00:00:00 Adge Lindsey
We can’t expect people to enter an art form coming directly from their story. So it was really playful. It just it I I would breathe, everyone else would find that breath. And I started to realize the impact and the power in that. And I also want to couple this with 17 years ago in Crested Butte. I started studying energy work through the School of Light Running and that paralleled my experience of teaching dance. I think it was. You know, those years of just putting it into practice together that I started to realize how profound what was happening in that dance room was. It came together because of deep meditation, being brought into dancers, asking us to arrive and using energy tools. I’m going to say it my teenagers with vouch for me in a very sneaky way.
00:00:53 Matthew Kuehlhorn
Welcome to the Kooler Lifestyle Podcast. I’m your host, Matt Kuehlhorn, and I’m excited to have you join me as I interview community members and business leaders from the communities in which I live, work and serve through my business, Kooler Garage Doors. We’re going to bring you highlights on characters in our communities. Why? Because community matters and I want to know more about who is behind our business and leadership in order to understand and support the community fabric that our relationships make up. And collectively, we can build stronger communities that support our lifestyles, our youth, and our health. Welcome to the Kooler Lifestyle Podcast of your host, Matt Kuehlhorn. Today, I’m sitting down with my friend, Adge Lindsay. She’s being in from Nicaragua. She’s a movement educator and trainer. Adge. Thanks so much for joining us today.
00:01:46 Adge Lindsey
Couldn’t be happier. Thanks so much my friend Matthew.
00:01:50 Matthew Kuehlhorn
Yeah. What’s the weather like down there right now?
00:01:53 Adge Lindsey
Steady, beautiful dry season. Blue skies every day, late 80s in temperature. It’s.
00:02:00 Matthew Kuehlhorn
Pretty magical.
00:02:01 Adge Lindsey
Yeah, I know you’re all ready for a thaw like this, yes.
00:02:05 Matthew Kuehlhorn
Absolutely. My wife Annie was just down in Mexico last week and you know, today is I think in the teens. I think it’s going to warm up into the 40s and just be amazing.
00:02:17 Adge Lindsey
Go water so I’ll never forget that love of just the the stoke. Even being a far all winter, every time it was jumping I could just feel it in my body. You know, like you’ve been being far away. I’m like, you get it. All that lushes of water so epic I can for the valley.
00:02:32 Matthew Kuehlhorn
Snowfall. Yeah. Adge. Where did you grow up?
00:02:38 Adge Lindsey
So I grew up in the Philadelphia area. I was mostly raised with my father and he worked a lot and I was very independent in my childhood. I will just dive right in and say most of my time outside of school was dance. I started dancing at a very young age of just 2 1/2. I was probably barely walking. And it became, it became a great love in my life and it really directed, you know, my ability to have a safe space in all those years of transformation and all the wildness of being a kid in a city in a broken family dance was really my access point. And it’s funny to think about because it was so technique driven. It was really just falling in love with the true structure of dance. There was nothing we were happening at all. It was very, very technical training our very pinnacle vernacular genres, and my teachers were very, very strict and I loved it. I loved every bit of that, and I realized now that that foundation of technique just became a launchpad for me to. Explore movement in a way that takes all of that superpower of knowing the technique of anything, skiing, running, anything that makes you more efficient and safe, and break all the rules. So really, when I stepped into leadership in Crested Butte, I would say that entire foundation came with me and I was given this huge opportunity to rewrite that contract with dance to do it away. I hadn’t seen it. And still bring those big qualifications of deeply knowing and revering education and technique and then bringing breath into the classroom and allowing students to crack open to the bigger gifts that I believe movement can bring us. So stumbled upon it really in that first whole bit of my life growing up in Philadelphia and couldn’t be more thankful for that deep training as I now take it in to other realms just entirely following my intuition and. Spreading that light, I spread who I am through dance and through movement most readily, and it’s just it’s where I shine. So I’m grateful for that. It was my therapy, Philly. It just, it gave me my grit. It gave me my drive like I love the East Coast style, still dearly in my heart. And when I arrived in Colorado about 21 years ago, it was like half my life ago. When I left that technique world behind, I arrived in Colorado and had no idea if I would even find dance again. And slowly I started interweaving with our local nonprofit, the Crested Butte School of Dance. And immediately that drive in me, that of that fire, that passion immediately got me woven into more leadership, and that’s really how it rolled. It was nothing I mapped out or planned out or tried for. I, like, signed up for a jazz class and in three months was teaching it. So I feel like even right there, it’s a great trace of how I just followed my intuition. And then arriving in a chill, beautiful mountain town, being a fireball took me a long way. It was kind of perfect. I like to be the starter of things, so I really got the opportunity to grow a nonprofit school of movement in a way that was entirely based in serving community. See that mission, to really tap into our hearts and connect inside so that we can connect with the beings around us and ultimately serve the greater good, became the foundation of dancing her Valley, I would really say. And this was not me singlehandedly, this was a team of us envisioning this for Crested Butte many years ago and watching that ripple like beyond what we even could have dreamed to begin with. That was all following intuition, that was just seeing those little pinnacles of light and saying yes, and then again, having the wisdom and the wherewithal to say, I know how to put this into action because I have the training. And that world of breaking boundaries and being rebellious in those structures has created hundreds and thousands of pathways for dancers to find journeys, people who didn’t even know they were dancers. So yeah, I’m glad I came in with my fireball energy. And wasn’t afraid to kind of conquer. And that’s all my East Coast grit for sure.
