Tag Archive for: strength

DancerInWhite

Jeffrey Epstein Cohorts

DancerInWhite

How Sex, Dad and Dance Woke Me Up!

There have been many reports regarding sexual misconduct, sexual abuse, sex trafficking and pedophilia. Little commentary from these report’s share the actual experience beyond the victim/perpetrator dynamic.

Jeffrey Epstein’s story is no exception. Even with the stream of young women who bravely confirmed his disgraceful schemes, the high drama was created by the who’s, the how’s, and the outcomes.

An experience is felt. It may be felt all at once or as awakening layers of deadened sensation. An experience exposes feelings not scandalous facts.

My story is an account of my experience, not the facts that could accuse and convict a perpetrator. My perpetrator is dead and I seek no revenge. What I offer in this story is faith building…

Asleep only a few hours, I am awoken night after night by my dad. Hearing him enter my private space curled me up into a ball of tension. My eyes wide open under closed eyelids. Even the first time, at the age of ten, I knew nothing good was going to follow.

Then suddenly, I am plucked out of the terror, from what felt like a hand from the heavens, taking me to a place that I can only describe as nirvana––a place where the soul is free from worldly possessions (including my physical body)––a place where I felt safe, relaxed and strong.

This is referred to as a disassociated state in psychology, where the person experiences a detachment from reality, different from a loss of reality as in psychosis. My experience of this state was not one of mental scrutiny; rather, it was a spiritual awakening.

When in this surreal state I felt plugged into both earth and sky. A relationship with my energy body, separate from my physical body, was woken. My central plumb line––the body’s innermost relationship with gravity––was plugged into a relaxed stretch that carried a current of pure life force. I was infused with a spiritual strength that cursed through my energy centers.

I felt like the channel connecting earth and sky. I felt important. I felt like an integral part of the whole of Creation.

Then suddenly, I would be snapped back into my physical body. Usually dad would be gone by then. Sometime not.

My life was like a Ping Pong game. For the 3-years dad visited my room at night to satisfy his sexual need. Back and forth I would bounce, between feeling the relevance of unifying earth and sky, to feeling unworthy of the most basic parental protection.

I had no control over these disassociated experiences. Just as I had no control over what was happening in my reality. But what I gained from these experiences was twofold:

• I have clear reference points for tension and strength.
• And I can distinguish between energy movement and physical movement.

At this time in my life I started dance classes. I wanted the physical mastery to maintain the energy alignment I experienced in my surreal life in my real life. I knew undoubtedly that spirit lived through me, and the way to connect with it was through my central plumb line––my posture.

I learned to transform the static energy of tension into the fluid energy of strength. I found the quiet balance of energy movement inside the demands of physical challenge, and understood the inner grace of poised posture.

Through years of practice, the tension of my curled up body learned to elongate into a channel of life force. Gaining the mastery, embodied in my surreal life into my real life, landed me in the Broadway cast of A Chorus Line at the age of nineteen!

Posture matters. It has the capacity to break through tensions grip and transform misaligning beliefs. It rescued me from the potential downward spiral of my childhood trauma.
Your plumb line connects the essence of you with gravities force and you plug into a universal belonging that is safe, relaxed and fiercely strong.

Strength is experienced as ease-full, not tough, rough and rugged.

It has become clear to me that many of the ways we are taught to strive, prepare and compete for the lives we want are tension building rather than strength enhancing. And by relating to an end goal, in leu of being on the journey, keeps us detached from our energy body––Spirit–– and exhausts our physical body.

What I have concluded from my experience is, the aligning energy that connects our energy body (or Spirit Self) to our physical body is the energy we each borrow from the greater whole. It took trauma for me to experience the gift of spiritual belonging. Showing me that there is a sacred thread that runs through all our life experiences.

Listen inwardly and trust what feels safe, relaxed and strong.

 

To learn to access the relaxed strength found in your posture check out: The Art of Strength: Sculpt the Body ~ Train the Mind, a Book-3D/Video Learning System that helps you feel relaxed on the inside and strong on the outside.

Practice Comfort

Doubts, about our future, tug at everyone’s nerves. But there is no room for self-doubt when so many of us need to create new avenues of income, and new avenues for connection.

Some of you may feel no purpose to guide you; some of you live with no human, animal or plant that affirms your value.

What were once low-grade self-doubts can become booming self-limiting judgments.

Self-doubt is where your resistance to self-care and personal comfort lie. Care and comfort, however, are day-to-day core conditions that maintain immune strength, emotional resilience and mental clarity.

