The Feeling Body
Age: 21. In my final year at Otago University, New Zealand I participated in a dance field trip to the wild and remote Catlins, located on the south east corner of the South Island. If you travelled in a straight line, across the choppy Pacific Ocean, you’d bang straight into Antarctica.
Continue reading “Dancing With The Beach. A sensory field trip to The Catlins, New Zealand.”
I have this pattern. It’s as much a part of me as my leg, or the fact that I still sleep with three dogs and a sheep (Spot, Spotty, Tracker and Argyle. Five year old me really liked the name Spot, I suppose).
Continue reading “I Am Enough. (Am I?) Listening to the self-critic.”
This is an excerpt from my travel journal. In 2012 I took a year of leave from my union job in New Zealand and spent 12 months travelling solo around Cuba, Mexico, Guatemala, Canada and the US. In October I travelled through Seattle, Portland and San Francisco…
Seattle passed in a blur of dancing and dubstep. Syncopated bass in my hostel dorm room, carefully applying eye liner, hair in bunches, tapping parts of my body to the dissonant beat. It’s lunchtime and I’m getting ready to go to a boat party, where I will dance for 3 hours while cruising around Lake Washington. Continue reading “Fall in the Pacific Northwest: On the Road in 2012”
Two Tuesdays ago, after work. With temperatures once again sinking below minus 10 I wrap my scarf around my head three times, add an extra pair of socks and carry my bike down 3 flights of stairs (my apartment’s bike stands are cluttered full of half bikes, skeletons left from opportunistic robbers).
I’m in the middle of the moonlit Pacific Ocean, about 6 hours from Auckland, another 6 to Vancouver. We’re at the level of the clouds, looming silvery and puffy over a calm sea. From my rectangle window I see the plane wing, blinking and illuminating the Air New Zealand koru in 2 second blips. I see stars, glowing and endless, galaxies spinning away from me, time and matter rippling and bursting and dying and all we see is their light, centuries later. Continue reading “We’re all going to die and that’s certain.”
Last week, the Ontario Legislature Select Committee on Sexual Violence and Harassment issued their final report. It is a comprehensive, well-written document, an absorbing hours read (if you find policy absorbing) and makes some solid recommendations. You can read it – with all 67 recommendations – here. Continue reading “Rape, politics and policy”
Once a month I offer “Yoga for Sex” workshops at the University of Toronto Sexual Education Centre. I refer to ‘yoga’ in the most holistic of terms: the workshops are about presence, connection, bodies and breath. I often get asked what the workshops contain. Here’s the short version.
But here’s the low down, of what actually happens during those two hours… Continue reading “What is Yoga for Sex? What is it I actually do?”
