That night, I learned that when you dance, when you shift the weight of your body from one foot to another, when you shake to the sound of the night breeze and to the thrum of your own grief, when you continue the private practice of movement, you will be reminded of the fortunate (or unfortunate) fact that your body is real. Your body, even after betraying you, will carry you. Sometimes mercifully, sometimes mercilessly. But it will carry you. And sometimes, dance is the gift in all that rubble. Dance is the gift in all that mess. Dance is the conjuring.

TIPS FOR
SETTLING THE NERVOUS SYSTEM, SELF CARE & RESILIENCE

-Remember to Hydrate
-Take A Deep Breath
-Name What is Present
-Remember the Humanity of All
-Seek Empathy
-Offer Empathy
-Notice Sources of Support
-Give Yourself a Hug
-Practice Grounding Skills
-Get To Know Your Nervous System
-Honor Your Nervous System
-If A Grounding Tool Isn't Working, Let It Go
-Seek Support
-Only Use Resources That Work For You
-Honor Your Choice
-Honor Your Capacity
-Undo Perfectionism

-Don't Go It Alone
-Actively Ground Into the Present
-Take A Break
-Remember To Laugh
-When Overwhelmed, Have A Plan
-Take Space
-Practice Grounding Before Stressful Situations
- Grounding That Works for Others Doesn’t Have to Work For You
-Normalize Your Nervous System Responses
-Love Yourself

-Work On Self Acceptance
-Create A Safety Statement To Ground Yourself
-Use Humor
-Use A Grounding Quote
-Breathe Into Your Belly
- Breathe In For 2 Seconds, Breath Out for 4 Seconds
-Brush Your Left Hand Down the Length Of Your Right Arm- Then Switch
-Name Qualities of the Most Relaxed Place In Your Body
-Picture Grounding People In Your Life
-Picture Grounding Places
-Name Qualities Your Senses Notice Outside Yourself
-Imagine A Favorite Food, Pet or Season
-Drink Cool Water
-Ground Your Soles Of Your Feet Into the Earth
-Recite A Prayer or Poem
-Carry A Touchstone Object
-Stretch Your Body
-Bilateral Stimulation (Alternate Tapping Opposite Sides of Knees or Collarbone)
-Hum or Sing
-Breathe In Compassion, Breathe Out Compassion
- Build A Support Pod
- Have Something Light and Fun To Land On
- Get Into Nature To Decompress
- Listen To The Sound Of A Bell Or Gong That Soothes You
- Bounce Or throw A Ball While Focusing On Your Breath
- Feel Into Your Body And Release A Sound That Matches That Feeling
- Tap, Pat, and/or Squeeze Your Body To Locate Yourself
- Parasympathetic Nervous System Stimulation: Stand Feet Forward... Twist Your Head To The Right, Then Let Your Hips Follow... Repeat To the Left.. Then Look Up (Slack Jawed)...Then Let Your Head Hang... Then Back To Center

No one should ever work.

Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you’d care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.

That doesn’t mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than child’s play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance. Play isn’t passive. Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once recovered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us want to act. Oblomovism and Stakhanovism are two sides of the same debased coin.

The ludic life is totally incompatible with existing reality. So much the worse for “reality,” the gravity hole that sucks the vitality from the little in life that still distinguishes it from mere survival. Curiously — or maybe not — all the old ideologies are conservative because they believe in work. Some of them, like Marxism and most brands of anarchism, believe in work all the more fiercely because they believe in so little else.

— Bob Black in The Abolition of Work (1985)