Care and comfort are not luxuries, they are essentials, when facing the atmosphere that this viral pandemic has commanded––a sudden divorce from belonging in, and unexpected isolation from, the world.

Delight lifts you out of the self-doubt that interferes with self-care and comfort. But it’s very hard to be delighted by what you’re actively judging as limited.

So, we need to learn and practice self-acceptance to realize personal potential.

To delight in self-acceptance is to enjoy: yourself, your body, and your unique way of seeing life. This authentic experience of yourself is what makes you one of a kind and elevates you to realizing the Divine in you. This best-self experience keeps you inspired to develop and share your gifts in the world, even if it must be through a computer screen during these times.

So how do you recognize your best-self?

Start by identifying something you really like about yourself. Like for me, I really like that my hair turned white rather than gray. I can count on this being a feel-good statement about myself no matter what else is happening.

Practice staying in alignment with a feel-good statement of your own. Experience self-acceptance, rather than self-judgment, when thinking about your feel-good statement.

Once you can maintain this vibration of self-acceptance, you can respond mindfully, rather than react angrily when challenged, and be your best-self.

When triggered into self-doubt, rather than succumbing to your habitual tension template, think about that feel-good statement to flip your alignment back to self-acceptance. It may have nothing to do with what’s going on, but it snaps you out of engaging with the trigger’s self-damning attack. It snaps you back into being nice to yourself.

Self-acceptance starts at home with your habits, and in your body-mind awareness. Practice makes comfort!

 

1:1 FaceTime Personal Training Available. Exercise is an immune system builder––your first priority during a viral pandemic! mindthebody@bodylogos.com

 

 

 

Workout Warriors Take Warning

Motivation Question

7AM fitness clients are high achievers! We’re warming up in the dark and seeing our day take shape before the sun comes up.

Holiday socializing may have overflowed into the work week and made these early workouts painful. One of my high achiever’s responded to feeling over-done by over-doing some more!

Did she believe that overriding her body’s exhaustion would make her stronger?

As her trainer, I had to help her decelerate and work with willingness rather than will. The willingness to listen rather than demand; and recognize that muscle failure is not the same thing as physical exhaustion. Muscle failure challenges a restored muscle to full capacity—till it fails. Physical exhaustion is an unrestored muscle.

Fitness resolutions need to abide by the same willingness; listen and discern between physical exhaustion and muscle failure!

Meet limitations anew each day by being present. Presence offers truth to your strength training that is both empowering and humbling.

Empowering because you experience your limitations from a place of respect. Meeting your limits, not beating your last performance, is the definition of self-love. Overriding your limits is the definition of self-betrayal.

Humbling because it’s a “real” exchange. Not with what you can and can’t do, but with what you’re willing or not willing to do.

My client was willing to exhaust herself further, escalate her body’s tension and beat up her self-worth over how heavy a dumbbell was and how hard she could drive herself. The question becomes, are you willing to sacrifice yourself—your wellbeing—to feed what you think “should be” versus what actually is.

Stop thinking and feel! Train for relaxed strength, and leave the tension of self-betrayal in 2019!

Woman Lying Supine

Find Your Natural Posture

Woman Lying Supine

While learning posture’s subtle balance between surrendering and aligning, a student questioned, “shouldn’t good posture be natural––balancing attention between tension and strength is hard?!”

I felt that his sentiment should be true, but my experience working with bodies showed otherwise. So I slept on it. (My go-to place when stumped!) As I laid down that evening and felt my spine unfurl into its rightness and enjoyed my muscles’ surrender from a day’s work, it struck me. He’s right!

The precision of posture is natural—when horizontal!

Since then, whenever a client expresses uncertainty about what is correct posture, I lay them horizontal and help them answer the question from a supine position.

Gravity is a blanket that guides you to your best self.

Tammy speaks about the Power of Posture

Fitness For Living

 

You workout, yet you still feel worn out by life. Every demand, expectation and responsibility adds weight to the gravity of your day.

What carries your workout vitality into your life?

Proper posture is the energy conductor that plugs you into your strength.

Posture that is relaxed and aligned wakes up your mind and muscle’s. You plug into gravity—a universal energy Source. After all, we are an energy resource—we die. The universe is an energy Source—it’s infinite!

When posture isn’t considered you use up your energy reserve quickly. You crave sleep and food to recharge, or external stimulants to keep up. Posture extends the life of your body’s battery of life force.

Listen to this 17-minute talk, broadcast from the Gary Marshall Theater in Burbank California, about the power of posture.

Do You Want to be Tough or Strong?

Chase the Carrot or Eat the Carrot

The choice between being tough or strong is a conversation about what you want running your life, tension or strength.

