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Who teaches Body Joy?
My name is Bella (Stacey) Dreizler and I have lived with my family in the Sacramento community since moving here in 1972 to begin a career in physical therapy. I opened Dreizler Physical Therapy in 1990 offering quality hands on care to thousands of patients until 2005. It was time for me to deliver health care to this community by integrating healing and movement in a brand new way. Now in beautiful East Sacramento space, I continue seeing individual clients for holistic physical therapy sessions that focus on hands on care and educational support
for a personal movement practice. Many clients
are dance and yoga students.
This call to change was precipitated in
2002 by a headlong fall into the
5Rhythms dancing path in which I continue to spend many hours joyfully immersed. This practice, developed by Gabrielle Roth, is a free-form dance discipline, a moving meditation that leads the willing student through a landscape of emotional and spiritual maps. Hours and hours in this practice transformed not only the way I conceptualized my own body in motion and my work in healing, but also what I thought I knew about who I was, my relationship to other people and what I was doing in this community. The practice had such a huge impact on my life that I knew I wanted to bring this unique teaching to Sacramento. In October 2008,
after years of prerequisite preparation and
a final year-long immersion, I received
certification to teach 5Rhythms.

As my ties to the clinical world of physical therapy evolve, I am increasingly drawn to the practice of yoga. It balances the dance and provides a fresh perspective for feeling my body in motion. There are a myriad of fascinating forms in this practice and I have studied kundalini, Iyengar and yin. Like most of us, I have dealt with body challenges over a lifetime. Yoga has expanded what I know about the body beyond the confines of clinical Western medicine and my physical therapy intelligence has opened the world of yoga up for me in a very unique way. The yoga classes I offer blend the pragmatic wisdom of physical therapy and the spirit of yoga.
What is Body Joy?
Body Joy is an umbrella term for
my classes and
bodywork sessions. This is my life’s work, a blend
of 38 years of physical therapy practice and exploration in healing with my deep love of embodied movement. What is embodiment? It is an awareness we have of being in our own skin, a deep, internal perception of how our bodies move, feel, and breathe. This I know: we enrich our capacity for self-healing when we fully inhabit our bodies.
We deepen our sense of embodiment by focusing on the body in this present moment; by bringing our attention to the breath, the life force traveling through us; by feeling our connection to gravity; by grounding, centering, opening and closing; by exploring our sense of release, power, touch and surrender. This interior body sense grows as we focus attention beyond the boundaries of our
skin and experience our relationship to space,
other beings, the collective.
And, since our bodies love to speak in metaphor, authentic meaning for soul and spirit emerge as we move. As embodiment grows, we have a sense of our fundamental animal nature, the truth of inhabiting the earth in intimate association with all living things and the health of the planet. This is unique health care delivery that makes a difference in this pivotal time.
Continued devotion as a student of 5Rhythms and yoga, obsession with music, individual work with clients, amazing hours as a witness holding space on the dance and yoga floor
. . . all this is woven into the fabric of Body Joy.
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