“So sometimes I need to be reminded that my body is mine.”

Today’s post comes from Return the Gayze, a blog I was alerted to by a Facebook post linked to me by a friend in a private message…you know how it goes. However I stumbled across it, I needed to share it with you. The post is about massage, about pain, about buried trauma, about what

Tools for making my workshops more powerful: a critical review of my own Embodied Consent Workshop last month

  Last month, I gave a workshop on Embodied Consent, which I talked about a lot in this space. It went relatively well, but I had some criticism for myself, and I’m looking forward to doing it – and other workshops – again with this greater knowledge. So what didn’t I like? I thought I

Embodied Consent: Where is your “yes”?

(Part 3 of my series on Embodied Consent, leading up to my talk on the subject at the Bound in Boston: Wicked Women Conference next weekend.) One of my favorite truisms about consent is that a true “yes” is not possible without the option for a true “no.” That being said, one of my primary

Embodied Consent: Where is your ‘no’?

(Part 2 of my series leading up to my talk on Embodied Consent, happening October 11 at the Bound in Boston: Wicked Women conference.) So I’ve talked in this space about how hard it can be to say no. But what about to feel no? In my work, Rubenfeld Synergy Method, we always come back to

Owning yourself fully: Bessel van der Kolk and healing trauma through the body

The big issue for traumatized people is that they don’t own themselves anymore. Any loud sound, anybody insulting them, hurting them, saying bad things, can hijack them away from themselves. And so what we have learned is that what makes you resilient to trauma is to own yourself fully. -Bessel van der Kolk In the

What was taken from you? Where do we get it back?

This weekend, we focused on soul: what feeds us, where we feel at home, how we connect to passion, to center, to power, to connection itself. As part of that, we talked about the thwarts to passion: what does your passion call you to do, and what gets our way?

An important learning from this was that most of the time, the thing thwarting us is not of us. We may have internalized it, sure, but it was something done to us. “Something taken out of my soul. Something I would never lose. Something somebody stole.” Or, something somebody put there, something that doesn’t belong, that we should never have been forced to carry.

5 Things Not to Do If You’re Over 40

Last month, I hit the big 4-0. While I don’t go in much for chronological age meaning anything, there are tremendous cultural tropes around what it means to turn 20, to turn 30, to turn 40. 40 always seems more momentous, perhaps because, in this day and age when we are living longer and delaying

You do not have to be good.

With the weather turning (finally) toward spring, and with everything reaching toward the light, I felt it was as good a time as any to share one of my favorite poems of all time. I love Mary Oliver, and I love “Wild Geese” because it expresses so much about what so many of us go

The Classic Sequence: First touch at the feet

I seem to have left behind this series, describing the progression of the so-called Classic Sequence of moves in Rubenfeld Synergy, quite some time ago, and I’m not entirely sure why.  Therefore, I am taking this moment to continue it.  Please click the above link for a list of moves that I’ve written about thus

Working with Sexuality: Decoupling touch and sex

In a previous post, I mentioned how often, especially for men, touch can be linked up in their bodies with sex.  In our current society, unfortunately, we have a disordered relationship to touch.  When we are tiny children, if we are lucky, our parents and other caregivers touch us all the time.  We are carried,