“My goal in life is to be the kind of person my dog thinks I am.”—Anonymous

When I was a little girl, James Cameron’s epic cinematic spectacle, the Titanic, had not yet hit the screen. But the story of the Titanic was as big in the cultural dialogue and collective unconscious of the time as walking on the moon. The human spirit soared that high and sank that low. At age eight, I saw a made for television documentary about the sinking. One image would haunt me for years. The women who fell overboard couldn’t lift their own body weight up out of the ocean and back onto the ship or life rafts. Unless someone helped them, many women drowned because they couldn’t do one pull-up.

The implications ran deep. On a personal level, I looked around  at  the women in my life.  There was no doubt about it. My mother, my aunts, my grandmothers, my favorite teachers would all die on a sinking ship. And I would too. I was a girl. And that I was biologically doomed to the same fate terrified me. My own body felt like a death trap.

Some of my life story can be explained as a journey to remedy this personal & cross-cultural diagnosis.  How to lift the bodies out of the water? 

I practice joy and trapeze, and more recently circus and yoga, as my own personal antidote.  It works. I have been described as a limitless fountain of joy by my teacher, fellow yogi and clown friend, Kevin O’Keefe. And I share my practice with as many as I can.

Because if you’re sinking on the Titanic, you don’t need to do twenty pull-up’s to save your life. You need to do one.