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Tag: Creativity

My Creative Morning Ritual

My daily ritual has grown to include practices that facilitate physical, mental, and spiritual well being and abundant creativity. When I complete these actions on a daily basis, I develop clarity and momentum, feel inspired and strong, experience less pain, and am able to coach, dance, teach, write, and engage with ideas and people in a well-grounded and present way.

Getting Good & Grounded: Creating a Solid Foundation for Yoga, Dance, & Life

Do you ever feel distracted, floaty, overwhelmed, or disconnected? Creating a stable, grounded, foundation is the first step in building a supportive yoga practice, dancing posture, and well-designed yet flexible life.

Healing Trauma & Ageless Living through Yoga & Somatics with Agi Fry

An interview with one of my most influential yoga teachers and friend Agi Fry, creator of Agi Ageless Living: we talk about what brought Agi to yoga, her lineage of teachers and connection to yoga philosophy, using it as a tool to balance the nervous system, relax, and heal, student-centered pedagogy, bringing things forth from the inside rather than putting them “on”, recovering from pain and trauma, her flight from the Hungarian revolution as a child, balancing multiple responsibilities and interests, bucket lists, and more.

Humor and Wisdom from the Multi-Passionate Dancing Life of Matthew Donnell

A delightful conversation with fellow dance educator and UNCSA alumnus as well as super-talented and wonderful guy, Matthew Donnell! We talk about the highs and lows of being a multi-passionate jack-of-all-trades, his highlights as a professional ballet dancer, how to fall down and get back up again, the importance of révérence, character dance, and technique variety in ballet training, developing character in dancers and human beings, serving our communities, helping dancers find their voice, and assert that all people are valuable!

Learning from Mistakes & Failure

“Do not fear mistakes–there are none.” – Miles Davis

The research-based book on learning, Make it Stick, blew my mind a bit during my teacher credential program, especially finding out that the difficulty of recalling new information correctly correlates to the depth of the learning. That means the more I struggle to remember German words, as long as I try hard, keep practicing, and get corrections when I can, the more permanent and retrievable that information will be in the future.

Struggle and failure are inherent to learning, creativity, and dancing, so we would do well to learn to approach them with compassion.

Rest & Recovery Rocks My World

In addition to stressing the importance of making time (and patience) for ballet practice, in her book The Ballet Companion, Eliza Gaynor Minden recommends that aspiring dancers also “make time for rest,” specifically stating that “Professional dancers generally take one day off a week. Allow yourself at least this much rest. Your body needs it.” (The Ballet Companion p.15)
Of course, this recommended minimum applies not only to dancers but to all humans! Life Coach Talane Meidaner insists that, “You need a day to do whatever you want with no plans, no list of things to do, no scheduled brunches, no lunches–a day to be totally free and spontaneous, to rest, to play, to honor your spiritual self.” (Coach Yourself to Success p.216)
Here I am exploring the importance of time off and ways to build it into our lives.

Adaptive Adult Summer Dance Intensive, Week 3

During July, I am sharing a fully adaptable “Summer Dance Intensive” program to develop body and mind for those who would like to be immersed in dance or yoga and don’t have the chance to attend such a workshop in-person. The suggested free sequences can provide a complement or bridge to online or in-studio practice. You can tailor the program to your needs, with anywhere from 5 minutes to 5 hours per day!

10 Lessons from 1 Year as a Creator

My path to becoming a “Creator” As I was taking a look at my results and learnings from my time as an online creator, I asked Ela, my girlfriend who is a graphic designer, owner of design firm Pixelchen und Karton and creator of my website, if we could take a look at my Google […]

Approaches to Space: Qualities of Focus in Dance & Life

What qualities of focus are required to be a creative and effective person? How do dancers attend to the space within and around them, using focus to direct the viewer’s attention and to give shape to their environment? Let’s start with four haiku poems I wrote to distill qualities of focus as introduction to the […]

Artful Archiving, Paper Purging, & Minsgame March

As I mentioned in the “My Minimalism Memoir” Blog and Podcast 041, having first played in 2019 in preparation to move to Cologne, I played the 30-Day Minimalist Game (or “Minsgame”) again this March, in order to curb encroaching clutter so that I have more space for what is most important. Now this round of […]

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