Category Archives: Breathwork

For many of us, this super moon marked a time of huge energy shifts, and releasing old stories that no longer serve us. Releasing those stories and opening up to a new life is a death/rebirth process. It requires imagination to envision what is possible. It also requires a willingness to have a new experience. Through the work of Body Dialogue,
Erin Panzella was able to imagine and create a new story.

My relationship with Erin, my student in Body Dialogue, exemplifies the power of finding one’s metaphor to embark on such a healing journey. When Erin came to me, I intuitively knew that unless we found the root of her story in her body, she would continue to carry the pain that had been her identity since her childhood.

Below is an introduction to Erin, who will be sharing her story throughout several blog
posts to come.

My name is Erin Panzella. I have been a student of Janice’s for the past four years. My
journey with chronic pain began as a child with undiagnosed gastrointestinal disorders,
and has continued on in my adult life due to a traumatic back injury that resulted in
spinal fusion surgery. When I finally felt recovered from the surgery, I suffered a car
accident which sent me into a tailspin of pain.

When I first met Janice, it seemed I had already exhausted all other modalities of getting
out of pain. I felt completely hopeless, yet also cracked wide open. This state of
vulnerability meant I was receptive to a new process. Janice understood that my trauma
was more than just the symptoms I displayed. Her goal was to go underneath the pain
and listen to the messages it was speaking. This helped me to shift my focus from trying
to “fix” myself to trying to understand how the pain and fear were consuming my
identity. This process required trust and vulnerability that were first cultivated through
my participation in a couple of retreats lead by Janice. During my first Body Dialogue
session, the following images came to me. The River became a metaphor for my healing…

The River

Artwork by Janice Stieber-Rous

I’ve been crushed under the weight of generations
Worth of Shame, Doubt, and the Burden of
Being a woman,
A lesser creature,
Only worthy of whatever
Men are willing to give.
I’ve been striving so hard
To carry this load
That my bones have contorted
And my muscles have knotted themselves
And I’m so acutely aware
Of the Pain,
That I can’t even begin to imagine
Who I am without it
Until someone said,
“Here, let me…”
Hands loosening my knots
Breath resetting my bones.
I was finally able to recall
A time that was absolutely mine…
Splashing in The Little Colorado River,
With my friend who has always been
There was no past
No future
No disappointment
No expectations-
Just bliss, clean and free
And so the hands help me
Ease into the river
Where I expel
The Pain and Shame from my body,
The water carrying it all
Out and away
I release, exhale
And hold the image of a setting desert sun
As the reference point for my new center

Keeping it simple is real. Coming back to center is a real place. It’s not a metaphor.

Artwork by Janice Rous

When I was three years old, I would dance around the foyer of our house in Maine. Somehow I knew that the greatest expression of joy, for me, was finding my wings to fly. So I danced; according to my mother and my sisters, I danced in the morning and I danced in the evening. Sometimes I even set up chairs for them to watch me dance. The foyer had etched glass window panes in the door. I remember dancing with the light and the shadows. I knew what complete freedom felt like. But a year later, we left that house in Maine, and I mark that trip as the beginning of recognizing contrast from total expansion and freedom to constriction and fear.

I entered into a period of deep grief, and when we finally arrived in Long Island, NY, far from the ocean and the seagulls, and the foyer with the etched glass windows, I began a journey to reclaim what I knew was true as a little girl.

Fast forward to 1965, when I was a student at the Martha Graham school of dance. Having spent twelve years trying to learn proper technique so that my body would master the elements of dance, so I could learn to fly with control, I recognized that to become a Martha Graham dancer was more about deprivation and restriction than it was about freedom and joy. That summer, I entered the American College Dance Festival and met Sally Stackhouse who was a principal dancer for Jose Limon. In her classes, I felt like I could fly across the floor in leaps and jumps and turns. In the next few months, I entered a huge battle within myself. Could I dance with that freedom or would I go back to classes that taught me about control and perfection?

This story is the seed of my work, Body Dialogue. I have been in a conversation all these years, asking how do I find joy, freedom, and expansion in movement, and at the same time fly like a bird and coast with the angels? I am exploring the concept of My Body as my Best Friend. She has been my guide and teacher as I have navigated this journey of contrast, felt in my cells and experienced in my bones, muscle and in the energy that I call “my body”.

