Episode 20: Did You Roll Your Eyes Again?
talking with Ceri about learning to stay and what happens when a queer pagan witch goes to divinity school
Are you new to Fancy Meeting You Here? Welcome!
If you like personal essays about sports, queer stuff, critical theory, or bodies, you’re in the right place. I’m an academic who became a documentary producer. I record an audio version of each essay with my partner, Lisa Weaklim, who is a filmmaker and musician. For some more context on who we are and what we’re doing here, you can read Episode 1: Do my golf clubs go in the U-Haul?
We’re currently in the middle of a series of interviews about trauma-informed movement practices. For more about the origins of this particular side mission, you can listen to Episode 17: New Gym, Old Business and Episode 18: I’m thinking about the Kavanaugh hearing again.
This week I’m excited to share an interview with one of my favorite yoga teachers, Ceri. She describes herself as a student who lives in the watershed of the Sausal that runs to the Pacific Ocean. She’s a sister and seeker, sometimes a minister and a mover. Hoping to be a healer and a unifier. Currently, she studies Divinity at the San Francisco Theological Seminary.
She says that folks who want to know more about the topics we cover today should look at the teachers and healers Jeff Chu, Abby Tucker, and Ashley Sharp.
This interview transcript has been lightly edited for readability. If you’d rather listen to our conversation instead of reading it, pop on over here for the audio.
Rolling Your Eyes in Yoga Class
Kelly: Thank you so much for talking with us today. I started this Substack back in the fall as a way to write about adventures in queer embodiment. Strangely enough, the initial subject matter was about Lisa and I playing golf together. I hadn’t played since I was a kid, and returning to golf brought up a lot of feelings for me about achievement and competition and all kinds of things. So we’ve been talking about the ways in which being present in our bodies makes us available to feel intense feelings sometimes. How do we live with that? How do we resist the pull of numbing or dissociating? How do we take care of ourselves when we get activated? So here I am, talking to different practitioners in my life who have their own relationships to that in their personal practices and in how they hold space and facilitate processes for other people.
Lisa and I joined a gym maybe a year ago? We joined the gym because there was a pool. That was the main draw. Plus, it was very close to our house. After we joined, I saw that there was a yoga class on the group fitness schedule. I was like, “Okay, I’ll try the yoga class.” In my experience as a yoga practitioner, I have not found my favorite classes in gyms. Classes offered in gyms aren’t the most . . . skillful practice. And it's often very “exercise” oriented yoga where there's a real push to go as hard as you can, do the most intense version of a pose, things like that. Which is all to say, I had very low expectations when I walked into your class that day. I just had my socks knocked off. I was like, “Wait, what happened here?!” I could also tell from the way that you were teaching that we had had some similar training. And I was like, “I gotta know who this person is.”
So that’s how I met you! I was shocked and delighted in a gym yoga class. But would you introduce yourself and describe how you think of your movement practice?
Ceri: Oh, sure. Thank you so much. I remember that day when you came in, just so crystal clear, and us talking about it right afterward because you knew that we have some teachers in common.
I live in the Bay Area, and I've been here for a while, but started out living in Louisiana. I grew up in pretty rural areas. And now I am, I do teach yoga as part of what I do or I facilitate. I so appreciated that you offered to talk about what you teach or facilitate, because to me it's more of like, “Hey, let's practice together. And if you need someone to say what they think we should be doing, I'm happy to do that.” But I do that. I do meditation and yoga retreats with another woman. We sometimes do them twice a year, sometimes once a year. Sound experiences, yoga nidra, just kind of a variety of those practices. And right now I am not doing a lot of it because I'm also in graduate school.
I'm working in a Masters of Divinity program and have been lucky enough to have just started that this past fall. I’ll also talk a little bit about the teachers who really inspired me and taught me. It's almost like my life put me on a path, but then these people picked me up cause I just had my thumb out. I was like, “Okay. I know I'm here, but I don't quite know what to do with it.”
I think I'd been really kind of driven, with quite a bit of my own trauma and body trauma. And I was just kind of at the bottom of that, in part because I found out I had Crohn's disease, which was really deconstructing my body pretty quickly. And in the course of that, I just had to turn things around. But I didn't know what to do with that, coming from a very Western-oriented way of talking to myself. And I ran into a couple of teachers, one Kimber Simpkins, she's a Bay Area yoga teacher, Ashley Sharp, another Bay Area teacher, Abby Tucker, and then later on, Janie Montague.
