Who's Not In the Room: Critical Questions for Disrupting Wellness with Dee de Lara

Explicit content warning

10/22/20 • 47 min

In this eye-opening episode I talk with a truly inspiring woman, Dee de Lara! We discuss her work with the paradigm shifting movement hub, What Time, co-creating BIPOC-centred online space and disrupting expectations of how and where to find movement.
Places to connect with Dee on Instagram:
Dee de Lara
What Time - Movement Class Hub
A few of things our conversation touched upon:

Dee's experience coming into a nourishing relationship with her body in a studio environment and how that sparked her up to questions like: "Who's not in the room right now and why".
Why conflict is part of a healthy studio environment and can be the very thing that leads dismantling oppression in movement and wellness communities
The complicated future for the studio wellness communities in Toronto (and beyond) as a result of the pandemic as well as the paradigm shifts that are disrupting systems of oppression in the community. What's going to be birthed out of this loss and struggle?
How racism shows up in our lives as Canadians, and the lies we tell ourselves about the nature of white supremacy in the Canadian cultural context

Quotes from Dee to inspire you:
"To experience deep connection and intimacy, we have to do both. We need to be able speak with passion, assertiveness and confidence and also listen with openness compassion and humility. "
"This idea that wellness shouldn’t or isn’t up to one figure or authority to decide who deserves it or who gets access to it."
"As human beings, we want to feel like we’re a part of something, but there’s more than one way to feel that."
About Dee:
Dee de Lara's (she/her) life and passion is all about listening to and telling stories, her own and those of others. She aims to co-create spaces to weave a web to between humans to share their experiences and feel more connected by: teaching MOVEMENT that aims to inspire curiosity, facilitating CONVERSATIONS that spark more reflection and action with Dinner Confidential and Insights in Color, making JEWELRY that reframes context and expectations. Dee is also here to ask QUESTIONS to disrupt the status quo, to elevate and amplify the voices of BIPOC and to critically interrogate the systems that exist. And ultimately to learn widely and deeply from others.
Today, one of Dee’s core values is disruption: not about interfering, but about trusting natural processes and interrupting patterns and behaviour to foster abundance and growth. At the beginning of August, with Bea Palanca, she launched @WHAT_TIME___, an Instagram hub to aggregate and connect independent, emerging and BIPOC movement teachers' offerings. WHAT_TIME is committed to disrupting the expectations of where to find movement, how it is organized and from whom you can find it. The ultimate aim is to centre BIPOC voices and experiences. Connect with her @deedelara.

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Dee's experience coming into a nourishing relationship with her body in a studio environment and how that sparked her up to questions like: "Who's not in the room right now and why".
Why conflict is part of a healthy studio environment and can be the very thing that leads dismantling oppression in movement and wellness communities
The complicated future for the studio wellness communities in Toronto (and beyond) as a result of the pandemic as well as the paradigm shifts that are disrupting systems of oppression in the community. What's going to be birthed out of this loss and struggle?
How racism shows up in our lives as Canadians, and the lies we tell ourselves about the nature of white supremacy in the Canadian cultural context

Support the show

Previous Episode

Breaking Through Physical and Emotional Patterns - Inspire by Fighting Monkey with Elke Schroeder

In this episode I speak with the luminous Elke Schroeder about her powerful work inspired by Fighting Monkey and how it dove tails with creating a more robust and adaptable nervous system and to bring us into deeper relationship with self and our environment.

Dive in into the philosophy of Fighting Monkey, a movement practice revolutionizing the way we think about our place in space and in connection to fellow humans.
Hear about the importance of moving beyond our predictable movements habits as well as the intersection between FM and the dismantling of systems of oppression in and outside of the movement world.
Start asking questions about how the fitness industry keeps our bodies stuck in limiting beliefs about ourselves and our bodies' ability to navigate external pressures to find what FM refers to as 'earthquake architecture'.

