The most compelling part of burlesque for me is to make the soul and spirit visible via the body.

To make the mind, the heart, the body (the animal self), the soul and the spirit all visible via the body. And to carry and exude that presence and visible essence into all of life.

There are three secrets to creating and performing a satisfying burlesque act:
Reveling, Revealing and Receiving.

Wrap the notions in this premise around you like a blanket. Marinate in them like they were the most delicious, exquisite vinaigrette. If you lived by these notions, and these notions only, you would live very, very well.

There are a lot of ways that a burlesque routine can be compelling or unremarkable. Why do some routines work while others don’t? I know that many people focus on the “Three Cs” of Choreography, Costuming and Concept (3Cs throughout this book). But I’ve seen many performances that were a solid 10/10 on all 3Cs and yet left the audience bored, daydreaming or somehow disengaged. So what’s really at the root of performances that fall flat, or that leave the performer feeling “off” even if the audience responded just as they’d dreamed?

It’s the absence of Reveling, Revealing and Receiving. Once you engage the “Three Rs” – REVELING in your Body, REVEALING your Radiant Essence, and RECEIVING what you Desire (3Rs throughout this book) – the 3Cs will shine to their fullest. However, without the 3Rs, no amount of innovative choreography, ornate costuming, or clever concept will be enough. When you really understand these three keys (that are the 3Rs), your performances will come alive in a way you never imagined possible.

In order to best understand the 3Rs, it is helpful to understand what they are NOT.

 
 

When you mimic movements that you've learned will make you look “good” or “sexy” you are trying on someone else’s “good” or “sexy.”

Reveling in your body is what happens when you are fully present and confident, regardless of what you’re wearing or how you’re moving. Reveling is when you are present in the very center of yourself. Instead of making an exaggerated pin-up inspired facial expression, you might be standing center stage taking a deep breath with a neutral gaze to arrive fully in your body. Instead of strutting in stiletto heels in a prescribed way that you learned is “sexy,” you might choose to be barefoot – or to wear combat boots or tennis shoes – if you feel more “in your own skin.”

Whatever you are wearing or however you are moving, when you’re reveling, you are aware of all that you are sensing physically and feeling emotionally. When you’re reveling you are working with your own feelings, your own self, and using that as fuel for your expression.

 
 

Reacting can look like rebellion or submission.

When you are performing as rebellion, you are using your act exclusively as a way of being outrageous for outrageousness’ sake. You’re expressing what you are not, who you are not, and maybe even who you are flipping off, instead of expressing who you ARE. By submission, I mean you are on stage to be pretty or funny, to fit in with what you think will give you acceptance; to simply entertain an audience. You’re essentially wearing a mask.

Revealing happens when you are radiantly coming alive, full of vitality, truly expressing yourself. Revealing happens when you have transcended your need either to push against, or succumb to whatever personal, familial, social, cultural, ancestral obstructions exist to you being yourself. We’ve been trained for so long to be pretty and/or funny in order to earn acceptance and praise. When you have had your fill of OMG and WTF at how you’ve been oppressed and not seen and not heard and not mirrored and not appreciated, instead of calcifying in anger about it all, or drowning in grief and powerless surrender, you take the time and care to choose what you would like to create with your life.

In this case, you are revealing through the creation of your burlesque solo. You use your solo to create a template for the life you choose to live, and to inspire others from your very example.

 
 

When you are moving constantly, with an absence of stillness you’re actually blocking connection with your audience and with yourself.

When you incorporate enough alive stillness (by alive, I mean you continue to breathe) in your performance you are allowing yourself to both deepen your tangible presence and the possibility of giving and receiving between you and your audience. Before someone has even shown me their act for review, I can be 95% sure that if I could only give one piece of feedback, it would be to do LESS. To move less. To take more time with the chosen movements.

You don’t need to do much on stage to completely captivate an audience. Or perhaps, said more truthfully, doing less on stage, when you are present in your body, is far more effective for both you and your lucky audience to receive the impact of your existence.

 Blending the 3Cs and the 3Rs

So, you have the Three Cs of Choreography, Costuming and Concept (3Cs). And you have the Three Rs of Reveling in your Body, Revealing your Radiant Essence and Receiving what you Desire (3Rs).

How do they relate?

I believe that the 3Cs must be in service to the 3Rs. If it’s the other way around, there is no life in your act.

