A look behind the scenes

Today, you get a behind-the-scenes look at some resources that have made a big difference in my own search for joy and healing.

I’ve been working on clarifying my mission and my messaging and one of the things that I started doing, as you might have noticed, is incorporating body liberation and become more body-inclusive in my work, which includes finding how what I’m already doing fits in the body liberation framework, as well as coming up with new ways that I can use my skills and talents to address that issue like in my Embodied Acceptance work.

My two main reference resources in my own body liberation process have been the Intuitive Eating and Health at Every Size (HAES) frameworks. Both of these include Joyful Movement as a guiding principle. 

Joyful Movement in these frameworks means moving our bodies because we want to rather than because we need to reach some external goal, like burning calories or sculpting our bodies and finding ways to do it in ways that feel good to us. 

Or as the authors of Intuitive Eating put it:

“Rather than focusing on fitness targets (like frequency and duration), a growing body of research shows that focusing on pleasure from exercise might be one of the most important factors in sustaining consistent activity”.

When I read the chapter that talks about joyful movement in the book I thought to myself, “well isn’t that what we’ve been doing in Shake Your Soul® all along”? 

If you’ve been with me long enough, you’ve probably seen different iterations of the Shake Your Soul® tagline.

I always thought that it would be good to come up with a tagline that captures the essence of SYS. And while I want to keep giving credit to Dan Leven’s creation (Dan developed and founded SYS) I also want to find a phrase that captures its essence right away.

The title that I came up with is:

Joyful Movement for Every Body. 

I already explained why “Joyful Movement”. As for the “Every Body”, I think it addresses the idea that this class is suitable for every kind of body, every fitness level, and every experience level in terms of movement or dance.

So my question to you is three-fold: what do you think of this tagline?  Would you use it to describe SYS to your friends? Is there a better tagline that you would suggest?  

I look forward to hearing back from you and I hope to see you in the virtual studio for some more Joyful Movement next week.