In an attempt to understand the many ways we experience and handle trauma, this winter quarter I will be focusing on how people in Thurston county can interact with stress and trauma through real food, kefir, and dance.
I will volunteer at the Thurston County Food Bank and participate in a local food campaign for the South Puget Sound area to gain an understanding about food access. I will do research on the history of the fermented beverage kefir and learn how to make two versions of it: dairy and water. I will participate in a multi-media, butoh inspired dance performance that ask the question how long can we destroy our planet before we destroy ourselves? I will also look into how dance and storytelling have been used to heal trauma.
This is a personal post regarding my health, my experiences, and my updated independent learning contract.
A time for me to open up my mounds in a safe and public space, to share some of the stories that have brought me to this day, March 6th, 2017
I have been experiencing degrees of depression for the last two years. Six months ago was the first time the feeling stayed long enough for me to need to give a name to the feeling so that I could address it, since it was clear that it wanted and needed to stay with me for a while. Six months ago I was also in my first Butoh stage-performance. (I will dive deeper into what Butoh is another time, but for some texture I will offer a brief image of what Butoh is.)
An image from Skin of Scarlet: Sex, Politics, and the Body, the first Butoh performance I participated in
Butoh is a form of dance-theater that was born in Japan. Rising in 1959 through the two original collaborators, Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo.
Known as the dance of death, disease, and darkness, the body moves slow and the goal is not to entertain. The audience is there to witness the performer reflect the parts of humanity that are taboo, silenced, and ignored. The very first Butoh performance revolved around homosexuality, bestiality, and a chicken was suffocated; pretty heavy content for any time period, but especially so for 1959.
“But, what is Butoh?”
It has taken many forms, and the answer and definition could be a controversial topic depending on who you who talk to. Butoh has roots in Japan, but has flourished in many countries since the 1970’s. It transforms and always will, and today, Butoh encompasses many styles, from the grotesque to the austere, from erotic to comic. It is often regarded as surreal and androgynous, focusing on the human condition and primal expressions rather than physical beauty.
If a friend of mine who has never seen Butoh before, and I went to invite them to experience it, I usually describe it as a per formative mediation, for the performer and the witnesses, on the things we sometimes like to cover up or turn away from.
Opening Scene from Skin of Scarlet: Sex Politics and the Body, the first Butoh stage performance I participated in
Now lets return to six months ago, two weeks before my first staged performance. My beautiful friend Nicholas, a queer latinx man, was murdered after his shift at the hospital he worked at. We still do not know who killed him, or why, but we have our assumptions. After the death of my friend, the weight of his departure and all of the taxing encounters with my own demons, I decided going to a counselor for the first time in my life could possibly be beneficial. Parts of it was, and parts of it was not. I have only gone twice, and I have not met with them again since January.
Every time I have ever prepared for a large scale Butoh performance, my modes of existing completely change. If my consciousness had a face, the hands of Butoh would grab it, and completely morph my head so that my eyes are staring in the opposite direction; directly into my body, forcing me to look at what and who I am. I believe there is a correlation between my experiences with depression and my first time really experiencing Butoh as an art form that I give away to others.
Butoh allows its dancers to feel in ways that are often discarded in our lives because of the logical and reasonable modes that we must be in in order to survive in this modern world. I become so occupied with digging into myself, that almost all of my daily and scholarly tasks began to feel more like obligations instead of nurturing experiences. Communicating in ways other than my body or song began to feel restricting and unfullfilling.
By Week five I had decided to make Butoh and its affects on the body and mind a part of my ILC.
I want to communicate what my fellow dancers and I experience during Butoh. I want to explore the ways we can handle depression and trauma by using our own body and silence as medicine.
Communication through language has been a trip for me the last few months, and I will try my hardest to share these experiences and findings. Thankfully, I am also currently taking a creative writing class with David Wolach, and they are helping me scale along the limitations that I am imaging for my work.
Thank you class mates, thank you body, and thank you Sarah Williams for the patience and support you have given.
What current policies and societal constructs interrupt an individuals opportunity to have access to real food?
Assisting with a Thurston County education and outreach initiative with Aslan Meade
Distributing food at the Thurston County food bank
Interviews with people involved in the Thurston County Food System
E-journal posts
What research has already been done on the mind-gut connection?
How can this knowledge be used to heal people on large scales? What foods support our guts microbiota?
Research and workshops on food as medicine
Reading List:
Gut: The Inside Story of Our Bodies Most Underrated Organ
An Illustrated Guide to Herbs
Oxidative Stress and Digestive Disease by Toshikau Yoshikawa
Learning how to make Kefir
E-journal posts
What research has acknowledged the connection between human health and the ecosystems health?
How does trauma and stress influence digestion? What food, herbs, and beverages can we consume to relieve stress? How can individuals who experience stress, social anxiety, and trauma find relief and release through food and physical activity?
