I was participating in a paired student lesson. I had arranged my body into a specific stretch. I was aware of muscular sensation, then this picture came into my head. It was a parrot on the handle bars of a bicycle. I shared the picture with my partner. As the words came out of my mouth, I knew!

I had been peddling out parroted answers all my life.

• I had abdicated space, saying and doing what was expected of me

• I had lived like a chameleon, being one thing with one and another thing all together someplace else

• I had dissociated from my body (heck, even my. mind) to get through moments, days, weeks, months, years

• I forfeited my agency and autonomy, making decisions to please as to not cause strife

• I lived in and with fear, keeping secrets, terrified, tolerating life, desperate to survive and belong

• I was like congealed fog, a messed up whisper stumbling through life making every attempt to just catch the next breath

We Don’t Talk Enough about Mental Health AND We NEED To!

• I was smart enough to know what was expected of me

• I didn’t want to “ruin” my future, so I just kept pushing forward (until I couldn’t)

• I was highly successful academically (until I wasn’t), one semester 3.9 and then the next one, withdrawing before the failing grades could count. I couldn’t string together enough days of health and focus as hard as I tried.

WHY??? Why don’t we talk more about Mental Health?

• Shame

• Fear

• Embarrassment

• Isolation

• Insecurity

• _______________ (fill in the blank) Why do you keep silent?

WHAT? What’s next?

Discovering and Exploring your own Expression and Expanding into it takes time, learning how to find the soles of your feet underneath you and the ground underneath the soles of your feet takes time. Finding space to understand that you are a person and in your personhood you inhabit a body and in inhabiting that body, you take up space. Learning how to take up space AND not play small is the journey of a lifetime for all of us. It can be done. ONE step at a time, ONE longer breath, ONE moment of conscious awareness pieced together with another and another and another.

• Stand

• Bring the soles of your feet hips distance apart

• Roll your shoulders down your back

• Lift up intentionally through the top of your head

• BREATHE

  THAT is YOUR FIRST STEP… Intentionally bring your body into space, lengthen breath and take the next step