Everything is energy. The breath is energy, our thoughts are energy, our bodies are the accumulation of our history and our presence in the moment. The physical body is of a different vibration than the emotional and spiritual bodies. But ideally when we line up the physical, emotional, and spiritual, we are allowing healing to occur in all three realms.

This article by Marion Woodman in Parabola helps us understand the pattern of addiction that is rampant in our culture. Her analysis helps to explain how we have arrived in this moment. Marion passed away in early July and left her students and her writings as her legacy

https://parabola.org/2018/06/10/worshipping-illusions-an-interview-with-marion-woodman/

For the last number of years, my body has taken on a different shape. I have grown wider and my stomach has rounded into a mound. My already crooked spine has gotten more crooked and places that used to be so flexible are starting to lose that ease I once had. Places that were once angular are now sharp, and places that seemed strong now feel rigid. It has been very easy to feel angry now that I have “more junk in my trunk” as they say. My photos reveal someone I hardly know. When I look at them, I do not like what I see, and I often ask “who is that?” I feel disgust or complete rejection of my own image, but that is my new edge. I have not yet fully accepted who I have become or what I see, but I am beginning to delve deeply into the self-criticism and self-loathing that is showing up.

If my body is my best friend, then how do I befriend this person inhabiting this Body?

How do I name it? What do I call myself? I used to simply go up and down five pounds, now I just keep growing. I love food and eating but it’s more that that; I eat whenever I can as if I am fueling a huge machine. Sometimes I think I am stuffing down the pain of my fears of the future; a world my grandchildren will not be able to live in, my fears of elephants and dolphins disappearing. How can I not be terrified by that?

I am also not moving as much as I did in the past. I am not walking every day because walking hurts my hip and my back. I am not motivated to jump up early in the morning to do my yoga or my stretching. So am I all of a sudden lazy? Or am I in a different rhythm?

I am writing this to you because my assistant Maddie suggested that this is a conversation that tends to be kept private. Few people want to talk about what happens to our Body as we age. Few people are willing to verbalize the ongoing struggle with shame and rejection of the Body.

What happens to us as we find ourselves different form before? How do adjust our expectations and our inner perceptions? How do we continue to be in a healthy Body Dialogue if there is disgust, loathing and anger as our new behaviors?

Now, I can only call on love and compassion; full acceptance. It was not this hard before, but now it is a daily practice. I am starting a loving kindness practice between me and my body. Not a deprivation regime but a strategy of indulging in unconditional love.

Can I challenge myself, not to thirty days of lemon juice and olive oil, but thirty days of loving kindness? Can I use my will in the service of love, not power? Can I invite my animal Body to speak and tell me what she wants and needs? Can I feel the shape that I have become as Janice too?

I release the inner critic when I see a new me!

I write this letter to you because I want to model a new way of thinking of our aging bodies. I am writing to teach a new course of self-correction based on love, acceptance and invitation. I am imagining this new energy as a gift to my body. My guidance tells me that now is the time to release all the phony ways we have been dominated and told what beauty is. Beauty is truly from the eyes of love.

This invitation is for you and me and any others who want to join me.

Try this when you have a voice inside that is filled with shame:

Sense into where you first heard that voice. Is it truly your own? Whose voice is it? Where in your body do you feel the messages of this broken voice?

Then ask your body to show you the opposite of that voice.

For example, if in my mind I hear my mother’s disgust at my family members for having no self-control and gaining weight, I replace it with remembering how I feel when I am swimming as a positive reinforcement for a new behavior. I bathe myself in this more life-giving feeling. After-all, our friendship with our body has very little to do with how we look, and a lot to do with how we feel.

Ask yourself: When do you feel the most at home in your body? When do you feel the most alive? The most energized? The most at peace? How can you make space and time to support these positive feelings?

We hope you will enjoy this poem by Sonya Renee Taylor: The Body is Not an Apology

PBS special Breaking Big with Roxane Gay, a leading voice in the feminist movement

https://www.pbs.org/video/roxane-gay-bmtg0n/

Last month I had the joy of being a guest on Carol Cox’s Speaking Your Brand podcast.  It gave me an opportunity to tell listeners why better breathing is so important in giving presentations, and in living a fuller and more expressive public life. This is actually only one of the many places that better breathing helps.

I wanted to share the interview with you because it explains so much about the connection between breathing and our communication. I think this could help people in ways that are probably surprising and unexpected.

