How do you think of dance?

Is it shapes?

Steps moving across a stage?

Or is it the body

steeped in its years

on earth?

Is it the body inseparable

from everything?

Are you dancing now?

If you are breathing,

that is a start.

Are you listening,

to the sound of that breath?

Better still.

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for sale:  “Body Mine # 7”

Original framed photograph with charcoal and pencil and text.

This week’s price only   $97 plus shipping.

You can purchase by contacting me HERE, or with Paypal.

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Engaging the artist within is one-to-one coaching for those who want to jump-start their creative practice.  Sessions include body dharma strategies (how to engage the body and let it inspire your work), improvisation & creative alignment practices.

My background as a movement educator, improvisational movement  and theater artist, writer and somatics practitioner gives me unique ways of helping you to engage your deepest, most embodied creative self.

The other part of my background is that I spent many years having an out-of-body experience.  This year marks 33 years since my last drink, and 25 years in recovery from eating disorders.  I have been on the planet for a while.  So for those of you for whom the body is not necessarily friendly territory, I get it, and I can help there too.

Beginning March 15, I am offering FREE COACHING CALLS.  These are introductory 30-minute sessions to help you optimize your creative goals.

I will only offer 10 of these, so if you are interested, contact me soon.  To make an appointment for a free call, either email me or fill out my form.   

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 Body dharma is a fierce practice. It is not for the timid or the lazy.

Attending to the body is not just cosmetic ministrations and ablutions.  It is not just practices, classes or disciplines. It is not only poses or techniques.  Because you can do all of that and still have never entered the body.

Movement is the body’s language and voice.  Breath is the body’s anchor.  Heart is the body’s center.  When you invite the body to move – without judgement, without hurry, without direction – you have begun to practice body dharma.

A recipe for entering the body:

Attention:  because the body is precise.

Listening: because the body is subtle.

Kindness:  because the body is tender.

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I want to offer a bit more information about my eBook.

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.  It  is designed to inspire you to become more daring, more visionary, more playful and improvisational in all aspects of your life.

I am now offering the materials that I developed for that class in an eBook that contains ten carefully designed chapters integrating photographs, writing and movement prompts, guest artists and specific strategies to help you find a deeper creative engagement.  Here is what you will find:

• Change:  Developing a vocabulary for making change from subtle to dramatic.
• Underscore:  How to develop an intentional underscore for your day or for a project.
• Segments:  How subtle shifts in activity and attention throughout the day can create greater focus and engagement.
• Play: From meandering to galumphing, how to foster a playful attitude and practice, including specific strategies for play-making.
• Practice:  Discovering your meta-practice and how it can support your work and goals.
• Moving and Listening:  Delicious strategies for engaging the senses and the body.
• Movement and Stillness:  The power of attention and recuperation.  How to develop a movement/stillness score in your work and play.
• Letting Go:  Learning how to drop it (even if you are going to pick it up again).
• Flow:  Observing and harnessing the interplay of improvisation and flow.  How to cultivate a consummate creative state.

The book is available at the end of this month.  You will receive the book as a pdf.

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

For those of you who are interested, I am also offering one-to-one creative jump-start sessions.  To learn more,  form.

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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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Still sitting even in the snow, or maybe especially in the snow.  Sitting requires more rigor and devotion when it is cold and windy.

There are days when I do not want to do the work, when I feel that it will take too much from me, or that I do not have enough to give to it. The work could be anything:  the writing, the riding, the dancing.

I went to the barn early today to ride because a snowstorm was coming.  For me, riding is sitting.  Riding is practice.  Riding is that combination of rigor and devotion.  Today was one of those days when I did not think I had enough to give.  My body felt sore and stiff after several days of riding the big, powerful Friesian, Sanne.

At one point in the ride, I wanted to stop and say, “Wait, this is too hard, I cannot do it, I do not know how.”  In fact, I think I did stop and say something like that.  I could feel how the muscles in my arms were braced, how the pieces of my riding were not flowing together, felt I was coming apart, both mentally and physically.

Here is the thing.  It was less my body than my mind.  It was that old doubting, questioning, fearful part of my noisy mind, the part that has gotten up and left the meditation hall even when my body is still sitting there (in the saddle, holding the reins.)

Somehow I did recover myself.  Here is what I did.  I stopped trying the same old thing, and began to improvise my ride.  A circle here, a softening there, a change of direction:  change, change, change.  I shifted my attention to the stiff, unyielding parts of my body and invited suppleness there.

I think this is what it means to be a spiritual athlete.  Nurturing an athleticism that is not about big muscles or marathon sitting, but the kind of athleticism that is about endurance and steadfastness.  About finding a way in, every day.  Offering the best, every day.

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(I apologize to the photographer, Marconi.  I cannot find a really good link to his work.  If any of you have one, please pass it along.)

I don’t usually include the work of other photographers in my blog.  It feels dishonest, a little like cheating.  But that is just an old tune in my head. When I find something this beautiful, it has to be shared.

Here is what I love about this photograph.  It is completely kinetic – when I look at it, I can feel the contours of the landscape in my body, can feel the breath and music of it so clearly through my terrain of skin, muscle and bone.

When I was just out of college, I took a dance improvisation workshop with the great choreographer Trisha Brown.  One of the things she asked us to do to create movement was to “read” the a wall in the studio with our movement, to translate what we saw into dance.  We all got busy dancing the basketball hoop, the windows, the bleachers, the sky beyond.  That experience kicked open a door to something that has always stayed with me – connecting what is outside with what is inside – finding that creative, generative impulse from everything around me.

I teach a workshop called Cookbook for the Bonehouse.  Here is a recipe for you:  Sometime today, maybe right now, stand up and face a direction you usually don’t.  Let your shoulders or your hips or your nose “read” (translate) whatever you are looking at into movement.  Do it again, but this time slow it way down.  Do it again fast.  What are you feeling?

Tell me about it!

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Tamara Lempicka

I have been writing about the landscape of the body and its relationship to the body of the earth and the bodies of other creatures.  About the sense of our own bodies as landscape, to be discovered, explored, savored.

These two paintings are by two of my most favorite painters.  I met Laura Von Rosk many years ago during a residency at Yaddo.  Her landscapes were the most sensuous I had ever seen.  I bought one she had done in Minnesota.  It had a perspective of gazing up the hilly thighs of a woman, across the fields of belly and breasts and into the sky beyond.   I recently reconnected with her work at a show in Hudson at the Carrie Haddad Gallery.

Lempicka’s work invites us into the contours, the hills, valleys, the hidden caves of the body.

If you lie on the floor and roll very slowly from back to side to front, how do you feel the landscape of your own body?  How effortless can you make that movement?  Continue on, rolling to your side and then ending on your back.

Imagine this as a little meditation, a way of calling the earth of your body into awareness.

If you are a rider, can you feel a deepening harmony of your body and your horse’s body as you ride?

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