Jennifer Louden is known as “The Comfort Queen” and featured on many globally recognised TV shows, including Oprah, with over 800,000 copies of her first book sold internationally. She is the world's leading authority on carving out the time and desire to look after your own well being and hence achieve more with less stress despite having a very busy life.
That's really the question we're all trying to answer, isn't it?Personally. Globally. In our daily choices. In our search for work that fits us. In our efforts for grow our businesses in sustainable ways.
Another way of asking this question is, "How can I live in a way that doesn't continually deplete me?" Perhaps a less positive take but it works better for me because it's more targeted to my challenge.
Thinking about this question on Sunday, I read Barbara Ehrenreich editorial in New York Times on the laws restricting dance clubs in Manhattan. Her newest book is Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, Here are a few quotes:
"The Greeks danced to worship their gods — especially Dionysus, the god of ecstasy. But then the far more strait-laced Romans cracked down viciously on Dionysian worship in 186 B.C., even going on to ban dancing schools for Roman children a few decades later. The early Christians incorporated dance into their liturgy, despite church leaders’ worries about immodesty. But at the end of the fourth century, the archbishop of Constantinople issued the stern pronouncement: 'For where there is a dance, there is also the Devil.'
"The Catholic Church did not succeed in prohibiting dancing within churches until the late Middle Ages, and in doing so perhaps inadvertently set off the dance “manias” that swept Belgium, Germany and Italy starting in the 14th century. Long attributed to some form of toxin — ergot or spider venom — the manias drove thousands of people to the streets day and night, mocking and menacing the priests who tried to stop them.
"...hardly anyone talks about what is lost when the music stops and the traditional venues close... in some cultures, ecstatic dance has been routinely employed as a cure for emotional disorders. Banning dancing may not cause depression, but it removes an ancient cure for it.
"The need for public, celebratory dance seems to be hardwired into us. Rock art from around the world depicts stick figures dancing in lines and circles at least as far back as 10,000 years ago. According to some anthropologists, dance helped bond prehistoric people together in the large groups that were necessary for collective defense against marauding predators, both animals and human. While language also serves to forge community, it doesn’t come close to possessing the emotional urgency of dance. Without dance, we risk loneliness and anomie.
"Dancing to music is not only mood-lifting and community-building; it’s also a uniquely human capability. No other animals, not even chimpanzees, can keep together in time to music. Yes, we can live without it, as most of us do most of the time, but why not reclaim our distinctively human heritage as creatures who can generate our own communal pleasures out of music and dance?"
Why not indeed? To create a sustainable life requires being in our bodies-- alone and in community: having fun, playing, even experiencing ecstasy together. I believe we need ecstasy, and a powerful doorway to that ecstasy is movement--of course, so is drugs and a lot of beer, but those aren't as sustainable.
Thoughts on how you have or would love to dance in the streets?