Author Archives: Paula Josa-Jones

Mar5

body dharma

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Deanna Pellecchia        Photo by Jeffrey Anderson

Body dharma is about bringing our practice into physical form.  It is rooting all of our experiences in the body and seeking a fully embodied creativity.

What it means to me is continually engaging the body in a spontaneous, authentic and improvisational way.  Practicing body dharma means that we are listening to and feeling the body all the time, and weaving that awareness into our moment-by-moment experience.  It is about listening at the cellular level.  It also means that we allow the body to be a teacher, a guide, and understand that it is a reflection of the presence or absence of harmony and balance in our lives.

I will be exploring this theme more this week.  In the meantime, I have just finished my new eBook, Breaking into Blossom.  It contains ten chapters on bringing more vitality and improvisation into your life.  You can order it here.

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Mar3

my first eBook!

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What I have become aware of is that for many of us there is a big commute between our creative work and the rest of our lives. As It is hard to maintain a sense of living wide-awake in a body when we are so tethered to the digital world and disconnected from vibrant, physical experiencing.

I developed Breaking into Blossom:  Moving into an Improvisational Life as an online class because I wanted to offer some fresh ideas on how to close that gap from my perspective as an improvisational movement artist, a teacher and a coach.  It  is designed to inspire you to become more daring, more visionary, and more playful and improvisational in your daily life, relationships and work.

I am now offering the materials that I developed for that class in a beautifully designed eBook that contains ten chapters integrating writing, movement, guest artists and specific strategies to help you find a deeper creative engagement.

The book will be available at the end of March.  You will receive it as a downloadable pdf.

The cost is $15.  You can order it here.

Mar2

trespass

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Yesterday I wrote about the boundaries set by others – our feral cat Mamacita, and the owners of the empty farm next door.  How there are places we cannot go, where we are not welcome.

When we lived on Martha’s Vineyard, during the off-season, we would trespass.  After the summer people evacuated at the end of the season, we  would walk on private properties, across land that was fiercely private during the tourist season.  We would joke, saying, “I am going to trespass against them.”  To me this felt like a way of weaving the forbidden lands back into the whole cloth of the island.

I have a friend with a daughter who is fiercely private.  Secretive even.  Resentful of any incursion on what she considers to be her business.  She is also a child who requires particular attention due to her learning deficits and chronic, even dangerous poor judgement.

So my friend has to dance along the thin wire of holding on and letting go.  It is not always a graceful dance.  At times she finds herself hanging by her toes, or teetering perilously close to falling.  She has found that if she can find an aperture – a space that invites entry – things go better.  Sometimes there appears to be only a wall, but if she waits, a way to enter will usually appear.

What initially seemed to be a trespass is then a meeting place.  Like the tree in the photograph above. Can you find the opening?

 

Mar1

winter farm, winter fences

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This is the farm across the street from us.  It is my favorite place to take pictures.  I love the geometry of the trees, the fences, the buildings, and the arc of Indian Mountain in the background.  When we moved here, it was busy with horses and cars and our friends rescued dogs.  Then the owners abruptly closed it down and now it sits quiet and forlorn except for a couple feral cats that we feed.

One of these, Mamacita, is the mother of Obadiah and Precious, two of her kittens that we managed to catch and adopt.  We caught her too and neutered her, but she is decidedly feral so we released her with a promise to take care of her babies and her as much as she would let us.  I went on Alley Cats and learned how to build a shelter, with fresh water outside and a warm bed inside.  We have never been able to touch her, even though she will come within a couple feet when we bring food out.

There is something about Mamacita and  the beautiful, empty farm that makes me think of the limits of our caring and of boundaries that we cannot cross.  This is not easy for me – I want to press myself into everything and gather everything to me, bring it under my emotional umbrella.  Today, I am aware of those lines that I cannot or should not cross – the places and the people that say “No further than this.”

As I write this though, I am devising ways to dance over those lines, even if just here, in my heart.