Well, I am a little late sending this out, and all the insane astrology moments have passed and I guess thats why I call this dead diary. I'll give myself a break because Mercury is still retrograde (until July 31) and astrology lets me blame my worst qualities on the planets. But really I've bottomed out ~ all of a sudden taking pottery classes, researching gong stands and guzzling down tart cherry juice: all activities signaling an identity crisis. I was also recently invited to a dance class, where a choreographer teaches you a complicated dance that you do over and over again. This is where I endured a mini panic attack, over and over again ~ having great difficulty in coordinating myself, I realized how far away I have gotten from the intelligence of my body.

This hit me especially hard because as a teenager, when I wasn't being anesthetized by cereal and tv, I was manically dancing. Stowing away in my room like a festive cave monk devoted to movement sequences ~ I would emerge days later to share these dances with my friends. In this way, for many years I wanted to be a choreographer. This didn't gain traction, in part because I grew obsessions for other types of creative outlets (like emo music) and collapsed my shoulders into thinking. I might also assign it to the horrors of bullying or being a woman in society ~ but in any case, here I sit, hunched over a computer and negligent from the neck down. So you wonder, as it is common for most of us who don't end up being professional dancers, where did the substantial connection to that mind-body freedom go?

This recent eclipse season has exposed the distractions that keep us from our essential parts. Where have we gone off track or denied ourselves? Where do we give our authority away to others? In a way, this dance class I took was so frustrating because my body was made to follow someone else's rules. We are going all the way back, to the beginning, peeling away at old psychological layers to gain autonomy over our bliss.

It reminds me of the Jewish new year Tashlikh ceremony, where you go to the river to throw bread chunks into the water, pretending they are parts of yourself you want to be rid of. We are enduring the type of growth that comes from having less, not adding on more ~ subtracting the materials, the people, the thoughts that no longer nourish us. If it doesn't make you groove, give it away.