On This Day 23 Years Ago: December 19
Chakras & Pages & Most Welcome Changes
October 2000
27 years old
"Oh, my God!" she gushes, taking my hands and squeezing them. "Who have you been studying with?"
I blink a few times and tilt my head. "Um...studying with?"
"Yes, have you found a new teacher?"
"No. I mean, I get to take workshops every once in awhile, and I've got some videos that I've turned into VHS garbage by watching them so many times but..." One of my shoulders shrugs up. I cast her a sheepish cringe.
"Well, whatever you're doing, don't stop." She casts an affectionate eye around the Moroccan restaurant where I've just finished performing my forty-five minute set. "We come here every year for New Year's Eve, and at other times because it's our favorite special occasion restaurant. I saw you perform on the past two New Years, and I always love watching you dance. But this..."
Her enraptured gaze runs the length of me as she sweeps a gesture from my sequined copper headband to the hem of my chiffon skirt. I'm still dripping sweat--pardon me. Belly dancers don't sweat, we glisten. (Hah! Maybe other belly dancers.)
"I don't know what you're doing," she says, "but it's working. I'm so proud of all your dedication and hard work, and I look forward to seeing where you go from here."
My throat closes. My eyes well up and I choke out, "Thank you."
As she hugs me in the least sweaty places, she can't know what a compliment she's just given me—and a confirmation. Because I haven't been studying intensely with any dancers. The longest I've ever taken belly dance lessons from any one person was three months from my second teacher back in 1995, and it was only her baby-beginner community ed class. It helped me clean up a few moves, but I never had the chance to take her advanced class.
Even so, I know exactly what this gushing restaurant patron is seeing. This change is not the result of in-depth study with a dance teacher.
This is The Artist's Way at work.
PAGES
On December 19, 2000, two days before being hit by a drunk driver, the first thing I did upon waking, before even getting up to pee, was crack open my eyes enough to reach for my journal on the bedside table. Every morning I would scribble out any dreams I'd just had, followed by my most uncensored thoughts. I would write this way for my first fifteen minutes of the day, puking across the page, then get up and get ready for work.
The practice is called Morning Pages, and since the first week of June 2000 I had been doing it religiously.
Just before summer, a dear friend had recommended one of the most impactful and life-changing books I've ever read. But I have to say, Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way is not a book I recommend reading—not if you want it to work its profound magic.
You really have to DO The Artist's Way.1
It's a twelve-week course designed to help you unblock all the places where you're stuck in creativity. It's a journey of deep self-discovery, of learning how create prolifically and joyfully, and to protect what you create, including—no, especially yourself.
As a Recovering Doormat and cradle-bred People Pleaser, this book couldn’t have come into my life at a better moment.
Morning Pages is one of its primary tools. Free-flow writing like that not only helps clean out mental clutter to make clearer pathways for creativity and focus, it brings to the forefront of the mind those thoughts, fears, hopes, and desires lurking beneath the surface, often unheard amidst the clang and rush of our daily lives.
Some of the other practices in the entire Artist's Way series involve setting boundaries, blurting out the first thing that comes to mind after certain questions, taking one's self on artistic play dates at least once a week, getting outside and walking, making collages. All these things have infiltrated my self-care and artist habits in the most glorious and healing ways.
Extra bonus: this course is not only for artists.
It works for any sort of creative endeavor. But for me as a late-twenties, unknowingly neurodivergent, HSP multipotentialite who ate, breathed, dreamed, and sweated creativity, it was the miracle overhaul I'd been searching for since…
Well, since I’d learned how to crouch on my hands-and-knees and peep, “Rawr!”
So combining this course with my first chakra cleanse that I did over the same summer? Talk about turning yourself inside-out, shaking yourself upside-down, and letting everything that doesn't serve your highest good fall out and be flushed. Whuff!
The Artist's Way actually took me fourteen weeks to finish, because I wouldn't let myself go on to the next lesson if I hadn't done the Morning Pages every day that week, as well as going on my Artist Date. That second practice was actually harder than the first. I'm a writer, so putting pen religiously to paper was as natural as swimming was for this girl born to the Land of 10,000 Lakes.
But nurturing myself and my inner child-artist, alone, for the sole purpose of play and exploration…
There were two weeks I skipped the Artist Date, therefore, I didn't finish the course until the middle of September. Only one month later, when that sweet restaurant patron had commented on what dramatic changes she’d seen in my dancing, I was thrilled to know that all my hard work was paying off.
I could see it, too. Could feel it in the ease of my shoulders. They had stopped riding so high, and they’d lost oodles of. My chest had begun to open up and I was standing taller. I could feel it in the slightest softening of my gaze. Most of all, I could tell the difference in my smile.
More and more often, it didn’t crack open my mouth in that awkward almost-smile that I'd been doing for...geez, I don't know for how long. In the wake of that revolutionary summer, it stretched across to my cheeks and even up into my eyes. My movements didn’t feel so spastic either.