They reoriented me to a way of speaking to the self, the body, much more gently. I thought the way through was to inspire oneself through harsh talk and “You can do this!” and “You better do this.” It was those sneering voices, the double-down on it that weren't really getting me anywhere. In fact, they were actively triggering a lot that needed to be un-done. Starting to hear their voices was the first time that healing was able to take hold, I would say. I've been in remission for over a decade, and I attribute it almost entirely to starting to talk to myself differently and talk to the world differently.
Kelly: When you started to study with these teachers and integrate their voices, were there certain phrases or moments that jumped out at you?
Ceri: Yeah, what really crystallized for me at the beginning was that I would roll my eyes. I would be like, “Wait, don't tell me I don't have to do this pose. Don't tell me to back off or go gently. Don't laugh while you're teaching yoga.” Like I was so, so not ready for it. And then suddenly I was like, “Wait, the very moment you're rolling your eyes and catching your breath and wanting something different is you wanting the old things that were deconstructing your body.” It was just such a good experience of saying, “Wait. The very moments that we were like, blowing a raspberry about something someone's saying to us are probably the moments we should look twice, and maybe bring a little bit of humor and space to that.” To say, “What is this reaction?” It may be the very medicine.
I do think the mind and the body get so disconnected, especially in this society. And it's the body saying, “I'm having a reaction and it's something I may want.” And then the very practices that they were giving around like, take a pause before you do this next pose, you know, sit down if you're losing your breath, or even if you're getting tighter, maybe just watch for a minute or close your eyes. Just unwinding the dogma.
Kelly: I’m so interested in these moments when those of us who have found a decent amount of success or achievement or acknowledgement through pushing hard and performing at a certain level, are invited to question whether that is actually the most efficacious way to exist all the time. Like, is that really the way to get things done? I feel that eye roll! Like, “You've got to be kidding me. That's not how we're gonna do this!”
Ceri: Right. I didn't come here to be told I didn't have to do something. In society we walk out the door and we're looking for all of the messages that say what we have to do, what we should do, and then orienting ourselves to go and do that. It doesn't matter if it's how we sit on the bus or, you know, how we load our groceries, it’s in the inane and what some people consider the profound, that we are should-ed into a pretty constant practice of re-traumatizing.
Teaching the People in Front of You
Kelly: When you started teaching or facilitating yoga practices and meditation practices, what were some of the things that you found yourself trying out as a way to offer that to other people?
Ceri: Well, I like to say I had the best beginning that a person could have. I got trained in the Bay Area and I moved to Dallas, Texas. Literally the van pulled up the day after my teacher training ended. I landed in Dallas and two of my teachers from my teacher training here knew people in Dallas and they said, “Listen, she should work for you.” So I got hired on immediately at two studios in Dallas. Dallas was the most fascinating group of students because they were super, super cautious about what they felt like was the religious aspect of yoga. We really had to dial back everything from putting your hands together in prayer to saying “namaste,” to respect that these students felt too much in conflict with their religious practices.
The things that I learned in teacher training – which I felt was really good training – I had to re-language and unwind. Janie Montague teaches in Dallas, and she was such a good teacher of this – you teach the people in front of you, not what you want to teach. So moment by moment, I was relearning that and interestingly enough, I had bodies come to me who were trans bodies. They were people recovering from a lot of plastic surgery. They knew that whatever it was, I don't even know what or how I was doing it. It was a place that was safe for bodies that had either by choice or by lived experience that needed a different way to be spoken to and it was all because I was trying to re-language for a group of people who weren't down with some of the more yogic stuff, they were afraid of that. I had to shift very, very quickly.
Kelly: Yeah, what a beautiful irony that while you were taking your Bay Area training and adapting it to a very particular southern, Texas landscape, that in that evolution, you also sort of made it clear that you and your classroom were a safe place for the people that you didn't even think that you were adapting towards.
Ceri: Yeah, so true. I think for a lot of new teachers, you know, you take in the routines and the things that you think “yoga” is, and you go in with this thought of like, “Well, this is what we're going to do.” And if you can off-road into authenticity that actually meets the people in front of you, then you're holding space. And that's kind of what I consider-trauma informed teaching is to be able to create a container where people can like the body is going to have you hit icy patches of complete disorientation. I think when you get into it, it doesn't matter if you're doing CrossFit, if you're doing yoga, if you're marathon or your body will rouse these and you have a choice to either exacerbate the trauma by like pushing it down or shoving it somewhere else, which a lot of, you know, great athletes are taught to shove through anything or to kind of like stay and see where you can go with it. I mean, and by stay, I mean more abide, not like stick it out.
