Movement for a World on Fire

With International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month, March always ignites my Girls on Fire work. This theme has a year-round presence at Spiral Studio, from our lending library and picture of Octavia Butler on our back wall to many of our oracle decks—reminders of the heroines who inspire us to show up fully.
When my Girls on Fire book was published in 2018, the timing seemed to be fortuitous. For years I had been teaching about the dystopic qualities of the U.S. through a Girls on Fire lens and arguing that there are many places in the world that are living the kinds of dystopian realities that Girls on Fire navigate in fictional contexts. 

Many people would say that they don’t want to read dystopian fiction because it is too dark and depressing, but I have always experienced these novels as the opposite. For those of us who love to read young adult dystopian fiction, we find possibility and hope—for the future, but perhaps even more so for the present.
I hoped that my Girls on Fire work would inspire people to work together to build a better future. And maybe it did. . . .

For several years I taught college classes on the theme of Girls on Fire and they were always full. I also taught yoga and dance classes, combining embodied movement with inspirational and aspirational ideas. When I went to Denmark on a Fulbright grant, I engaged with European graduate students and our Girls on Fire work was featured in a collection of essays that I collaborated on with a colleague. 

We were working on the final edits for Teaching Girls on Fire in 2020, just as the COVID-19 stay at home orders were issued and we added a paragraph to our preface:

In the time between the completion of this book and the final edits, the world has changed. The COVID-19 pandemic has made dystopia all the more real. . . . Resiliency, community, agency, and self-care are just some of the Girls on Fire lessons we can teach our youth and ourselves. As Katniss reminds the powers that be in her world, and many memes remind us in our world, “If we burn, you burn with us!” This is a promise as much as it is a threat. We’re all in this together and the future is bright when we help our girls burn brighter.

But this message was subsumed by the very real fears and challenges that people were facing. All of the inspiration that we gathered together fell off of people’s radars. The COVID-19 pandemic might have been the first experience that many Americans had with the realities of dystopia.

And then Trump’s second term began and, once again, the world is on fire. Only this time the theme isn’t about disease, with a side of institutional racism. It’s about fascism, the climate crisis, war, economic struggles, identity and culture, ideological battles, and more. Today, the world on fire is, to say the least, a lot.
Perhaps this is why I am feeling the Girls on Fire theme even more acutely this year. People need hope more than ever. Once again, we’re struggling with the ongoing mental health crisis, the increasing divide between the polarized, political left and right, and the attacks on our beliefs and our bodies.

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At first glance, the connection between Girls on Fire—the transformative heroines of young adult dystopian literature—and our embodied movement practices may seem unlikely. But these are exactly the kinds of connections that make Spiral Studio so unique.

On March 8, in Spiral Flow Yoga, we embodied women warriors like Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games, brandishing our bow and arrow to target our goals and standing in a superhero pose grounded in the skills and strengths we each bring to the world.

At Evolve on March 21st, we will explore the Awaken and Energize theme through meditation and movement inspired by Girls on Fire—celebrating empathy, passion, and courage in the face of fascism, climate crisis, and patriarchal violence.

Beyond the studio, I’m teaching a special class at Penobscot Valley Senior College: Burn It All Down without Burning Out: Lessons from YA Dystopia’s Transformational Heroines. This is one of many ways I connect my work at UMA with my creative vision at Spiral Studio, and one of many ways I give back to our community.

These connections—between academia and the real world, between ideas and practices, between physical and social movement—are at the heart of how we survive this world and how we build a better one together.

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Hope lives in the stories of Girls on Fire, but it also lives in our muscles, just waiting to be released through movement. In Kelly McGonigal’s book, The Joy of Movement, she writes about the ways in which movement actually reshapes our brain to make us more receptive to joy and social connection. When we move together, we embody joy and co-regulate our nervous systems. Joy is amplified; security is embodied.

Further, when we move our muscles secrete hormones that “scientists call hope molecules.” Our brain becomes more resilient to stress and our “entire physiology” adjusts to help us to find the “energy, purpose, and courage [we] need to keep going.”

Spiral Studio is the critical  intersection where yoga, dance, embodied movement, and radical rest take root. It is where we connect to joy and hope, where we write new stories and imagine new possibilities. It is where we move together and hold ourselves accountable to everything that is bigger than we are. It is where we care for ourselves and each other, renewing our emotional, physical, and mental bandwidth every time we show up.

How we move matters. If we move out of obligation, out of a desire to get a workout out of the way, we move as an antithesis to joy and hope. If we move in ways that punish our bodies, what else is our movement calling in? If we move in linear, controlled repetitions, what are we embodying? And the less we move, the less likely we are to be moved.

At Spiral Studio—and beyond—we are committed to movement that fosters joy, hope, and connection. What we offer is movement that moves us—more than yoga, more than fitness, more than wellness—it is a space to embody courage, resilience, and the fire within us all. 

Just like our Girls on Fire, we move, we rise, and we ignite. And by doing so we hope to awaken and energize our community to move with us.