LMN Ep 13 – It's Good to Be Alive

After months away from the podcast, I’m sharing a story from an art and somatic dance workshop I went to in Da Nang, Vietnam.

What started as movement and drawing exercises turned into something much deeper about the patterns we carry in our bodies, the ways we keep ourselves small, and what it feels like to finally take up space again.

This episode is about expression, inner child healing, creativity, embodiment, and remembering that it’s good to be alive.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to LM Men. I'm Leela Morensi. On this podcast, I speak honestly about what it means to live and love as a woman returning to her feminine essence. Some days it's about sex and polarity. Other days, heartbreak, trust, or the quiet moments of growth in between. This definitely isn't a podcast of polished advice, but more of a space for truth. A space without shame where we explore the deeply human experience of loving without losing ourselves, and the ongoing dance of feminine and masculine within us all. So take a deep breath, drop into your body, and let's begin. Gosh, I have not recorded in months, and honestly, I've been overthinking what I need to record. Do I need to fill them in on everything? But I think I'm just gonna start with something easy. I'm now in Vietnam, and the other day I went to this art and somatic dance workshop. It was super impactful and different than anything I've ever done. The facilitator started the class by guiding us through some somatic movement just to get us into our bodies, and she was saying various parts of our bodies as we were going along, just like what would it feel like for your body to be led by your feet? And then what would it feel like for your body to be led by your knees, and then your hips and your elbows and your hands and your head and every part of the body. And it's it was just interesting to see in myself and in others how different the body moved. Um, and it was cool to be in a space where you could just experiment looking like an idiot and just experimenting with yeah, different movements in our bodies. So that felt really nice. After that, she had us sit down, close our eyes, and think of a pattern that we had in our lives that kept on repeating. And it didn't have to be the deepest, darkest moment of our life or the most secret, shameful pattern that we have, but just something that we felt was recurring. What I ended up choosing was the fact that for much of my life I've had this pattern of keeping myself small and kind of staying on the periphery of my own life, you know, playing it small, not speaking too loudly, being that good girl, not being noticed too much. And that's a pattern that I'm ready to let go of. So that's what I chose. Once we had our pattern, she asked us to dance or move in a way that shared how we felt in our bodies with that pattern. What ended up flowing through me was I was on the floor, mostly curled up into a ball close to the side of the room, just kind of trying to move one limb out and then bringing it back in, and then like trying to get big, but like nope, curling back into a ball because it's too scary to be seen and to take up space. So that's kind of how I moved. And it was really interesting to watch other people, like we were, of course, all in our own process, but to see other people how they were moving because we hadn't shared what our patterns were with the group, and nobody was prancing around the room, nobody seemed joyful, obviously, but it was all just kind of this slow contracted movement. When we were done doing that for a certain amount of minutes, she brought out some paper and some crayons. She asked us to draw this pattern and the movement we'd just done and how that felt in our bodies. The room was kind of dark, so I just picked the darkest colors I could find, and I ended up with two different shades of dark purple and a black. I was drawing pretty much just on the outside, like the border of my paper, as if I was making a frame on the white paper. And I was drawing kind of like scribbles, some certain things that kind of look like a like a skyline with some almost like skyscrapers or like mountains, and sometimes there were things that look like waves, but that kind of dipped back into the frame of the edge. And most of it when it was purple, I like outlined it with black, as in that symbolized to me the fact that even if there is a little bit of color or a little bit of movement, it's it's being const constrained. That's a weird word. Is that a word? Yeah, just contained, constraint, constrained, definitely not a word. Okay, but this black line was keeping the movement that wanted to happen from happening. We did that for about five minutes, and then she said, Okay, now if you have the power to change this pattern and to get rid of it, or to change it into something else that you want it to be, start doing that to your paper. Start drawing it, or some people were like ripping their paper, some people folded certain parts. And I just felt this urge to fill the entire piece of paper with as much color as I could to take up all of the white space and fill it with color. So I just grabbed this handful of crayons and started scribbling in the middle, and I started tearing up because it reminded me of a time when I was like four years old. My parents used to have this cooking school, and in the evenings these students would come. They were all adults, they would come, they would take the cooking class, and then they would have dinner together. And I remember during these dinners I would get busy with my crayons and my paper, and I would make drawings for everybody that attended. So, in order for me to make sure that I had drawings for everybody, I would take a handful of colorful crayons and I would just scribble a big round thing in the middle of the paper, and that was my drawing. And then when people were leaving, I would hand them the papers and like thank them for coming. I don't know. I just made that last part up. I don't know if I was so much of a a spokesperson back then. But I would give them these drawings, and it reminded me of that because I just like it's like my inner child just wanted to grab all of the crayons at once and put them together and just scribble. So I made this shape in the center of the paper, and then I started filling in the the negative space with like pinks and oranges and yellows and reds, and it turned out to become this rose-looking shape. So I decided to go with it, and I made a rose, and then I created some leaves coming out of it, and then I made other flowers on the other part of the paper, and then some swirls, and then some beautiful blue clouds, and then I started adding random hearts on top of things, and it was like there's no limit. There's no limit. Like nobody's telling me what I can do and what I can't do with my drawing. I get to do what I want. I put a heart right in the middle of the rose because I want to, not because hearts go in the middle of roses. It was just like there was no adult logic in what I was doing, and it was so freeing, so beautiful. I just couldn't get enough. I was just drawing like a mad woman. I took the black crayon and I outlined some of the petals in the rose. That was a reminder for me of like, okay, the patterns exist, and there's this tendency for me to stay small that has played out in my life. But I don't need to get rid of that shadow. I can just outline certain parts of my life to help kind of show me that I am aware that this pattern is there, and I get to choose that I want color in my life, and I get to choose that I get to take up as much space as I want to. That's all on me. You know, no one is trying to keep me small other than myself. So it was just this really fun exercise. After we were done drawing, it was probably like another five or seven minutes. She had us stand up, she put music back on, and she said, Now dance where the liberation of the pattern is. Everyone was lit up and fun, and I just decided to take up as much space as I could with my body and stretching my arms and my limbs and twirling around like a little girl, running around the room and trying to fill the room as much as I could, just like I'd filled my paper with the color. And it felt so joyful and so wonderful. After that, we shared a little bit with a partner of what we'd drawn and how we danced and how we felt, and then we spent a good seven minutes with some really pump-up music just shaking the crap out of everything in our bodies, which shaking is such a cathartic release for the body, and it was wonderful. I don't think I've ever done that for that long. It felt like a really long time. Uh, but it was just such a wonderful way to become aware of something that's present kind of in the background, bringing it to the light, and then expressing it through art. So I wanted to share that, I guess, just for the fun of it. As adults, I feel like we don't have enough of these opportunities to bring back our inner child. I don't know if it was just the crayons that lit me up like that, or the drawing, just on the floor, you know, I was just on my belly, just drawing, and I I never really do that anymore. If I'm painting or if I'm drawing, I'm usually on a desk. So it was just this different way to shed light onto something that we have the power to change. I guess I'd like to invite you to try that maybe. Just setting like 15 minutes of time aside and dancing or like thinking of the pattern that you have in your life that's recurring, and then dancing what that feels like, and then drawing it. And then continuing the drawing knowing that you could change that, and what would your life look like if you could change that and dancing that that freedom and feeling that liberation from that pattern. Anyway, it was really fun for me to do that, and fun for me to share it with you. I'm excited to record more of these because uh so much is shifting in my life that I'm so excited about. It's good to be alive. Thank you for listening.