I will share something else that happened. In Dallas they didn't have meditation teachers and they didn't have restorative teachers. And so in addition to teaching vinyasa, which was where I was oriented, they were like, “Could you teach these other things too?” And the minute I felt myself like, “I don't want to be one of those teachers.” I was like, “You're eye rolling. You need to walk right into that and say yes.” That's how it had connected – those teachers and being on the mat with them every single time I rolled my eyes. That’s how I learned that if you’re going eye-roll internally or externally, that's exactly where you should walk. And I couldn't be more grateful because everything we do saves us, I think, when we're in alignment and authenticity. Those practices save me every day, too.
Kelly: I did most of my early yoga training in the Bay Area, too. And then when I finished my PhD, I ended up getting a professor job in Phoenix, Arizona at Arizona State University. Down there I taught a lot of physical theater and improvisation and classes that were practice-based, inside acting and dance studios. And so we often did different movement practices to warm up or to help create an ensemble. I bumped into a similar situation. I was teaching just, really basic sun salutation sequences to my improv class and having them work on syncing up their movement and breath as a way to create connection with each other and build their nonverbal communication. I had a student lodge a complaint with the university (she ultimately dropped the class) because she felt that being required to practice yoga – even just the postures – was in violation with her faith. She asked if I could make an adjustment to our warm up, if we could do something that wasn't yoga. And my brand-new-professor, like Bay-Area self really dug in my heels and refused to change the class. I refused to make that accommodation. And I realize now, looking back, like, who knows what her experience would have been like if I had maybe been a little bit more flexible and used that as an opportunity to come up with a different solution. She might've had a really interesting experience or our class might've had a chance to grow in a different direction with her presence. But I needed to be the smart, lefty teacher who was gonna come into town and make sure everyone did what I said. Hearing about the way that you evolved your teaching to meet the students where they were in Dallas is really powerful. I have a sense of how hard that would have been for me because I failed to do it in Phoenix. So I appreciate that.
Ceri: Well, it wasn't easy. I am quite sure I failed over and over again, but, you know, we just, I think even the consciousness of trying is really, really good merit.
Taking Your Queer Body to Divinity School
Kelly: You have started Divinity School, and I’m curious about how this new chapter feels connected to the work you've been doing – or doesn't – and how, as a student, you may or may not be engaging with “shoulds” or focusing on achievement or striving in ways that are challenging? Or another way to say that is, “How is school?!”
Ceri: Oh my gosh, that is a great question because school has definitely brought up all of the personality that wants to get measured on an A, B, C, D scale. And you can only imagine which of those I would like to yield at the end of the day. So, you know, every, every day is a practice of pulling back from the “What do I need to do to get measured correctly?” and going into the, “What is the meaning? You know, what does the world need out of this that I'm doing right now?” ‘Cause I don't need another degree. So there's a lot to be learned. School is teaching me way more than just what the books are there for, or what's in those books. I've been completely humbled by the ancient Greek language, just as example number one.
Kelly: Oh wow.
Ceri: There’s nothing like learning a brand new language to take you down really, really fast and remind you of, A, how hard it is to learn a language of anything, you know, whether we're learning the language of the divine or learning the language of the body or the self. So it's a good, good reminder on finding school a practice.
Kelly: When you went into this program, what was your sense of your intention? What did you feel like the world was asking for through you and through this work? And has that changed in the time that you've been studying?
Ceri: Yeah, so I really felt like the world right now needs as many people as can possibly do it thinking about who we are on the planet with the planet, with all of the creatures. And we've gotten to this place where we've developed such separating language for who we are, whether that's human-centric or particularly religious-centric or even earth-centric. And I think if we don't start to apply some more integration – I mean, it comes back to yoga, right? Like where's the union and where is the authenticity? And we've become so disintegrated and unable to talk to each other, much less to talk to the beings that I think are talkable to, which is every living creature in some way or another, as well as the elemental world, as well as the Earth itself. But we're just getting further from integration that way. I was lucky enough to be able to pause and do this with the hope that I'd be able to discern in this time, “Where would the value be? Is it in ministry? Is it in working, you know, actually with communities in need? Is it all of it?” I don't know where the other end is, but I couldn't just keep doing just a little. I felt like I needed to take a step that would teach me more about how we do this. Where have people failed? Where have they succeeded? What is the current conversation around social justice, which the San Francisco Theological Union, that's kind of their primary orientation – social justice teaching through ministry. And they are super non-denominational, so I can be every kind of left pagan witch that I like to be.
And hopefully there will be something on the other end. I'm really cautious about just hiding out in academia. So every day is also a question about that. It's like, “Are you hiding out for the work that really needs to be done? And if not, where are you showing up for it?”
