A former Cochranite hopes to impart what she’s learned during her decade-long journey exploring the relationship between body movement and wellbeing.
My Little Black Book of Energy is a culmination of Michelle Waines Greenwell’s study, which began as a journey to remedy severe foot pain. The stress of running her dance business as well as three dancing companies manifested in her feet, Greenwell said.
“There was nothing physically wrong with them – if you went and had an X-ray, nobody was going to find anything – but emotionally it had all pocketed in there.”
For Greenwell, simply walking across the floor was an exercise in pain. After she heard about Touch for Health, an alternative holistic health treatment system that involves remediating body movement through different techniques to improve wellbeing, she got in touch with Gary Webb of Whole Body Healing in Calgary and began to study the system.
After starting with simple foot massages, she worked through the system’s processes and slowly the pain dissipated after about a year.
Greenwell should know a thing or two about movement. She founded Dance Debut Inc. here in Cochrane and instructed at the studio for 22 years. Throughout her study and pulling from various backgrounds such as dance, applied kinesiology and Tai Chi, she began to explore and test out different methods on her dance students. From there, the idea of the book took form.
The spark to write the book came from a publishing contest run by Hays House Publishing three years ago. Greenwell spent the whole summer before the contest writing the manuscript and submitted it. The book didn’t win and it went on the backburner while she returned to school for complimentary and alternative medicine. But, after further thought, she decided she was satisfied with the book and decided to self-publish. “It was written the way I wanted to tell it. It was written with the tools that were most important to me so I decided I was going to put it out the way I wrote it.”
The book walks through Greenwell’s background and how she came to develop the techniques and tools. Some of them are simple, such as touching a point on the forehead or deep breathing. Other elements involve dance techniques and other tools she acquired from studies in alternative medicine.
Greenwell said that as she continues to investigate deeper into the book’s subject matter in future, she would provide readers with more research and studies into the techniques. But for now, she said they can simple test it out for themselves.
“You don’t have to read the research; here’s the technique, here’s how it helped me. Give it a try and see what happens.
“The more people that have these simple tools in their hands, the more people will realize they can fix themselves.”
For more information, visit dancedebut.com/get-it-while-its-hot/ or for a copy, email [email protected].