Butoh Performance
Reading List
The Sacred Kitchen, Robertson and Robertson
Ecopsychology, Roszak, Gomes, Kanner, Brown, and Hallman
Nourishing Traditions
Sally Fallon
Nourishing Broth
Sally Fallon
Research and reflective essay on the history of dance/performance and how it has been used to heal and intiate movements
Everything, really. Our bodies are our own private flesh-ships. Our own watery works of art and in a perfect world, they would be our number one reason for living. We’d live to take care and nurture and revive them, never sacrificing them for someone elses benefit or greed. And yet, alas, we are here right now and we will try and do what we can with what we were thrown into. I will digress to go back to my intital point, which is, the body is the center of our human experience. Whether we love our bodies or want to add or subtract parts of it, its all yours for the taking, loving, abusing, and amusing.
Last quarter I took a class called Afro-Brazilian Dance with Janelle Campoverde which changed the way I relate to my body , how my body relates to itself, and the way I see dance as a tool for society.
Every morning when class would begin we would spent the first 45 minutes doing what we casually called “body awareness” practices. We would dim the lights and Janelle would guide us through seemingly simple movements that were often times quite complex due to the amount of muscles or bones that were being used and activated. All of the movements had some sort of benefit to the way our body naturally moves. After doing an exercise on one side, Janelle would invite us to walk around the room, or move our arms back and forth, and experience the difference in the range of motion that was now, suddenly accessible and moving so smoothly. Many of our body awareness exercises revolved around the hips, the back, and the shoulders, as those were the body parts that were moved the most in Afro-Brazilian Dance.
After doing these practices for a few weeks, I began to imagine all of the ways it could be beneficial and the two that came up right away were:
Farm workers-who bend or kneel for eight to ten hours a day
Women who are holding trauma inside of their body from assaults
Individuals who are trying to escape their body to escape their pain
In my project this quarter, I want to explore the ways the body connects to itself, the way the body connects to others, and the way the body connects to the earth. And how all of these connections can aide in the healing process of our bodies, our minds, and our planet.
Dance has been and is a powerful tool in uniting people and empowering all bodies. Similar to the U.S., Brazil was going through social and political heart ache surrounding race and unjust rulers in the 1960’s. In the late 1960’s, music, art, and politics merged into the art movement that is known as Tropicalia. Artists used rhythm and performance art to critique the oppression of the Brazilian dictatorship at the time. This art project spilled over into everyday life, people of all ages were dancing in the streets to communicate, to unite, and to show the government that they weren’t sitting this one out.
This art form opened the doors for other movements, and soon after Tropicalia the Black Consciousness Movement made it way to Brazil in the 1970’s, an organization dedicated to promoting and celebrating Afro-Brazilian culture in Brazil.
Kefir translates to “the feel good beverage.” The word Kefir (kay-fear) is derived from the Turkish word kief which means “pleasure.”
No one knows where or when the kefir grain first appeared. What we do know is that dairy kefir grains originated from the Northern Caucasus Mountains region of the former USSR
This ancient fermented dairy beverage tastes similar to yogurt but has a lot more to offer and the texture is closer to a smoothie.
When you make your own dairy kefir at home, this is how it all begins
These are the kefir “grains.” They are stretchy, sticky, and gooey clumps of living cultures of yeast and lactic acid bacteria. The microorganisms in the grains multiply and ferment the sugars in the milk, turning it into the drink we know and love, kefir. I use raw goats milk. Any animal milk works, milk alternatives can work but the results will not be the same and it will not be as nutritious.
The cultures feast on the milk for 24-48 hours. The length of fermentation depends on the temperature of their home and how sour you want it to taste. The longer they ferment, the more sour it will taste. The cultures like to be in warmer temperatures, from sixty-eight to eighty degrees. If it is cooler than 68, they may need to ferment for longer.
Top Seven Health Benefits:
Fantastic source of many nutrients including protein, calcium, phosphorous, vitamin B12, riboflavin, magnesium, and vitamin D.
It is a powerful probiotic (the bacteria we deem beneficial) that can help with weight management, sugar addictions, mental health, and digestion.
Kefir has been used around the world in relieving candida over growth, chronc fatigue syndrome, A.D.H.D., crhon’s, emphysema, and restoring the inner eco-system after antibiotic therapy
Homemade Kefir can contain up to 60 different strains of probiotics and yeast-yogurt has about five
Restores balance in the gut by colonizing unoccupied bacteria space in your gut, keeping the harmful bacteria moving along
Kefir can improve bone health and lower the risk of osteoporosis–it increase calcium absorption.
It is generally well tolerated by all people, even lactose intolerant. The lactic acid bacteria in fermented dairy foods turn the lactose into lactic acid.
When I say natural nourishment here, I mean it in the most literal way possible: nurturing through the natural world.
Natural World: all of the animals, plants, and all things that are existing in nature and are not made or caused by humans.
Last year I had the opportunity to go to the Eco-Farm conference in Monterrey, California with the Evergreen State College program Ecological Agriculture: Healthy Soil, Healthy People.