  • The 3Cs are the lightbulb and the 3Rs are the electricity that moves through it.

  • The 3Cs are the windmill and the 3Rs are the wind that move the blades.

  • The Three Cs are the ego and the 3Rs are the soul.

 Recapping The Three Keys

The first key is Reveling in your Body. This means being aware of all your sensations: physical, emotional, spiritual. It means choosing to move in a way that expresses what you wish to express – what brings you pleasure. Not faking it. Being in your senses. Embodying *you*.

Key two is Revealing your Radiant Essence. Now that you’re in the center of yourself, feeling yourself so exquisitely, you won’t be so tempted to look outside to see what you think others want to see in you. You’ll just naturally be beaming your stardust essence. It won’t be calculated. Your gift will be your presence, granted simply by your visibility, your consent to us truly seeing you. And it’s so much safer on many levels to offer your presence when you’re grounded in yourself, rather than mimicking.

The third key is Receiving what you Desire. Once you’re allowing yourself – and any other lucky witnesses – to truly see you, you have set yourself up to be nourished by that gaze. It helps immensely to slow down, at least for moments, to drink in the gaze … whether it’s your own internal gaze, or that of others. A deep breath here and there also goes a long way in increasing your receptiveness. 

Oh, and yes, if you’re wondering: everything I share about creating a satisfying burlesque act also applies to living a deeply satisfying life.

What prevents us, in the first place, from Reveling in our Bodies, Revealing our Radiant Essences and Receiving what we truly desire? 

The answer: trauma.

 
 

When we think of trauma, most often we’re consciously referencing boom boom trauma, rather than drip drip trauma. These terms beg definition:

  • Boom Boom Trauma is when something happens that has a date and a location. For example, my house burned down on April 2, 1992, in Seattle. Or, I was sexually assaulted on the, on the 19 of December, 2001 in Santa Rosa (both made up). It’s clear. Life was one way, something happened, and life was noticeably different afterwards. That’s boom boom.

  • Drip Drip Trauma is when every second of every day, it’s not safe to BE you. It’s very hard to track because it’s the whole forest that doesn’t see you. It’s very hard to put your finger on. It sends me, it sends us, into this really trance-y area. But it’s the trance that we don’t know we are in until we leave it. Until then, we can’t see how UNSEEN we are. 

How do our instincts become injured in this way that prevents us from seeing how unseen we are? From unacknowledged, unintegrated, untransmuted generational trauma and dis-ease/disease. 

When babies are born they love their parents – and all their ancestors, regardless of whether they know their names or not, including the most scoundrelly of them. Children tend to be the clearing house for all the pain, loss, suffering, longing, grief, terror, rage, loneliness, hopelessness, censorship and despair of those who they come from, those who came before them. And guess what the success rate is of that mission? Zero, that’s right: Zilch.


Babies have a choice: try to win a sure-to-lose battle to soothe and relieve their parents’ and ancestors’ above named medley of agony or claim their birthright to live as a fully expressed human. When we’re focused on option A – which at first we all are – we tie our hands from realizing option B. When we move towards Option B, which involves individuating not only from our immediate family, but also individuating from our ancestral lineage, it ironically is the only way we can truly honor those very ancestors and take what they have given us: Life. 

All humans have the authority, capability and right to live in rapport with Life, to fully experience and express their radiant, never-to-be-repeated, stardust essence living in a body. Claiming our right to exist and right to need is a guilty state, and we so desire to be innocent. It’s only by accepting the guilty state of existing, of needing and of desiring and living into our vision for ourselves that we ironically do honor our ancestors and honor Life.

What does creating a burlesque solo from the inside out have to do with healing intergenerational trauma? Everything. It’s one avenue, one practice that I know from my own experience and that of my mentees over the last two decades, that can provide this elusive marriage of Full Human Self Expression and Freedom, with Safety and Belonging. Being seen and mirrored on our own terms by those capable of seeing us is a key element in this movement.

We begin to recognize that we do not die when we allow someone else to see our Radiant Essence, and we can allow even more of ourselves to show up.

 
 

Your body remembers the shame it experienced when you were shunned at five or fifteen when you gleefully showed your belly to the neighborhood on a sunny day.


