Author Archives: Paula Josa-Jones

Dec11

what dims the light

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“Also pay attention to the little things that get in your way but that you put up with.  The fact that we tolerate them is even more subtly insidious than the irritants themselves.  These are the annoyances we’ve resigned ourselves to, saying ‘I guess I can handle that’ or ‘I can’t be bothered to change that right now.’  And then often we just stop noticing them and how they dim the light.”  Michael Bungay Stanier, Do More Great Work

I have become aware of the stuff around me that stands in the way of finding focus and showing up.  It is not just possessions, or feeding the dogs, but the psychic detritus that gathers around me and impedes up my ability to do the work.

This week I am going to look for ways to brighten the light. A good thing to do, it seems, as we enter the darkness of winter.

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Dec11

an imaginary audience

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Paula Josa-Jones in Russian Ghostdance

This week, I am thinking, feeling and writing a lot about performing. I write about it in this week’s Journal.

I have been working with two artists recently as coach, choreographer and director.  Both have one woman shows.  I love this part of my work – bringing my eye to their work and helping them to deepen and open.

That work has also awakened my desire to perform.  In the past, many of my performances involved deep disguise.  Ways of hiding in plain sight.  I wonder how this new creation will reveal, what/who is waiting to be seen.  Performing has always been about revealing a part of myself that I cannot show in the daylight world.  The dark side, the inside, the wild side; underlayers, like showing my psychic petticoats.

Writing the daily post is also a performance.  But unlike the theater, where I can hear you (the audience) rustle and breathe, where I can calibrate my performance by how I am sensing an audience on a given night, this performance is for a largely imaginary audience.

But here’s the thing:  before the relationship with the audience comes the relationship with myself; with the impulse to create, to shape something new and delicious, something that I can savor.

Flight attendants always tell you to put the oxygen mask on yourself first.  Same thing here.

Dec9

Nelson this week

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Yesterday I went to work with Nelson.  There is The Work, but the other part is that I go to Nelson because being with him is an immediate way to get happy and move into focus.

There had been snow so things were different.  Nelson was spookier than he has been for a long time.  The snow was falling off the trees onto the hood of my car making this random timpani sound which he found alarming (so did I).  For both of us the light was refracting differently, and the footing was sloppy and icy.  He allowed me to take the giant snow balls off his feet, and then we went to work.

I have been developing the work on Nelson’s left – the dark side – asking him to move on cue onto a circle going left so that his dark side is the one facing me.  When he circles to the right, his body is a smooth curve, and he moves comfortably – either close in to me or farther out, depending on how I have asked.  When he goes left, his body is straight as a plank, he doesn’t want to look at me and he is markedly more tense.  It is as if the cannot feel himself on that side.

The BLM freeze brands the captured Mustangs on the left side of their neck.  Given Nelson’s terror and ferocity at that time, I am sure that event was traumatic and violent at least.  Maybe that is why the dark side is so persistently dark.

The lovely thing was that after we practiced his a few times, he got quieter and calmer.  Not exactly soft, but I could see that coming.  That was when I hit a patch of slippery slush and made a shockingly disorganized predator movement.  Arms flung up for balance.  He took off.  After a few moments, he came back and we went on.  That is the very beautiful part of developing a long relationship with a horse.  There is a foundation of trust, a language of ask and answer that let’s us slide seamlessly back into the work and the relationship.

Here are some of the things I have learned from Nelson.  These are lessons that spill into my writing, my choreography, my mothering.

  • the importance of consistency
  • how to go slow
  • how to build the work incrementally
  • how to begin again
  • the meaning of love

The last one is probably the most important.  There is nothing like stopping to take in the sun, the trees, the hills while standing next to a creature that is choosing to be there, to be next to you in that breathing moment.  Today my stallion Capprichio put his nose on my neck and stood like that, just breathing for about two minutes.  Bliss.

postscript:  I am teaching an online class called Breaking into Blossom:  Moving into an Improvisational Life starting on January 23.  If you register before December 23, the price is $75.  On Christmas Eve Day it goes up to $100.

 

 

Dec8

OPD, OPW

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Other people’s dreams:

This year I got a major course correction.  A gigantic error message.  I had been spending too much time helping with other people’s dreams.  My efforts, which at first felt fluid and lovely, began to get tangled, murky, and then ultimately the situation became ugly.  

Others around me  could see that The Message was appearing with increasing frequency and that I was not seeing it, not wanting to see it.  I just kept slogging along, pushing, until the discomfort became overwhelming.

Finally I detached, unhooked, walked.

Other people’s work:

Similarly, as a new blogger, I was scanning for guidance from The Ones Who Know. As it turns out, they are actually me.  I have to decide what makes sense.

For many years I have practiced and taught Authentic Movement. It is about listening to the voice of the body – allowing the body to move without the judging arbitration of the mind.  It is about feeling, not thinking.

What I am learning about writing is how to let the body speak into the words.  My friend Nancy Stark Smith once called it “bloodful” writing.   Here’s how I feel it:  I get a flush of excitement, a little storm of synaptic activity; thoughts and ideas refracting, connecting – spinning together in a new way.  It is physical, shivery.  Then I write.

There isn’t room in that moment for other people’s words, preoccupations.  I am interested in them, but they do not have a place in that moment of inspiration.  It is all in my body, my heart, my words.

I am writing about this:  how do you feel your inspiration?

I am also writing this week about the beast, the performer and being animal.  It’s another little, ragged memoir.  It’s in The Journal.  It’s a monthly subscription (and you can opt out at any time.)