My Philosophy

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.

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

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. Life retrofit (like earthquake retrofit).

4. Auto-immune illness (self-not self issue)

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

On Sexiness ::

1. Don’t aim for “sexy” (on stage or off). Full Presence includes sexy as one note in a gorgeously full scale of many notes. Full Presence and Radiance is what I guide the women to aim for, and it will necessarily include “sexy” along with so much more.

2. I find it’s easy to HIDE behind sexy, and HIDE behind funny and HIDE behind a developed skill. I know it might sound like “what’s left?” If I’m not working my sexy or my funny or my special talent, what on earth am I showcasing? I say to that, you are showcasing the essence of YOU*. The YOU that you probably learned early on in your life, was unacceptable from a primary caregiver, or sibling, or teacher, or friend, or neighborhood or school or town. Just letting us see you, letting yourself be seen WITHOUT distraction, while wearing something that you specifically chose, curated and created, against the backdrop of a song that’s meaningful to you. You can just stand still, or make a single gesture, or shimmy your shoulders lightly, and our mouths will drop open in awe.

* One's essence is the intersection of their most specific, personal self (including their body--with all it's frailty and mortality--and personality and quirks and preferences and talents and proclivities) AND the Source from which we come. It can be called the intersection of humanity and divinity.

If I really see you, I will laugh out loud, or fall silent, or explode into a thousand pieces. ~ Rumi

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. Something about how we can be calm while not knowing, and while in the mess (and make art and make love with it).

9. 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.

6. Mind-body split is NOT a split!

The Six Core Showgirl Awakening Movements ::

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 includes, 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 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. There are 3 steps in the awakening of your Inner Showgirl

The first step is a THAWING
The middle step is CONSCIOUS FORM MAKING
The third step is MELTING, and digesting your world in a way that you choose to, to being nourished and taking what is offered, blending with

8. The importance of being earnest.

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

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

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

12. Anger (pants off); Addict (hit of stage); Life/experience on stage = more of an opportunity & can be a training ground for the off-stage, much more importantly than the reverse

13. Become more self-referenced; respond less

14. The Power of Negative Thinking

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

16. 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!

2. Kuan Yin (aka Awakening Showgirl) holding feminine/masculine (Fertility card)