yourself to experience that in your life. I know that what brings me joy is being in my body and moving to great music, Chances are that if you’re reading this you might like that too 🙂

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The Gift Thu, 12 Apr 2018 22:33:02 +0000 I was given a life changing gift from a student and a friend (you know who you are!) and I thought sharing the resulted transformation would be a nice way of paying it forward.

The gift is a set of ideas that I’ve been experimenting with and it starts with the simple cliché of “seeing the glass half full”. The difference is applying it with real discipline rather than just keeping it a theoretical idea. The way it works: if we want something badly, instead of focusing on what we’re lacking, we can focus on amplifying what we do have, what is going well for us or how much we like certain aspects of the person or the situation related to that. 

It means that when we experience any from of negativity we use the information about what we don’t want as a strong indicator towards learning what we do want. There is much learning to be done here, believe it or not. 

How well do you think you know what you want? Well it can get tricky because we’ve been so conditioned to focus on what others want for us. There is a part in each one of us that  knows exactly what is good for our soul in order to get the most out of this life and it doesn’t  always match with what others want for us.

Now, going back to what we don’t want, once we identify that thought of not wanting something, instead of dwelling on it as we’re used to, we move on to noticing the parts that do make us feel good. We can support this work by spending more and more time doing and thinking about things that give us unconditional joy (yes, like Shake Your Soul® for example) and then milking those good feelings for as long as possible, or as in cliche #2: “do more of what makes you happy”.

From this perspective the “bad” things that happen to us are not bad at all because they sharpen our awareness of the things that our soul desires most and they help us grow and expand. If things were “good” all the time there would be no impetus for growth. The more time we spend doing things that make us feel good and basking in the feelings that are being generated by those actions, the more we will attract what we desire into our life. 

I’m happy to report that ever since I started trying this on a consistent bases, I’ve spent more of my days feeling centered, satisfied and generally happy. it takes real discipline and practice because you have to be extremely aware of every thought that crosses your mind. A steady practice of meditation works well toward this end.  I’ve had great fun playing he game of intercepting stray thoughts. Knowing that I have the ability to direct my thoughts and focus my mind every second of the day has been tremendously empowering. 

By the way, if you want learn more about similar ideas, look up the teachings of Abraham. 

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