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Informal Research and Study groups
My favorite learning tool is to gather with a group of others who want to investigate a common interest. I like to pose a collective question and to explore it physically, with our hearts and minds open to discovery. For example, in 1995, some friends and I co-founded the White Women’s Race and Class Lab, an experiential study group of white women with backgrounds in movement therapy, bodywork, dance, and a shared commitment to dismantling racism. For examples, click on Three Activities from White Women's Race and Class Lab and Some Assumptions About Power and Rank in Community Arts. In our meetings we examine race and class issues through case studies from our own lives, movement exercises, hands-on bodywork, and discussion. The movement and bodywork generate physical metaphors and analogies that bring our conversation to deeper levels than words alone. We share our resources, our troubles, our successes, and food. I always seem to have at least two or three of these study groups running in my life. A study group lasts anywhere from three sessions to ten years. Recent study groups have focused on Embodied Leadership, Buddhist Sutras, Body-Mind Centering (the work of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen) and Writing.
Somatic Studies: The Body as a Way of Knowing
Over the past 30 years I have studied somatic (body-mind) integration with teachers in the United States and Asia. These studies include both European/American somatic practices (See Somatic Lineage Charts) and Asian practices such as vipassana/insight meditation, tai ji quan and yoga. My somatic training is supported by my dance background, which includes movement forms from around the world, especially Bharata Natayam (Bhaskar Academy in Singapore), Haitian dance (Jean-Leon Destine) and modern/post-modern dance.
Formal Education
My formal education is the philosophical foundation for my work. My undergraduate degree is in Asian studies; my master's degree is in Human Development. I have no academic credentials in art, dance, or performance.
By studying Chinese and Indonesian languages, I entered worldviews that are radically different from my own as an English-speaking American. Cultural assumptions about the place of human beings in the universe are inherent in the structure of a language. For example, the Chinese written character for heaven consists of a person with outstretched arms and a line overhead; even heaven exists in relationship to humans.
An in-depth exposure to Asian languages met my hunger for different models of integrated living. Many Asian languages reveal an assumption that body and mind are integrated. In Chinese, as in many Asian languages, the word for heart and mind are the same word. As a student, it was heartening/mind-opening to know that the symptoms of dis-integration I experienced and witnessed around me (splits of matter/spirit; heart/mind; humans/nature; work/play; body/mind...) were cultural constructs and not universal truths. For details, click on
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