Kelly: When you were starting to feel the pull to show up to this work in a different way than you previously had been, how did you come to the decision that Divinity School would be a good place to continue that exploration?
Ceri: It was a long decision because I think that becoming someone in the yogic world and working, you know, with the body practices and meditation was, very, very beginning of it. Then I started to think, oh, wait a minute, I got to do something different here. There's something more. This is the pebble in the pond. There's so much more that I'm not reaching through this and that this is not reaching. Yoga, you know, in many ways it's inaccessible.
So I looked at schools, then I went through a whole process of like, “Toxic religion! How do I become part of this? Or do I become part of it? Or how do you become part of it by staying on the edge of the inside? Or do you stay on the edge of the outside?” I went through a two-year non-degree program that was so helpful. I was like, oh, yeah. This can be part of the pebble in the water, and I can do this without, I think, re-traumatizing the people around me. There are a lot of people in my queer circle who were like, “Wait, you're gonna do what?” I know there are people who took a pause from me, they were like, “Okay, if you're gonna go get Jesus, we got to like, maybe not go to dinner.” I think I'm working through it, you know, once again, like, when I eye-roll at them, and I'm like, “Okay, walk into it. Let's sit down. Go for a walk. Let's have a meal. Let's talk about what this is and what it isn't. And specifically, I need to hear what your experience is because this is gonna take all of us. And to alienate any of us in the process is not, it's not worth a single hour of Greek studying for me, which is taking many, many hours.”
Kelly: Yes! I have two questions about this. The first one is about how embodiment and the body in general show up in seminary. Where do yoga, meditation, and movement practices get to take up space inside this work? And then the second question – I don't know if it’s even fully formed yet. So Lisa and I were both raised Catholic, and so much of that experience felt like being trained to disavow and transcend the body and to also disavow queerness. And it's been really interesting to disassemble that, or reassemble it into different shapes, and to figure out, if you can be a queer person with a body and have some relationship to organized religion or spirituality?
And so maybe these are really the same question! I don’t know if you have a history with Catholicism or if you just happened to end up at a Catholic institution. But I’m asking for a friend! (I’m asking for me and Lisa.)
Ceri: Asking for a friend! Okay, I could talk about this for the rest of the week, but here it is in a nutshell. I did grow up Catholic. And honestly, I find that the Catholics are more embodied, if that's at all possible, than the Protestants because the Protestants are really like the body is the thing of filth and get rid of it and go. I love them, but they very, very much have made a separation. Now the Catholics are just fine to flog the body all day long as well, but there's not – to me – as much in the doctrine. But maybe that's just because I grew up Catholic and because I love the Franciscans who I think are so in love with the elemental world.
Kelly: True! True.
Ceri: Francis did flog himself a whole lot anyway. Just an aside. And I should give a shout out to Claire because nothing would have happened for Francis had Claire not been there. But about the place where it fits in seminary – I do have to say a couple things. San Francisco Theological Seminary is, in its founding, Presbyterian. And I love that because they, like I said, they're thinking about social justice. They also support women in ministry much more so than the Catholic Church does. So I was drawn to that. And I have a teacher, her name is Wendy Farley. She starts every class with embodiment practices. It doesn't matter if it's Zumba, or walking meditation, or breathing and chanting, or wild dancing. She's like, “We have to get out of our head. We have to get in our bodies.”
She's one of the reasons that I decided this was my program. The day I came to campus to learn about the program, she did an embodiment practice. I was like, okay, these people at least understand that the sublimation of the body and that separation has damaged us. It's made the body, Earth, and others separate from our individual minds and look where that's getting us. So I really, really am committed to bringing those forward together because the body, it stores everything, encodes everything we've ever done. And if we just keep on pushing it away, how much intelligence are we forgetting all the time? And how much of the divine are we refusing to know when we do that?
Kelly: YES
Ceri: So I'll tell you a story about my Catholicism or Catholicism in this process. I interviewed a couple of nuns who are still very very in the church. And I was like, “How do you stay? How do you stay in this?” And to a one, they said, “Because coming at it from the outside is not gonna knock it down. You have to get inside.” And I find that that's a metaphor for getting inside of our bodies.
I'm gonna loop this back to how we can be queer and … I'm not gonna say we can be queer and be Christian, but we can be queer and be spiritual. It is our birthright to access the divine in any way that that looks like. In fact, I think being queer often lets us access divinity even beyond because we're thinking and orienting very differently to the world already. The world has said, “You are different.” And so many of us are like, “I'll take that. I'm going to take that and run with it.” And it makes us think differently. And that's why we're so creative, often because the world has said, well, you're too different for us. Like, let's take that and look for whatever it is that you want to call. Look for the God of your understanding.
