. . . connect with your spirit in motion
Body Joy sessions blend a lifetime of physical therapy practice and exploration in healing with my deep love of movement and dance. Embodiment is the awareness we have of being in our own skin, a deep, internal perception of how our bodies move, feel, and breathe. We enrich our self-healing power when we fully inhabit our bodies.
My life's work is to coach this awareness, sprinkle it with the magic of music and invite our bodies and spirits into their unique fullness. We deepen our embodiment by bringing attention to its parts; playing with breath traveling through us; feeling our connection to gravity; grounding, centering, opening; feeling release, power, touch and surrender. This interior sense of having a body grows when we move beyond the boundaries of our skin and experience our relationship to others and to community. And, since our bodies love to speak in metaphor, authentic meaning for spirit emerges as we move. As embodiment grows, we sense our fundamental animal nature. We feel how we inhabit the earth and the intimate association of our well being, our connection with all living things and the health of the planet.
Who teaches Body Joy?
My name is Bella (Stacey) Dreizler and it has been a privilege to live in the Sacramento community since 1972. I worked here as a physical therapist for 35 years and owned my own physical therapy clinic until 2005. The clinic offered quality hands on care to thousands of patients and a growth fostering atmosphere for the many therapists who worked there over the years. I sold the clinic in 2005 to invest my energy into fully integrating healing, movement and dance. In beautiful second floor space over my garage in East Sacramento, I continue to see individuals for bodywork sessions. These appointments focus on hands on care, education and support for personal practice; many clients are dance and yoga students.
In 2002 I began to explore the dancing passion I had been born with and I continue to spend many hours immersed in the 5Rhythms, a practice developed by Gabrielle Roth. This free-form dance discipline delivers students to enhanced body awareness through exploration of emotional and spiritual maps. Hours and hours in this practice affected the way I conceptualized my own body in motion and my work in healing. In 2005 I began to teach my own form of movement classes as an expression of all the ways the 5Rhythms world had collided with my professional life. My continued personal immersion in the practice had such an impact on my life that I knew I eventually wanted to bring this unique teaching to the Sacramento community.
In October 2008, after years of prerequisite preparation and a final year long immersion with 80 other dancing souls from around the globe, I received official teacher certification in 5Rhythms. Since it is not a practice that one learns intellectually, I continue to be astounded by the analytical, technical nature of learning to teach the practice. The intuitive dancing road I had been traveling all those years was more closely linked to my professional life than I had ever imagined.
As my ties to the clinical world of physical therapy wane, I am increasingly drawn to the practice of yoga. It provides a balance to the dance and a fresh perspective for feeling my body in motion. Eighteen months immersed in the kundalini form satisfied my fascination with the connection of breath, movement of energy, and the chakras. Since then I have opened my exploration of yoga to a myriad of forms. Yoga Moves classes blend the pragmatics of physical therapy and the spirit of yoga.
My continued devotion as a student of dance and yoga, my immersion in music, my work with clients, and the amazing hours as witness holding space on the dance and yoga floor . . . all these factors are woven into the fabric of Body Joy, the umbrella term for the classes I teach and the bodywork sessions I offer. This web site reflects the current facets of Body Joy. Stay tuned for developments in the ways we will be playing together in the future.