one of the coolest people i know 🪞
her thoughts on life, its lessons, and how we change
greetings, greetings to you, dear reader.
i wrote in my last dispatch about living in the unknown, without control, and what that process in getting there looked like for me. i also mentioned that one of the reasons i was able to get to that point in my life was because of the work that i had done (and still do!) with an incredible somatics practitioner named Gena Rho.
a lot of my writing here focuses on how we show up in community. both with ourselves and one another. i ask the question often: what does that look like in terms of our practices, our tools, and the conversations we’re having with one another?
i wish everyone had access to the tools and resources Gena provides. and knew more about her and her work. she’s one of the coolest people i know. and so, today, i bring to you, dear reader, an (edited and condensed) interview with her.
we talk about a lot here, so you can only imagine what it’s like when i don’t have a detailed set of questions in front of me. i've learned (and still learn) so much from and with her. so, it was a true joy to ask her these questions and an honor that she took the time to do so. i hope you get something out of this, too.
Sara: Our work has been so profound for me. People in my life say to me: “Oh, I’ve hurt myself or this feels wrong.” I’m like, “You need to call Gena. I don’t really care what’s wrong with you, call Gena.” What I want for people to get out of this is to get a sense of your personal journey and how you’ve navigated that and your expertise as a practitioner and the literal decades of wisdom you have with regard to how you show up today.
So my first question, give me your thoughts on how we can all be better stewards for the balance between our souls and bodies?
Gena: *Laughs*
Sara: Big question!
Gena: Big question. Ok, here’s what *laughs* came up today. You’ve heard this term, spiritual bypassing. It’s landed differently having my friend Carrie here this week and talking to her about that. And teaching in-person and working with people in-person are very different than on Zoom, so I'm getting to see that difference.
I'm also having conversations with people who are used to bypassing, and they don’t even realize they’re bypassing their own self-care, their somatic practice, their life. They’re waiting for something to come to them, or they say, “tell me what to do.” They’re coming from a particular perspective. That perspective might be a blind spot or the reason to bypass feelings. But it becomes its own cycle. And my own somatic journey is what has woken me up, made me available for my own process to really feel.
You’re literally going to laugh at this reference, a little ridiculous. There was a point in my life where I was a little bit like donald trump – I said it enough, and I believed it, even though it wasn’t true. “Everything’s okay, it’s all okay, everything’s fine.” I was going against what I was seeing in my family, which was not a lot of happiness. I was like, “I'm just going to be the optimistic side.”
I don’t believe there’s one way to get to a place of being the steward or caring about yourself enough to commit. But that’s what has to happen. And I don’t presume that the work I'm doing is the only way. There are lots of other people out there with interesting and wonderful things to offer that can maybe help someone get to know themselves more. And what it is they need.
Sara: When we talk about having access to your body, setting boundaries, making choices, not bypassing, being grounded in yourself, what does that mean in terms of the practice that you help people find?
Gena: On a very concrete level, we start with the level of the body. It’s just noticing where there’s discomfort or where there’s a disconnect. Not everyone has access to where they’re disconnected or where they push away or how they compartmentalize their lives. I certainly didn’t have access to it, a lot of people come to the somatic work that I do, because they need to address pain, I did not, you did not…
Sara: I was like, “I'm not in pain! Nothing hurts!” *Laughs*
Gena: You were like, on the phone, “I don’t have any pain,” and I didn’t either. I came to this work because I was like “I want more information, and I'm ready to dive a bit deeper and have more for my clients and for my kid,” who didn’t crawl and was having issues physically. And then – talk about going into the unknown… I was shocked, I was shocked at what I was feeling.
All of a sudden, things were opening up. I was having feeling and sensation in parts of my body that I must have been cut off from, because I started to feel. Literally this week, because I've had Carrie here, we did some hands-on exchanges, and I'm blown away again. I'm like “Oh my god, I didn’t realize how disconnected I was from the left side of my body and that the left side of my back is where I was holding and bracing.” I didn’t know that until Carrie did some hands-on somatic work with me.
As much as I practice, and I have my self-care, I can’t always be objective. We need each other. Maybe, that’s the community.
Sara: It’s an accompaniment, too. I was just talking to my friend on the phone, and we were both talking about asking for help, not being alone, doing it with somebody else. Like you could do it alone, but why the hell would you want to?