Kelly: Amen. This persistent false dichotomy of spiritual community or spiritual practice versus queer community has to go. It was never true in the first place either. I'm sure there are plenty of nuns that could tell us about that, too.
Ceri: I have so much great reading because the SFTS also has us reading trans theologians. And there's this amazing writer, his name is Jeff Chu, and he's talking about being queer and his process of becoming a minister. And then, Lama Rod Owens, I don't know if you know Lama Rod, but that's another queer voice in spirituality. (And I would call it divinity. I don't know if Lama Rod would call it divinity, but I would.) They're so important. This trans theologian named Austen Hartke is a beautiful writer countering so much of the transphobia in people's biblical understanding. It lifts your heart when you read Austen’s work.
Learning to Stay
Kelly: Oh, thank you for those recommendations! Ceri, is there anything else that you want to say that you haven't said or any bits that want to come to the surface?
Ceri: One of the questions that you asked earlier via email was if I could tell a story about a time when I met with someone who was super activated? I will tell you that story if you want.
Kelly: I would love to hear that. Yes.
Ceri: Okay, this was early days. I was doing one of my first, it may have been my second, retreat. And it was a very remote retreat center. I co-lead the retreat. And a young person, not that young, I mean, early 20s, disappeared. And we knew they had been struggling, but they just walked off the property. And my co-teacher was basically like, “You got to go find them and bring them back.” I mean, I'm not a therapist. I was older, but not that equipped. And then who do you call? I did find them and I just said, “Come sit with me.”
When you don't know what else to do, it comes back to abiding with and creating a container to stay with someone. And look, if I'd been in the U S I would have probably called for some help, but we weren't. We were so remote. I didn't speak the language in Indonesia. So I sat with them all night. They moved their body from every position – from fetal to sitting to the back was completely arched like they were in some kind of inner pain. And then, by the morning, we were able to check in and say, “Okay, do you need to go? Do we need to get a bigger intervention?” Because we definitely would have gotten them home if that's what it would have taken. But it just took abiding without talking, without prodding, without asking, “What's going on? What's going on?”
And we're friends to this day and they call me almost every year and say, “That was the deepest experience I've ever had.” And I'm so grateful for that. I'm not attached to it. We have such a discursive tendency, but I just want to say that there is something to being able to abide and know without words. You don't have to always like scratch at someone and something to have it emerge. Sometimes our being with is just the most incredible gift.
Kelly: Thank you for that. When you were sitting with them throughout the night, were there things that you found yourself doing in your body and your brain that helped you generate the kind of presence that you described?
Ceri: You're so, so smart, Kelly. Yes, I think I breathed ujjayi breath for like seven hours. I mean, it was quiet. They couldn't hear me. But that full on movement of the rib cage in a circle and breathing the whole body, I feel like that was an exchange with them. But it was powerful for me to literally and metaphysically keep me awake to what was going on with them. And, breathing comes back to not closing down. Certainly there were moments of eye rolling, and “Can I not just go back to bed? And why did I get this straw?” And those were the moments where I just turned around and went right back into, “No, this is a gift. This is where we practice making the container of the world that we want. It's not the big world, it's every little tupperware we find ourselves in as we go through our day.”
Kelly: Yeah. It’s also like,”Did you say you wanted a retreat? Did you say you wanted a different quality of time and space? Here you go!”
Ceri: Oh yeah, there's never been a one that hasn't taught me more than I brought to it, I think.
Kelly: I really appreciate the way you’re talking about abiding. It’s something that has run through this conversation. It also feels like part of what you were naming when you were explaining the draw to seminary. How can we abide in a more fully integrated way without having to disavow parts and pieces, without having to separate humans from other animals, from the divine. There’s an integration and a being with that feels important, especially when we end up in places where trauma gets activated and we want to bolt. Or blame.
Ceri: Yeah, or knock it out.
I don't have any tattoos, but when people say, “What kind of tattoo would you get?” I get the word “stay.” Not staying in a way that would traumatize someone. I don't want anyone to think this is sticking it out. It's more like how can we not flee ourselves and abandon ourselves? Because we are the very thing that will be there on the other side, I think.
Now, we can get into the whole thing about self and non-self, but let's not do that.
Kelly: Let’s do that in the next one!
Ceri: I'm so grateful for our time together!
Kelly: Thank you for talking with me and sharing so much of your journey and your teachings. This has been really lovely and I appreciate it.
Ceri: Thanks so much for having me.