Dr. Daphne Miller was the keynote speaker the second night of the conference. Her book Faramcology has initiated a conversation about how the health of the soil can gift our bodies with health and well-being. Miller takes us a few steps beyond “food is medicine” and offers the idea that the farm where the food is grown is what can offer us the real medicine, not just the food. And not only does this nutritious food from this nutritious soil heal us, but being on the farm heals us as well. Miller covers the many aspects of farming and how these aspacets have a direct and powerful impact on our health. From seed choice, soil management, to actually doing the physical labor yourself…they all have the ability to heal us or not. Dr. Miller brings up this idea that farm-to-body is an important relationship and deserves our attention. When we heal the soil, we heal ourselves.
I recently came across a video on Upworthy where a man shared his abusive and isolating experiences in the foster care system as a child and teenager, which eventually led him to becoming a foster parent, and eventually permanent parent to four children with his partner. Their new youngest son was born with fetal alcohol syndrome, and when it was time for him to attend school, the school was calling his dad every day to come and calm him down. Doctors told the couple that being around animals and nature would help their childs frontal lobe develpop, and so the couple decided to buy a farm for their family of six. They lived with pigs, goats, and chickens. The chickens were the animals that the youngest son grew closest too. He was known to always have a chicken in his arms.
Both of these sources really got me thinking about our physical and mental relations to our environment and all of the living creatures that live with us. What does a truly symbiotic relationship between humans and the soil look like? Which microorganisims in the soil do good things when they are inside out bodies? Is eating dirt a good idea? I’ll get back to you about it.
Scientists and doctors have been investing more time and money into researching digestion. The last decade and a half have been exciting times for digestive health in the english-speaking medical world. Eight percent of the American population have diagnosed digestive diseases, six percent have acute episodes of digestive disease, and forty-three percent have intermittent digestive disorders.
Up until fairly recently we were not aware of the guts immense influence on the mind and our immune system.
We are still learning a lot about bacteria in general, and scientists are classifying bacteria as plants. This is why the term gut flora is going around, which isn’t completely accurate yet it quite descriptive. Similar to plants, different bacteria have different characteristics concerning their nutrition, habitat, and level of toxicity.
The scientifically correct terms for the ecosystems of our gut would be microbiota, or “little life,” and microbiome.
Quick facts about the life inside our gut:
Our guts microbiome can weigh up to 4.5 pounds and contains about 100 trillion bacteria.
1 gram of feces contains more bacteria(or remnants of the bacteria life) than there are people on earth.
When something is wrong with the microbiome of our gut, other systems will be negatively impacted. Skewed proportions of certain gut bacterias have been detected in people who experience obesity, malnutrition, nervous diseases, depression, and chronic digestive problems.
Bacteria cracks open indigestible food for us, supplies the gut with energy, manufactures vitamins, breaks down toxins and medications, and trains our immune system to attack violators.
99% of all the microorganisms that live on us or in us are found in the gut.
Our gastrointestinal tract is home to more than 1,000 different bacteria, populations of viruses, yeast, fungi, and other single celled organisms.
Most of the bacteria lives in the large intestine and rectum
If the human body was the planet, our gut would be the forest were all the wildest creatures dwell
Borago OfficinalesMember of the Borageinaccae family
Known as the herb of gladness and burrage
Commonly referred to as Borage or Starflower, this herb has a well established reputation. In almost all historical writings surrounding borage, its power to uplift spirits and dispel gloom never go unnoticed. There is an ancient Latin verse that translates as “I, Borage, bring always gladness” and 17th century English botanist and herbalist John Garard believed ‘the leaves and flowers of borage put in wine make men and women glad and merry and drive away all sadness, dullness, and melancholy.’ Modern herbablists praise borages influence on hormonal activity. Cortisol, the stress hormone, and aldesterone are both supported by the essential fatty acids in the herb. Borage restores vitality in the body and bones and calms the mind. Romans would feed borage to gladiators before their games and crusaders drank borage tea before battles.
In Italy borage is served as a side dish. In the U.S., it is typically found as an herbal supplement in powdered or tincture form. The leaves and bright blue-purple star shaped flowers have a taste similar to cucumbers, making a pleasant addition to salads, soups, cheeses, and beverages and when these plant parts are dried, they make a nutritive tea.
Health benefits of the Borage plant:
Essential fatty acids such as Gamma linolenic acid (GLA). Essential fatty acid deficiencies can affect mood, internal inflammation, and various cellular functionsHigh levels of calcium and iron
Potassium
Zinc
A, B, and C vitamins
Restores adrenal glands to their natural balance, creating a calmer mind and body
Natural sedative
Anti-inflammatory properties for skin and internal complications (current research is being done on Borage and arthritis)
Dosage
Borage can be taken fresh, in capsule form, or as a liquid extract.
A typical dose of the capsule form is one to two grams per day. More than that can be tiring to the liver. Dried borage leaves and petals can be brewed into a tea. Three or four flowers mixed with leaves will be enough for 8 ounces of hot water.
Borage grows well in Pacific NorthWest summers and has the potential to be a cost-effective mood enhancer. The bees like them, too.
Weekly post that addresses student’s exploration of your ILC learning objectives, activities and outcomes; specifically a weekly post that explores answers to the questions in the Learning Objectives.