Gena: I'm terrible at that, I have to say, that’s probably why I go “community”? I'm not very good at it. Maybe even just saying that is progress for me. What it looks like is helping people own what they feel or actually noticing it and then trusting and owning it. Those are kind of the basic tenets of what I'm doing but in a very visceral way.
Sara: Just the level of validation: “Oh, no, that is what I'm feeling, that is what’s happening in my body, that is my experience in this world.” For a lot of people, they haven’t had access to that before, myself included.
Gena: Or they’ve had some trauma that has invalidated their experience. So then they say, “I have no idea what you’re asking, I don’t know what I feel…” I hear that a lot. So many of us shut down to that, because it’s hard, it’s painful.
Sara: Totally. Switching to you… thinking about your routines, rituals, and practices, what helps keep you in your body, what keeps you rooted and grounded in your days, in your weeks, in your months? In life’s transitions?
Gena: Anything that’s an activity out in nature, that’s outside. Whether it’s like hiking, or riding my bike or just walking. That’s a huge thing for me, too. My somatics practice is balancing myself and was always part of that, but if it doesn’t include some outside time, in nature, away from people, things don’t go well. So I try to do that as much as I can. But also, I do receive other work. I have people I go to, other professionals that complement Somatic Movement Education: shamanic energy work, craniosacral work, acupuncture. And I mix that up. That depends on where I'm at and what I need. I'm very much aware of this body changing every year, every day, every month, there’s always something different.
Sara: Yeah, that’s a great segue to: what’s the best advice you’ve ever received about navigating life’s changes?
Gena: I don’t know that I've received any of that.
Sara: What do you wish somebody had told you?
Gena: Maybe it’s trust. Trust myself more. If I think about the big transitions in my life, I was pretty good at being brave and stepping into things that were risky, making changes, career changes. But I always questioned it. And I don’t feel like there was anybody who said to me, “Yeah, this is the right place.” I never felt like it was clearly the right thing. There’s always been a degree of faith. That something’s gonna work out, or it’s going to get me to another place.
Sara: Yeah, it wasn’t ever like a voice in your head that was like “This is your divine calling. If you just continue to make the choices you’re making, you’ll get where you need to go.”
Gena: No. There’s a lot of resistance around it, with the exception of doing my somatics training. That might be the one exception, but it was one circumstance where I was like “Yeah, it’s the time.” Somehow, when I stepped into that and made that decision and had a lot of intention behind it. I felt that way about my dance career too, but it was a different experience. Things opened.
Sara: You’ve done a lot of different things that have all been super impressive in their own right. You were a teacher, you were a dancer, you’ve done Thai bodywork, you teach yoga. You have all of these different things that I would consider you an expert in. I guess that now goes into the other question about navigating those changes through the movement practices and starting as a teacher but knowing that there’s something outside of that that you wanted to be doing. And now, I would consider you to be very much a teacher. There’s a lot of full circle stuff happening in there.
Gena: Yes. What’s the question? *Laughs*
Sara: *Laughs* Similar to the “You need to learn the word ‘trust’,” trusting where you are in that given moment and that being enough. Do you feel like there’s a cohesive story to how you’ve navigated those different movement practices and those career changes? I know we talk a lot about how what happened up until now matters less than where you are right now. But if you think about the story that you at least tell yourself or you tell other people about how you got to today, what would that story be related to your career?
Gena: I think the through-line is: I was at the end of something, frustrated, and pushed into doing something that I would find happiness in. I left teaching, and I was depressed, I was angry *laughs* and also felt that I had failed. Because I wanted to help these kids, but it was taking such a toll on me that I was like, “I need to do what I love. What am I doing? This is soul-sucking.” It just was rough, it was really rough. That was the transition from being a classroom teacher to going to graduate school and then entering into the professional dance world. But it was definitely like “I’ve got to try this now, because I need to find some joy.” That’s really what it was. And I left graduate school pissed, and I felt like my soul was sucked there, as well. *Laughs* And then, I was like “Who’s idea was this?”
In terms of creativity, it didn’t nourish me. It felt a little factory-like. It was a conservatory program. And it may have been the program I chose, and I thought it was something that it wasn’t. But it pushed me to the next place, which was getting the job. All these things provided an opportunity to clarify what I really didn’t want and what would make me happy. I wouldn’t change anything.