“I’m happy to bring you this week’s podcast episode #49 with Janice Rous.

More than simply helping to calm your nerves or speak more clearly (which it definitely does as well!), using your breath properly and intentionally can connect you on a deeper level with your audience and make your words more powerful and impactful (it’s physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual).

This is what the best speakers in the world do – and you can too.

Janice and I also talk about why we’re often reluctant to have silence and pauses in our conversations and presentations (and, I would add, in our lives), but why it’s crucial for our listeners (and us).”

~Carol Cox, SPEAKING YOUR BRAND PODCAST

Highlights:

• The importance of breath, tone, resonance, vibration, and grounding the body
• How to let your breath guide the voice so your words are powerful and impactful
• How pauses and silences are necessary so your audience see you as the authority on your topic
• Techniques to invite your audience into your speech
• The importance of physical and vocal warmups before a speaking engagement

 https://www.speakingyourbrand.com/breathing-for-better-speaking-janice-rous-podcast-49/

This morning a friend called and told me her espresso machine was broken. She could use her stove-top coffeemaker, she said, but she wanted an espresso. The machine was supposed to work—so why wasn’t it?

Broken promises. Sometimes we think about our body this way. My body is supposed to be working, we think, so why isn’t doing what I want—and whose fault is it? Sometimes we look inside, and say “I know how I hurt myself. I did too much during my workout—maybe I shouldn’t push so hard . . . ”

I think about this myself when my body isn’t up to my expectations and I wonder why. Am I doing something wrong? It feels like our body story is often about the secret promises we believe the body made to us, and is now breaking. The other side of our body story is that sometimes we look for someone out there who will fix whatever is wrong: our doctor, chiropractor, body worker. Who will fix this?

Instead, I offer a simple idea. Maybe the trick is to listen to our body’s message and find tools to work with our minds, bodies, and souls to look deeper in and find the way out.

On May 4-6, 2018, I’ll be conveying a retreat for women at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. It’s called “Body Dialogue: Listening to Our Deeper Messages and Finding the Joy of Movement.”

It’s my privilege to offer this retreat at the Atlantic Center’s sumptuous campus on the east coast of Florida. As we meet in circle, share, learn together, and move together, we can find the tools for our well-being and the secrets inside that lead us towards greater awareness and health.

Follow this link for more information and registration: http://atlanticcenterforthearts.org/event-or-exhibition/body-dialogue-a-practice-of-deep-listening-and-movement/

For many years I have observed that we treat our bodies the way we were treated as children. What I mean is, our bodies are the part of us that cannot always speak our needs. This often goes unnoticed until there is a problem.

Sometimes if we were neglected as children, we might neglect our bodies. If we were pushed to be perfect, we expect perfection from our bodies. If we were driven with activity, we expect our bodies to go and go.

So with that in mind, I have been thinking about what it is like for our bodies, and the part of us that is not able to speak, to receive the news and be present to discourse that is often full of anger and hate.

How does our body internalize the aggression and projections that people on both sides are hurling at one another? I know it affects my nervous system, my digestion, and my breathing. I know I am feeling the actual assault physically of fear and hopelessness in the collective discourse.

So what is to be done if we want to stay politically aware of what is going on—but feel overwhelmed by the seemingly constant barrage of lying, deceit, and hostility.

I believe we cannot turn off to what is being presented, because one day we will wake up to a dictatorship and our rights will have been taken from us. I also know I cannot live in constant fear of the outcome of these politics. I resent that the political sphere is trying to grab my attention and not let me go. It feels like an assault.

I believe it is really important for the truth to be revealed in all the arenas that are speaking out, and I also feel that at 67 years of age, I do not have ceaseless reserves of energy to resist and fight. I often feel weary and taken over by the grief in my heart, mind, and body.

Joanna Macy, an important teacher and elder, reminds us that to not feel outrage, grief, and sadness during these times will leave us impotent, and that NOW is the time to use our love to serve the power of truth.

I know this to be true, but I feel the cost to my system daily.

NOW more than ever, physical practices are crucial—practices that help keep us centered and release negativity from our physical and energetic body.

This is a time we cannot coast down the hill. I know it is a time to get in gear, not get overwhelmed—a time to practice mindful movement and mindful speech.

But most of all, we need to remember our bodies speak to us daily. We need to listen and discern what she is telling us.