Mardi Gras as Embodied Ritual and Upcoming Lent Movement Series

I’ll keep it brief, as here in New Orleans we are letting our normal lives drop away and giving over to the spirit of the Mardi Gras season. 

After the celebration settles, I am hosting a 6 week Lent Movement Sustainability series, starting Wednesday February 25th, 8 PT/10 CT. You can sign up here. 

The last few weeks in class, we have been working on holding complexity and pendulating between different experiences. Fast and slow, inner and outer awareness, tension and release, imaginative tasks and more anatomical task.

I feel that tension now, balancing the pain of the world and the joy of community, all the tasks that need to get done, and the giving over of my normal commitments to a ritual that sustains me and my community. All the work will be there on the other side. 

The depths of Mardi Gras season is an opportunity to enter into a different realm of existence that hinges on community, creativity, and nourishing the collective spirit. It shows that many things are always happening at once. It is often said on Mardi Gras Day, "Everywhere else it’s just another Tuesday”, which is to say, there are so many different ways to experience and live a day. There is multiplicity in a human existence. That alongside horror there is always also power, joy, community and care. 

Carnival season, movement, music, celebration, embodiment. Age old rituals from around the world that give us a new perspective and allow us to try on a different orientation to life and restore a part of our spirit for the rest of the year and all that may come our way.

This weekend, I will be dancing in the streets, hugging friends and strangers, letting my rational brain fall away into a collective experience of the celebration of life. May it serve as a breath of restoration to all who partake.

After Mardi Gras, I will meet you all in the virtual and in person studio space: to feel, to move, to come back into ourselves, and to continue remembering who we are, and how many possible ways there are to be in a body and in the world. We are all improvising. Practicing on the dance floor helps us remember that, and to keep trying new ways, again and again.

Hope you find some sparkle this weekend, in big or small ways. 

Willa