Your body also remembers the pain it’s trying to compost for your whole family line and the whole world. But your body also remembers who you are in your fullness. Our bodies are living blueprints of our stardust essence. And they become dis-eased and diseased when we don’t express our full nature. This dis-ease can express as autoimmune illness, as the body fighting itself. It can also express as allergies, as addictions, as insecure attachment and as thought, mood or eating “disorders.”

This is especially true for highly sensitive persons, who are even more acutely, explicitly and specifically aware of feeling the pain of their families, both living and deceased, and the pain of all humans, both living and deceased. Our sensitive bodies feel and sense EVERYTHING. Discerning our own sensations, emotions and experience as distinct from others is key to creating from the inside out.

 A Note About Previous Performance Experience

This method for creating a burlesque solo is appropriate for a person with any level of dance or performance experience: from complete novice to very experienced. If you have a background in the performing arts, be aware that you have more to unlearn than those who are newer to the stage. Professionally trained dancers and performing artists most often have honed the skill of discerning and delivering what is expected of them, by an audience or a director. In this approach to performance creation, the choice of the performer is paramount. How you choose to feel and how you track that you are experiencing that, is key. You’re honing homemade agency, self-sourced sovereignty, your very own secret sauce in action!

You don’t need to spend weeks, months or years learning “how to dance burlesque.” You simply need to be present in your body, feel what you feel, show what you want to show and let your lucky audience adore you ... on your terms, of course. The movements I share in Step 1 go a long way in facilitating just that. Burlesque from the Inside Out is about being seen on your own terms. 

The presupposition is that your inner showgirl already exists, even if neither you nor others have seen much of her yet. For all of us who use the Burlesque from the Inside Out (BIO) process, we are experimenting with an expression onstage that may or may not yet match our outer expression the rest of the time. We seek to find our most expansive selves on stage so that we may live from that space in all the moments of our daily lives.

My definition of an Awakening Showgirl – which is who you are when you create a burlesque solo from the inside out – is this:

In mainstream burlesque, the reveal gets the focus, but BIO is focused on revealing your Radiant Essence.

You may now be thinking “Super duper! So, how do I do that?”

I describe the 13 Steps for creating an act that feels like that in my book, How To Create a Burlesque Solo … From the Inside Out.

 On Spirituality:

  1. Whatever created us, whatever spark, whatever source we come from, I believe created us into this form so that it can experience itself in a body. 

  2. The point is not to transcend human form.  We’re here for a very short time.  It’s to be here, in our gorgeous not knowing, just having glimpses of eternity.  We’re here to revel in our bodies. 

  3. Immanence, not Transcendence, is the journey of the Awakening Showgirl; It’s through feeling all the feelings and the hungers and the specificities of being a spirit in a body that we awaken, not by distancing ourselves from the mess and needs and delights of our 5 embodied senses.

  4. The marriage of Attention & Intention is Magic; aim for clarity about what you’d like to feel/experience & take note of what you are feeling/experiencing now & what you’d like to feel & experience; lovingly redirect your attention to the latter, while acknowledging lovingly the former.

  5. Magic (My Will) & Mysticism (The Will of Source/From whence we come) marry in Mystery (our Essence); The sweet spot where we say Yes to ourselves completely is exactly where we say Yes to Life completely.  They are not at odds.  They are in cahoots, and our Essence is waiting patiently for us to catch up to this truth.

  6. Joy of Aliveness can coexist with every human experience and feeling possible (and can be conjured using conscious physicality).

  7. Our bodies are the site for the marriage of Heaven & Earth.  

  8. As I experience more and more of my I AM, I experience more and more of the Great I AM, more and more of *both* my individuality *and* my divinity at once.

  9. Who is the I AM??  We answer this question by living, and the answer never completes.

 On The Struggles Women Come to Me With:

  1. Most women have a lack of self awareness of how much they edit out.

  2. What you say Yes to, you include in your experience & what you say No to, you also include in your experience.

  3. When the Right to need is impaired, desiring feels really dangerous.

 On The Showgirl Awakening Work:

  1. Burlesque can be performed as a ritual to re-member oneself, to come home to the body.

  2. The same principles and spirit you use to create a burlesque solo act, you can lovingly use to create a beautiful life.

  3. Receiving Full Attention from another, who wants nothing more than to apprehend you, to behold you, to recognize you is a High Gift, for both the viewer/attender and the viewee/attended.