I stopped feeling so spastic.
It was all getting there. It was a slow process, yet it was so steady that even I could discern the shifts.
And that chakra cleanse? Revolutionary!
CHAKRAS
At the start of the same summer, I “randomly” (try synchronistically) discovered a new book at my favorite new age store. It was called Eastern Body, Western Mind by Anodea Judith.2 Working through this book did a thousand times more for my inner turmoil than every hour I’d ever spent being semi-listened to by a shrink, and for sure every drug anybody has ever tried to cram down my throat to numb out my pain and shut me up as “all cured.”3
Don’t know what chakras are? Here is my favorite crash-course overview, as delivered by…well, I would never call Avatar: The Last Airbender a “mere kid’s cartoon.” The chakras are so much more complex, and there are more than seven, but if you don’t know what the bleep I’m talking about:
Once I got through all the work of the third chakra—the center of personal power and self-esteem, I was suddenly able to stick my finger into my navel and wiggle it around like nothing.
Yes. Me.
I’m telling you, there is something to this mind/body thing, because I hadn't been able to do that since first grade when Tony Woodhull punched me so hard in the gut I almost threw up. Any time anything has ever come close to touching my belly button, I’d had that same sensation. It's a cross between nails on the chalkboard and needing to puke up my shoes.
But after working through the third chakra, I could jam my finger in there and gouge to my heart's content if I wanted to.
Which I did. Just to prove the point, so there.
Fifth chakra remained a stubborn beast though. Ugh, my voice. My true voice.
My nemesis.
But I work on it constantly. My friend who had introduced me to The Artist's Way suggested that I take martial arts for that issue. Since her advice had always been spot-on for me, I thought about it a lot. I had quit medieval fighting in the SCA4 after that fiasco with my knight and his wife, and I really missed it. Many of the best fighters had always been those who also studied classical martial arts, so I wondered if maybe that would be the next step in strengthening both my third and fifth chakras.
Let me assure you. It did.
SUBLIMATION
There was one other quest I undertook over that summer. It was called "sublimation"—the art of taking the ordinary or even something that others would consider trash, and transforming it into the Sublime.
Me being me, I instantly thought of all the pig shit farmers spread over their fields to replenish the soil. But I really like that metaphor.
Feces into Fertilizer.
Apparently it had been with me for ages. My big gladiatrix tale that I’d started writing back when I was seventeen was the perfect example. I didn't even realize what I was writing when I puked out page upon page of this warrior woman before I’d ever heard the name Xena. After everything that had happened in my home town and through college, I needed an inner gladiatrix. Desperately.
I still do.
It was the same with the even older novel about a girl named Phoenix. All that shit...all that anger and grief and shame and ostracizing...so many of my losses and wounds...they have always gotten sprinkled and painted in great swathes throughout these fictional stories that I write as obsessively as I dance.5
It all gets sublimated into art.
October 27, 2000
Back at the Moroccan restaurant with that lovely patron who was so blown away by the changes to my dancing
I can’t believe how noticeable these changes are to other people. This woman is absolutely seeing the results of The Artist’s Way, the chakra cleanse, and my experiments with sublimation. My dancing is going back to how it used to be when I was a kid before movement became cheers, and before dance became belly dance.6
But now, even here at the restaurant, I've been telling stories when I dance again. People don't really know what I’m doing, yet somehow they KNOW.
They don't get up very often anymore and try to stuff money in my belt. They also rarely try to chat me up in the middle of a performance. Instead, they wait until I'm finished to ask all their questions or thank me for the show, and they either hand me tips or put them in the basket that I've started to leave out.
One of my friends said they watch me like they'd watch a ballet performance, instead of treating me like another piece of the decadent furniture in this exotic ambience. They certainly don't treat me like a piece of meat to drool over anymore, and that has been a huge relief, because I just don’t have that kind of party-girl personality.
I really like this idea. I'm a storyteller at the root of everything. I always have been. My original college major was acting, and I'm a writer, so weaving tales into the medium of dance is the most automatic thing I can do. At the very least, I'm telling the tale of what the music makes me feel.
But more often than not lately, I'm sharing my heart with my audience, in addition to entertaining them with pretty costumes and pretty moves. That feels really good. It feels like ME, and I have finally felt comfortable letting people see what's really going on in here.
Apparently, they're enjoying it, too. I make more now in tips than I ever have, and I keep getting compliments like this one—compliments that go a 1001 times deeper than how gorgeous my outfits are or what a pretty girl I am or how great my body is or how well I can move.
People are noticing the pieces in me that are...sublimated.
Something is shifting, and it's happening faster than I can really process it.
"So?" my bright-eyed fan asks. "Will you be performing on New Year's again?"
My grin goes as huge as my mouth is capable of. "Oh, yes. I’ll be there with bells on! And beads and sequins and satins and silks."