"Fighting Monkey is not an easy thing to do, not only for coordinations, but in general ... because you are confronting a lot of your patterns and blocks."
"It's not a fight practice, It can seem like fighting, but actually it's about fighting your monkey mind."
"It's a reclaiming of your physicality to harness those tools of resilience."
Elke is a Mover.
A dancer, performer and Fighting Monkey student and instructor. Her diverse movement background includes dance of many styles, floor-work, acrobatics, yoga and martial arts. She is an archer, a poetry maker, a forest-dweller, a chocolate-eater - full of wanderlust, tornado-winds and boundless energy.

Elke leads a practice that is fluid, strong, and creative. She encourages Play, rough-housing and curiosity, tempered with an attunement to self-awareness. In to go Out, out to go In.

A graduate of the School of Toronto Dance Theatre, the Octopus Garden Yoga Teachers Training and Mentorship programs, the University of Toronto Drama Program and the University of Waterloo Independent Studies program, Elke teaches at myriad organizations such as Spirit Loft, L’Artère Danse, (Québec), the University of Calgary, Ryerson University, The School of Toronto Dance Theatre, GMD Toronto, T.O. Love-in,, Jane Clapp/Movement for Trauma, Mosaic Yoga, and YYoga (Brussels).

She is an active creator and performer of contemporary dance (20+ years) and travels for her work throughout Canada and abroad).

Find Elke on Instagram @elkebschroeder or Facebook: Inspire by Fighting Monkey with Elke

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Next Episode

Depth Psychology, Embodiment, Movement, Myth and Alchemy with Mackenzie Amara

In this multi-faceted episode, I am so grateful to speak with fellow Jungian Analyst in training and movement magician, Mackenzie Amara, AKA 'THE INKED SHRINK", about the role that culture plays in our minds and in our lives. We go into our mutual love of the intersection of the soma and psyche and how she always includes elements of analytical psychology, myth, alchemy, and shadow work in her teaching and how dance and depth psychology are part and parcel for her and cannot be separated.
A few things we talk about:

The place that Jungian theory holds in our modern world, and how Jung's wisdom can be used to understand how it's rapidly changing
What happens when minds socialized by western culture try to absorb eastern philosophy and mysticism
What it means to recognize our wholeness, and our complexity as individuals
The mercurial nature of being in relationship with other humans
The place and importance of irrationality, non-sense, and non-linear in our lives and minds

Golden nuggets of wisdom from Mackenzie...

"That next step is the only thing that you can do right now. So you have to start where you are or otherwise you’re nowhere."
"We’ve been culturally programmed and religiously programmed to avoid that recognition [of evil] in ourselves lest we give into too deeply."
"When the culture can’t hold the experiences of another culture’s religion or zeitgeist or tradition, you just sort of fall through."
"You can’t move beyond the next movement. Whether that’s the next breath, or admission or confession, or the next twirl or the next partner, or the next eye gaze. "
About Mackenzie
By trade Mackenzie is a writer, coach, & 5Rhythms® teacher. By vocation she is a Jungian analyst-in-training & Clinical Psychology doctoral student. By design she is a collection of fractal, holographic cells dancing around some strange attractor for the sake of who knows what to live an insignificant, mythic life reflective of the mysterious vital spark within her. She identifies as a series of memories & unverifiable subjective experiences of self-hood to which she is rather fondly attached. She has a penchant for scholarship, the occult, pedantic erudition, morbid humor, grandiosity, nihilism, & semi-responsible hedonism. Born in the shadow of New Age culture into a fractured family system & the subjective experiencer of (arguably) extreme early childhood trauma, her life’s work is to heal psychic wounds—her’s & other’s—that she & others become strong enough to contend with the unconscious quicksands & transpersonal abysses which lap at the periphery of developing consciousness. She is an emergent property of Being playing at becoming sovereign. She really, really loves butter.
Connect with Mackenzie through @theinkedshrink or learn more by visiting her website!
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