This. Life. Now.

What do you do when you want to change someone’s behavior because they’ve annoyed, frustrated, or upset you and didn’t show up in the way you wanted them to? It’s really not about our interactions being about you and them. Here I talk about why we get so attached thinking we need to change people and how to flip these situations into inner healing opportunities.

Words on the page, words in the air, this concludes our 2020 summer series of This. Life. Now. I leave you with the gift of 5 of my prose poems. So we’ve been around the sun now with coming to understand how the Universe does have our back. Relationships where the heart and hearth is built from the beautiful self-home infrastructure. Purposeful practices at the intersection between us and the sacred spaces we inhabit. Becoming the innovative leader who sits at the table right so seniors can see you on fire with agility, re-pivot, and relaunch of the rocketship. Correcting a young man at a party that “This is a women’s college, not a girls’ school” and the classroom a place of competing not against each other but systems of ideas within the dominant hegemonies; an uncommon woman. A hologram doctor laughing at the assumption that technology is trying to replace the human. A ball aimed at 40 feet landing 30 because the wind teaches us why we need to be unrealistic in achieving our goals. A collective of dancers organically transforming movements from one shape to the next as a whole body across space. Warrior snake that sheds the skin of what no longer serves us for healing and inner strength. This is just the surface of the keystones I’ve written over the last four years. Words are just pointed; they can’t be definitive. So then, my words as sketches, traces, of the whole. Like sheet music, not the actual music itself, they are guides to what will play out and that’s why we call them the notes. These are my last notes for this summer for This. Life. Now.

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Today’s episode is a conversation walk that I give you for times when you find yourself needing a meditation for inner strength and healing. When we remember how to access our authentic selves, we discover that all the resources we could ever need are already within us. On this guided visual meditation journey, I walk you through some these. How do we shed the skin of what no longer serves us? What are you willing to sacrifice in order to grow? What are the gifts we should be giving ourselves?

In today’s episode I use dance as a metaphor for honoring the body and personal movemeng unique to each of us, and more largely our phenomenology within the larger world. This conversation is a “wander-ment“ of thoughts where grounding in dance composition and pedagogy actually opens room for greater philosophical and metaphorical rumination that is self-reflexive and large context-related to life. What might it look like to create a practice of exploring and questioning body, space, and material that those who are not intentional artists don’t see, read, or experience consciously? What might it look like to do this in a way that relies on personal engagement and implication? We might it look like to think about bodies, space, and movement all at literal and higher critical levels? Candice Salyers website: https://www.guidedance.com

Everyone wants to improve their productivity skills and time management, but when it comes down to effective planning, we need to frame the conversation more largely around how to become a boss along the pursuit towards fulfilling the objectives we set out for ourselves. These 5 ways to rethink achieving your goals have greatly changed the routes to my success. What specific mindsets, resources, and practices do we need to start taking on to chase our own golden goals?

Today’s conversation is all about having a critical conversation on teaching and learning with technology, which couldn’t be more relevant to the present moment since COVID-19 proving nothing but the fact that we need to have well thought through mixed-modes of instruction, including that of the digital. Where has my own authority within learning design, a field that has always been at the forefront in the discourse around pedagogy as it anticipates the future of learning, positioned me? What misconceptions do we have about technology and how can we gain a better handle on thinking about our use of it more critically? How do we integrate its role into our productivity and learning going forwards?

In this week’s episode, I discuss my undergraduate experience at the country’s first established women’s college. What values have I learned from an institution committed to intellectual inclusion and critical thinking, gender inclusivity, and service beyond the campus? What has my uniquely Mount Holyoke network taught me? Today I invite another special guest to join us, Emily Dickinson Professor of Film Studies, Dr. Robin Blaetz, who shares part of her story as a faculty member at the college.

Welcome to another episode conversation where we discuss what it means to become an innovative leader. In this episode, I reveal the process of creating my own self-designed major, taking innovative academic risks, self-advocacy, and how to “make things happen.” Join me as I feature a special guest, Hannah Pozzebon, Mount Holyoke College alumna ‘20 who shares part of her own trailblazing journey.

In today’s cosmic conversation let me share with you how to start cultivating your own sacred space. Rarely do we give a second thought to the everyday mundane spaces we inhabit. Each one of us engages in some sort of purposeful practice, which is why we need to create intentionality towards our “being-ness” and energy within site specific places. I walk you through my 3 step question exercise on excavating such curation.