Returning with Rochelle Schieck
One of the many perks of attending The School of Womanly Arts is that you get to hang with some of the most powerful women on the planet. This is where I met the undeniably ultra-divine Rochelle Schieck, creator of Qoya. Rochelle’s enchanting light is impossible to miss. She allures women to know their soul’s truth through a liberating movement practice that she named Qoya. Weaving the wisdom of yoga, the wildness of creative expression and freedom of sensual dance, it is no wonder that Qoya is the Quechan word for Queen.
It is my great pleasure to introduce Returning with Rochelle Schieck:
If you had the ear of all the women in the world for just one minute, what would you want them to know?
Through movement, we remember. We remember, as women that we are inherently wise, wild and free. Qoya, the movement system I created, is based on this idea that through the wisdom of yoga, the creative expression in dance and the liberation to enjoy oneself through sensual movement we can tap into our essence and feel the sacred dancing through us and us dancing through it. Through movement we can start to feel that same life force that makes trees grow, waves in the ocean rise and fall, dogs’ tails’ wag and the earth spin around the sun is the same pulse of life that animates our own body.
Let’s do an experiment. Shake your right hand for 10 seconds as fast as you can. Then bring both hands up and feel the difference between your right and left hand.
While we may be used to feeling a duller “going through the motions” left hand sort of existence. The zing that you feel in the right hand is always available to you. The feelings of happiness, pleasure, joy, depth, expression, connection to the sacred that we all seek in our outer world are stored within our cells and through movement we can learn to call them out.
Verbally, that’s what I would say aloud. Energetically, I would say to each woman, “With everything that I am, I believe in you.” And I would hope that she believed in herself too.
If you could spend 24 hours with anyone in the world, it doesn’t matter if they are alive or passed on, who would it be and why?
I would want to spend my time with Bob Dylan. The back story is: we are both from Minnesota, both Gemini’s and both identify with the revolutionary/counter culture archetype that pays more attention to the inner intuitive voice than the outer voice or status quo.
I would want to hear stories about l writing songs in the 60′s with the confidence of an old soul in a young person’s body. I would ask about his thoughts on using art, in his case music, as a way to bring voice and expression during times of great change like he did with civil rights and the anti-war movement. I would ask about his creative process and his thoughts on how he maintained his authentic voice for over five decades creating music. I would tell him that I grew up never meeting my father, so in times in my life where I needed fatherly guidance, I would put Bob Dylan on shuffle and surrender to whatever wise words would come through. Right now, I remember a tender time where he reminded me, “She’s got everything she needs, she’s an artist, she don’t look back.”
What is the intersection between shamanism and the divine feminine?
After a passionate study of the divine feminine for many years, I found myself in tears in my first introduction to shamanism. This was an unbroken lineage of energy healing for thousands of years all in service to the divine feminine. The divine feminine being mother earth. Many of the metaphors of healing are done through connection with nature as a way to connect with spirit. One of my most powerful overlaps of the divine feminine and shamanism was during a pilgrimage to the sacred mountain Salkantay outside of Cusco. All of the mountains around Cusco ground a particular energy and this mountain was said to hold the energy of the “Undomesticated Feminine.” In addition, shamans believe that when you die your body goes back to the earth from which you came, your spirit goes to the heavens, but all the knowledge you acquired goes to the mountaintops. Many medicine men and women will hike to the tops of mountains and meditate to access knowledge to their questions. We hiked 16,000 feet over 5 days, took breaks to be in awe at the wild avalanches and at the top of that mountain is where I received the clarity of my message for Qoya that our nature is wise, wild AND free. It was there that I saw that Qoya is an opportunity to express and embody the full range of woman from kind and wise, nurturing and soulful caretakers of spirit, sensual and erotic, fierce and protective and wildly wildly creative. All of us.
I am going to play that word game with you and give you one word and you tell me the first thing that comes to mind: magic.
The first thing I think of is a picture of the universe on a subatomic level. I see the deeper reality that we are all a combination of stardust, of light, of vibration and as woo-woo as that may sound modern science, specifically quantum physics, can prove our subatomic nature is mostly atoms dancing in space. So, in honor of that, I think of the peak of Qoya’s free dance portion of class replicating that vision. Everyone moving their bodies as wise, wild and free in space. Quoting Albert Einstein, I would substitute the word magic below for miracle. I pray that we open more and more to the magic and the miracles that are always there.
“There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” -Albert Einstein