CHANGES
December 19 was a Tuesday in 2000. My journal that morning was full of excitement over the holiday student show I would be co-hosting the next night, and my continual relief over being in a bigger apartment with a bigger income. My never-ending to-do list included finishing my Christmas shopping, unpacking from the move, packing for my holiday trip back to Minnesota, and getting new health insurance because I had just changed jobs.
As day-job office work went, I was thrilled to be at this new place. It was a local internet company where I was responsible for phones, reception, mail, filing, payroll, invoicing and statements, accounts payable and receivable, tax prep, and being the general "go getter whatever you need" girl. I also knew exactly how my bosses liked their coffee, and the pot was always fresh.
One of my biggest frustrations was the office's organizational system that had been in place for many years. I was hard at work overhauling it to a much more efficient system, but first I had to convince everyone of the merits of such a change. Once they saw how smoothly everything ran, their relief and gratitude flowed—as did all the paperwork into its new designated homes.
That job was the purrrrfect fit for me. I adored everyone I worked with, and they expressed their joy at having me there vociferously and often. The atmosphere was creative and playful, hardworking and fast-paced—just the way I liked it. I preferred to have a dozen plates spinning at once, as it kept the work from seeming monotonous. Sure, it was numbers and paperwork, but I am equally my father’s daughter. He’s an accountant by profession, the eternal jerry-rigger by passion, with everything in its proper place.
What can I say? I’m a nerd. I obtain colossal satisfaction from transforming chaotic messes into order.
Yeah, that’d be me getting off on left-brained, anal-retentive tasks.
(Also me in my clueless moments when I don't understand that a cute guy is wanting to flirt with me. Ahem.)
And yes. I do rearrange my eggs in the carton every time I use some, creating new patterns from the remaining specimens.
Wut?
Occasionally, because I don't like to be THAT predictable, I make them asymmetrical.
ON THIS DAY 23 YEARS AGO
So, no pig-shit, there I was.
Twenty-three years ago on this very day, I went to work in the morning. Afterwards, I came home and unpacked some more moving boxes. I practiced my new drum solo for the recital. I answered some emails and wrote a mushy one to Galen, thanking him for such a wonderful date the night before. I worked on my flier for the impending January workshop I planned to hold. It was called E-Motion: Conveying Emotion Through Dance.
After climbing into bed, I read a little more of Colleen McCullough's First Man in Rome7 until I got tired. It's a monstrous historical fiction epic about the chinks that got laid into ancient Rome's armor, allowing for the rise of Julius and Augustus Caesar. Perfect for sinking my ancient history obsessed teeth into.
Finally, I got tired enough to sleep.
I conked out that night, having no clue that the next time I laid my head on that pillow, it would be at 3:00 a.m. with a serious concussion I didn't even know I had.
This brain injury would take my ability to comprehend that monstrous novel I’d just started, much less remember what I’d read the night before—sometimes five minutes before. It would take my ability to do every one of those left-brain, multitasking duties I’d been hired to perform at my day job. It would take my ability to comprehend humor, sing on-key, or snap my fingers on time with the beat of a song, much less play finger cymbals while dancing, smiling, and chatting with my audience. It would take my ability to keep from blurting out everything that came to mind the moment the thought occurred, and it would prevent me from consistently storing memories of a day’s doings overnight.
It would pretty much take my life as I knew it.
Good thing I’d started writing those journals. They would become the equivalent of an external hard-drive, reminding me who I’ve been and who I am today.
Although I was too injured to dance on New Year’s, I did dance at that holiday student recital. I also finished my Christmas shopping. But everything else on my calendar and to-do list…well, some of those things got postponed for years.
Others never happened.
Up Next: Rise… Fall… Phoenix.
This series begins here:
BLAM.
© 2020 Hartebeast
Eastern Body, Western Mind by Anodea Judith - the first book that ever introduced me to the chakras and that whupped my butt for an entire summer. I actually don’t recommend doing any of this stuff alone and unsupported by a professional mental health team the way I did, especially if you have trauma in your history. But…well???? I didn’t have any other options back then and I desperately needed to do something so… Eh. I changed my life. Because I said so.
At this point in my life, I was still twenty years away from being seen by an actual trauma-informed therapist. We’re talking the late 70s into the 90s here, so most of the people I saw were simply unequipped to deal with the caliber of trauma I brought to their tables. Every antidepressant I’ve ever been put on has been like a wrecking ball through my life. I have a lot of drug sensitivities. As such, the benefits so many people reap from pharmaceuticals do the opposite to me.
Another revolutionary book that has changed my life: The Body Keeps the Score - Brain, Mind & Body in the Healing of Trauma
Don't want to read the book? Here's the basic premise of what trauma does to the body and why talking about it, even in therapy, so often doesn't solve the problems: Short Version. Or Long Version by the author himself
I have not read the Artists Way — but I’m going to have now.
I have read the body keeps the score — which I thought was excellent.
Recently I read — Rick Rubens book on creativity “the creative act: a way of being” — I found that really good, incase your interested...
Great piece by the way.
The whole chakra thing is new to me - but I find it very interesting :)