  4. Shamans were the first rockstars, and we get a taste of the BEST of that through SGA performance...not the addicted, dissociated, overly inflated or overly collapsed rockstar scenario, rather the exquisitely aware of her wholeness, her radiance, her expressing of all-that-is in one gorgeous extension of her arm, shimmy of her bum, sign through her luscious lips.

  5. I believe the the Awakening Showgirl state is what naturally occurs when we end the war with ourselves.

  6. Showgirl Awakening work lives at the intersection of Art, Spirit & Psyche.

  7. The beauty is IN the mess.  We’ve been taught to clean up messes, and to figure everything out.  Not figuring it all out, rather making a choice and allowing the Life/Mystery full berth to respond, and taking the response.  We’re not here to figure everything out.  We’re here to get really good at making choices.  And take what we get.  That’s our art of the moment.  And then we get to make a new choice!

  8. Beauty is an expression of life’s longing for itself.

 On Movement and Our Bodies:

  1. Your body is wise beyond measure (trust her).

  2. Movement unlocks your wisdom & makes it accessible to you.

  3. Movement is medicine. We can use conscious movement as medicine.

  4. To access Presence with most ease & satisfaction, use both stillness and movement consciously.  Sometimes more stillness will be the key for presence, and sometimes more movement.  Depends on the state at hand.  Often, it’s a dynamic mixture of both.

  5. Full belly-swelling breathing invites & ignites Radiance.

The Six Core Showgirl Awakening Movements

{ For videos showcasing these movements, explore them here }

1.  The medicine of the Shimmy (shoulder shimmies, butt shimmies, jazz hands) includes, but is not limited to ::

  •  gently sloughing off what no longer serves you

  •  activating your person print, which is the vibration that lives in dual columns of light in the very center of your body, one that reaches both from the center of the earth up to the heavens beyond where the eye can see, and the other that reaches from the heavens through the center of your body to the center of the earth.  When activated, through shimmying, this “person print” of you (very similar to a fingerprint), expands to fill up more space (to fill a room, or a city, or even a country)

2. The medicine of Shaking (aka Bouncing) includes, but is not limited to ::

  • Resolutely shaking off whatever is weighing you down (old feelings, others’ feelings, old thoughts, others’ thoughts, any story or experience of one’s own that is perseverating or any story or experience of another that is taken on as one’s own, consciously or unconsciously

  • Sourcing Joy from the earth, up into the body


3. The medicine of Circling (making circles with parts, or all of, your body) includes, but is not limited to ::

  • Magnetizing--or attracting--what you desire to you

  • Softening

  • Hypnotizing (hipsnotizing...HA!)

4. The medicine of Twisting includes, but is not limited to ::

  • Integrating the left and right hemispheres; integrating the Feminine & the Macsuline

5. The medicine of Extensions included, but is not limited to ::

  • Giving and Receiving; Revealing oneself; Extending oneself

6.  The medicine of Stillness (the mother of all movement) includes, but is not limited to ::

  • Integrating the medicine of all the movements that came before it

 On Transformation:

  1. Fixing is overrated.  Acknowledging is underrated.

  2. Shifting the focus from fixing to creating is key.

  3. There is nothing we need to overcome in order to blossom into the version of ourselves we dream of expressing and experiencing.  Through accepting and even appreciating that what we are experiencing now *is* the desired state of a past version of us, we can stop trying to overcome ourselves, and allow ourselves to continue to choose, take what we get and choose again.

  4. Just asking ourselves what we would like begins to change our experience.

  5. You couldn’t even imagine an experience you desire having if it wasn’t somehow already on your map.

  6. We are lacking the feminine equivalent of the martial arts ::  it’s time to invent/reinvent the venusian arts!

  7. Importance of the Right to Need and to Want (to ask what would you like presupposes this right is intact)

  8. To know what you believe, just look at your experience .

  9. Chronic vs Acute (health); Developmental vs Event (trauma); Urgent vs.Important / Essential / Foundational (business)

  10. Become more self-referenced; respond less

  11. If you can feel it, you can heal it (and have fun creating with it!

  12. We are always doing our best.  We are always choosing the best possible experience on our menus, it’s just that our menus need expanding.

 On Masculine and Feminine Energies:

  1. When we do Feminine as Masculine and Masculine as Feminine (which happens often!) it doesn’t work!