Sara: Thinking about melding the personal and the professional and the work you currently do. The common thread for both of us isn’t that we came to the somatics work saying, “Oh, I have a bunch of deep physical pain or sensory-motor amnesia.” It wasn’t about the physical body. It was about: “I want more data, I want more information, I want more access, I know I'm missing something, I don’t know what it is, maybe this is where I need to look.” The first phone call we had, where I was like “No, no, no. I'm not in pain, absolutely not.” And now, I'm like “Oh, I'm in pain all the time.” *Laughs*
How has your entrance into this work, your establishment as someone very well-regarded in the field, how has your work in this specific modality impacted your perspective on the world?
Gena: I think the main thing for me was realizing what wasn’t true, what I thought was true for myself was not. There was a whole lot of stuff I was saying to myself about where I was, about my relationships and how I was in the world, that was not true. I had done other somatic work, so I wasn’t unfamiliar with it, but this work brought me to a different place. I just didn’t expect to feel. Even though I wanted more information, I thought I knew where I was going.
Part of me was like “I don’t know that I'm really going to get anything that’s different, I know my body. I'm coming with a lot of knowledge here.” It was actually my very first hands-on session with my friend Carrie. I disassociated, I fell asleep or I passed out, and the next thing I knew I was startled awake. And I was like “what just happened?” And she goes, “Yeah, your nervous system just…” and I was like “what the fuck is going on here?” *Laughs* The main thing was that this brought me to a place where I was able to go through my own process. And be okay with that. And finally own my feelings. I realized that I had spent a lot of my life wanting to be in some place other than where I was, and that’s a bodily experience, right? It’s everything. This is everything.
Sara: Yeah, I think a lot about the difference between some place other and being here now.
Gena: Exactly.
Sara: We were talking about what does community actually mean. For me, at least, it’s that I'm walking alongside people. That we’re all here now. We’re all at different places in our lives, maybe, but we’re all here now. If I had to describe the impact of the work we’ve done together, and how I view community, that would be the biggest one. Like learn to fucking ask for help, don’t do it alone. *Laughs* You can ask for what you need and get it. For me, it’s like of course the work that I've done with Gena helps me build a stronger community, because I have a stronger sense of myself. But before you were like “let’s define community a little bit more,” and so I’d love to let you have some space to define it.
Gena: It’s connecting. I can’t know what’s important to me without knowing what I authentically feel. One of the big shifts that’s helped me is my relationship with myself. I've learned how to make that a priority through the work I'm doing now. I no longer push away the uncomfortable feelings and just focus on the positive ones. I'm okay to sit with either what’s unknown or what’s a little bit dark or a little bit edgy or sad. I can actually sit in that and be okay with it.
As a result, that's helped me sit with other people’s darkness. And their joy. It doesn’t rattle me the way it used to. My mother, love her, but bad feelings made her feel really uncomfortable. She always wanted to fix. And I wasn’t asking for that. So that was my model: there’s no space allowed for discomfort. Maybe that's reparenting in some way. That’s helped me build community and build stronger relationships and more intimate relationships in a really positive way. One of the reasons why I think traditional therapy doesn’t work, and it’s worked for me at some times and not at others, is I can control the narrative. I can avoid all the stuff that’s uncomfortable that I don’t want to talk about. So it takes a real exceptional therapist to see past what I'm saying. And that doesn’t always happen. And that’s true for every modality…
Sara: I love that. That absolutely resonates with how I think about it as well. Not a surprise on my end, at least, I trust so much of what you have to say.
The second to last question is, if you could tell the twenty-five-year-old version of yourself anything, what would you say?
Gena: I brought it up before, and I think it’s trust. But at twenty-five, I didn't know what joy was, I didn’t know what being happy really meant. I believed at that point in my life that I was supposed to suffer. That everything was going to be a struggle and a lot of work. Because that’s part of what I saw around me. That’s the first thing that comes to mind in terms of where I was, I was like I'm gonna work hard and help these kids in inner-city Philadelphia, working, teaching, even if it sucks, and I'm depressed and miserable. That’s what I'm supposed to do.
Sara: Joy, ease, and trust. I love it. Last question: how can people work with you?
Gena: People can work with me individually, in person, in New Jersey, or in New York. Online, taking classes. Or coming to workshops in person. And I have retreats.
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