I’ve come to realize that tough is protective gear masquerading as strength. So, when training folks, I work to keep it honest. Challenge their strength’s potential AND learn its limitations.

When a client was failing in his workout due to exhaustion, not muscle failure, he averted his gaze.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“You’ll be mad if I tell you,” he replied.

He was in the middle of a digital fitness challenge where he had to have his heart rate elevated for a certain number of minutes within a month’s time. He was over-training. Rejuvenation time was shelved until the challenge was over.

It was clear he was disheartened. His tension pooled in his chest muscles; broadening the protective shield of his back.

Looking at the floor he mumbled, “I’ll be fine. I’ll just walk everywhere today instead of my peloton run.”

Can you see yourself in this?

Use minutes to meditate was my advice. Use the time for active restoration versus active progression. But the digital minute-counter shutoff when his heart rate stabilized.

Penalized for self-care. Hmmm?!

  • We look away when we know in our body that we’re hurting ourselves, but in our mind, we have an insatiable need to progress.
  • We look away when we believe that we would lose our strength––be traumatized––if we didn’t triumph over a challenge.
  • We look away, when we know, deep down, that some nonsensical belief has triggered our tension into the driver’s seat.

What is our tension chasing?

Survival––Survival of the fittest! (richest, skinniest, smartest…)
We’re chasing a carrot on a string. That carrot is the belief that we’re not the fittest.

Here’s the truth of it. Chasing will never change the belief. In fact, the tension that keeps the belief running is getting stronger by the act of chasing it.

Stop being strung along and eat the carrot!

We feel most balanced when we can look life straight in the eye. Balance asks us to look in both directions. What if we stopped chasing? What if we just dropped into our bone’s stillness and reevaluated our habitual chase to prove ourselves?

What is in our body’s stillness?

Neutral Attention––Neutral to life’s flow. (truth, unfolding, evolution…)
When we eat the carrot, we reassess what we want to align with. An outside expectation or an inside truth. A distorted judgment or good sense. A past trauma or your present realness.

“Trauma is a fact of life, but it doesn’t have to be a life sentence.”
Peter Levine, PhD & author, Waking the Tiger

Trauma is a physical experience. Any level of trauma––disappointment, judgment, expectation––lives in the body as tension until it’s resolved.

The mind forms beliefs to make sense out of the body’s sudden invasion of tension. Very often, self-damning beliefs that are mis-taken.

The body’s tension template and the mind’s twisted beliefs are locked in with each other, until the body’s tension can surrender its grip.

When we bump into this chase, we feel like a wimp and feel we need to toughen up!

But what if I were to say, when we bump into this chase, we need to feel into its vulnerability––experience our inner-wimp––until we are introduced to our strength.

  • Experience your body as a wimp. Don’t focus on your mind’s judgments or your emotional reactions. Feel for your bone’s perspective. What is under your judgment and reactivity?
  • What are your bones hungry for? What does your inner-wimp need, to feel cared for?
  • Be that care-giver.

This is self-care not self-indulgence. You know this because you’re not perpetuating Self-denial (with a capital “S”), nor are you ignoring the chase. You are reassessing who you are, and what you need, to feel aligned with your deepest, richest, wisest Self.

When we chase the carrot on a string, we lose our selves. When we eat the carrot, we find ourselves. This is strength.

 

Please share this with anyone you feel could use its message. Thank you.

Are You Aligned With Your Strength or Your Tension?

When we work from strength we feel strong. When we work from tension we feel weak.

How do you feel today? 

Let’s say strong is a connectedness between your self and a challenge that leaves you feeling successful; and weak is a separation between your self and a challenge that leaves you feeling unsuccessful. The cause of separation in weakness is often due to the mind and body having a different perspective about what you are intending to do. Inner ambivalence exhausts your allegiance.

Your mind is motivated to workout; your body feels self conscious working out.
The result: 18% of gym members don’t show up at the gym.
Your mind wants to eat healthy; your body feels punished eating healthy.
The result: 68% of Americans are overweight or obese.

Mind body ambivalence creates tension filled patterns in your physical performance and mental response to challenge. To connect with your strength rather than your tension, first take a moment to focus inward. Recognize your mental, emotional, and physical condition. Take a breath. Widen back in your mind, release stress through the occipital hollows at the base of your skull. Breath again. Reorganize the body, relax muscular tension so you experience the bones weight. Then, surrender your mind and body into each other until you are OK with who you are now and who you are becoming. Begin connecting to your challenge from this place and an internal strength is coupled with an external expanse that inspires you into the challenge.

Strength is excavated out of tension.