BodyLogos Blog

Expanding Family with Holiday Sparkle

Holiday festivities can lose their joyful charge as you lose family members. But when you expand your family’s traditions you can expand your family circle. And, you recharge that joyfulness beyond the limitations you’ve known.

Arts & crafts united my family at the holidays. Crafting unique ornaments each year became a loving competition between my mother, sister and me. We would learn from each other—share our selves—and craft belonging into our family.

The rest of the time, my father’s alcoholism and pedophilia were daily concerns that kept us squelched, distanced from each other. But at Christmas time, we could rise above it, if only for the season.

Crafting ornaments gathered the women of our neighborhood around the same table, acting as both a survival antic and artistic outlet. Each of us in our own imaginations, creating beautiful offerings, sharing sweet treats and savored dreams. It was magical. This is when I felt the safest and happiest in my youth.

These were delightfully intimate moments where the synergy of life all came together in perfect harmony. Even, and especially, when the world around us wasn’t there yet.

In fact, I’ve always felt that arts & crafts offered women the survival skills needed to create a new and improved life. It asked us to be visionaries and problem solvers. We created something out of nothing, with a finite degree of skill and supplies.

It also gave me a sense of grace. Presenting hand-crafted ornaments that expressed my light was, and continues to be, important to me. It shows gratitude for life, even if the life being lived feels flawed.

Offering my ornaments shows love for everything that is good—a rising above short-comings and offenses.

Now, with my sister gone in Covid’s wake and my mom hampered by health limitations, I feel an even greater pull to the safe-haven of arts & crafts. Beads and gems, needles and string, pliers and cutters, surround me as I create Enchanted Icicles that catch the light and magnify what’s good in the world.

Through the holiday season, I’ll gather friends, stretch my imagination, and infuse each crafted icicle with love’s magic. And to expand my family even further, I’ve decided to offer these Enchanted Icicles to you!

Kick off your holiday at: https://bodylogos.com/icicles/
Join my Expanding Family! Enjoy the goodness and grace of hand-crafted Icicles!

Love is more than crafting stuff. But, crafting ornaments, and the like, has offered me a path to rise above disappointment, fear and uncertainty. A path that when united with the right people has led me to a magical life all year round.

The holiday is a time to offer thanks to each other. A time to light the way for us all to embrace what’s good and just and heart-based. Delight in what is, share of your self, and visualize a life you can’t wait to live!

Happy Thanksgiving.

DancerInWhite

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Redefining Strength

I want to change our perception of strength. Strength is the ability to meet resistance and influence an outcome without compromising ourselves. And we already have it.

Strength is not an attribute; it’s a state of being. Gladiators, bodybuilders, and football players demonstrate strength through brute force, sheer willpower, muscle mass, and relentless pursuit. But we’re also quick to identify dancers and martial artists as strong. Their medium taps into a sense of vulnerability, balance, alignment, controlled power, and grace—but no one can deny their strength. Strength may look different on each of us, but it is an inherent part of who we are.

You are not weak by nature; you are stronger than you think. Your strength is not something you need to kill yourself to gain—it is already within you, waiting to be excavated. The key is to stop chasing something you already have and tap into it, so you can manifest that strength in your everyday life.

Because we don’t think we’re strong, we approach resistance with the idea that we’re not enough. We throw everything we have at it and push past our physical, mental, and emotional limitations. We see strength as domination, but it’s not.

When you learn to listen to your body’s divine wisdom, you cultivate a sense of where your body is developing tension instead of standing in its strength. You end the vicious cycle of unrealistic expectations, injury, and self-criticism and learn how to consciously embrace responsible growth. You stop compartmentalizing your strength into emotional, physical, and mental pieces and operate from the strength of your being at all times.

You learn how to align yourself with gravity—instead of working against it—so you can channel your strength to meet life’s resistance. As you meet resistance with equal parts power and alignment, you transform tension into strength

As in the sword dance above, the power lies in bringing just the right amount of force—not too little and not too much. By meeting the sword’s weight, I meet gravity. I am tapped into a larger source of energy, free of tension, and discover a strength that is wholly and uniquely mine.

About Tammy Wise

Tammy Wise is a widely respected mind-body fitness expert based out of New York City, owner of BodyLogos, Inc. author of The Art of Strength: Sculpt the Body ~ Train the Mind. A former Broadway dancer turned Tao minister, Tammy was voted the Best of Fitness by Time Out New York and has appeared in Martha Stewart’s Whole Living magazine, New York Magazine, Natural Health, Shape, and Thrive Global. She’s a Transformational Authors Contest Winner and regular contributor to Honeysuckle magazine and Medium. Visit her at bodylogos.com.