00:07:20 Matthew Kuehlhorn
Yeah, that is, that is grit from the East Coast. I totally get that. How did you end up finding Crested Butte or how did it find you?
00:07:30 Adge Lindsey
Crested. You OK? I’ll connect those dots pretty quickly. The imagery of a map is kind of perfect. I traveled to Colorado one time when I was 12 years old with my grandparents. And I fell in love. In the summer we went to Keystone and Breckenridge. It was for a work meeting. And I fell so much in love that I took everything that said Colorado on it home with me. And I hung the map that we had in that hotel room up on my wall hall. And it stayed on that wall until I packed my bags and drove out to Colorado. At 19 years old. I looked at my dad and basically said I’m going to Colorado. And he said that’s a really big state. And I said. Yeah, I’ll find my place there, then we’ll figure it out. I had no idea where it was going. Landed in Fort Collins, got myself finished with my undergrad, worked my butt off, took a lot of great Rd. trips in between semesters, and really just opened my heart to living out West and created a beautiful relationship with a native of Crested Butte. So it was easy from Fort Collins to start building that bridge to Crested Butte. And I’ll just say on a complete energetic level, from the first time I took a road trip up there, a crew of us went up to crash at this friend’s parents house. I knew it. I entered that valley. You know, we all know that turn right before CVS when, like, the whole expansiveness appears before you. And I was like, oh, it wasn’t even like I’m going to move here. It was like, Oh yeah, I remember this place. And that was it. I would became my goal as soon as I finished that undergrad degree I was coming to Crested Butte.
00:09:12 Matthew Kuehlhorn
What was your degree in for undergrad?
00:09:14 Adge Lindsey
My undergraduate degree is actually anthropology and geology, and I think that’s really cool because I see how that weaves perfectly into my love of culture and travel. And I look at these pieces of me and I see how that component of my life really opened my paradigm to expand. My ability to see people differently and all of that always came into dance as well. But now, of course, it’s serving us as we’ve made this big family change, to be living in Central America in a whole different culture. That anthropological work is really what brought me down here.
00:09:50 Matthew Kuehlhorn
But I love that. I can only imagine being a dancer. You get connected to your your body early on. You go through this fundamental traditional style training very regimented, and as you grow, you have this experience of of opening up. How does that relate to not just seeing people, but feeling them as well? Because you’ve been speaking a lot around feeling intuition and energetics, and I can only imagine my assumption is that you have this innate ability through your body to feel others. Is that true?
00:10:29 Adge Lindsey
100% thank you. I that was so beautifully said and I appreciate you seeing me in that way. Just having been community members so long knowing each other. It always starts as a personal journey. And like I said as a child, because I could go to my inner landscape with those tools and help myself feel into areas that I wasn’t finding in my physical life, I wasn’t finding in my networks of support and nonsupport around me. I think the next step of that really becomes putting it into practice. Being gifted 14 solid years of teaching dance in a classroom setting where everyone’s story walks in that room with them. I had to very quickly pull a room of sometimes 22 to 25 teenagers or adults. I mean, it doesn’t really matter. Whoever you are, you’re coming in. With so much already in the body that in order to create the space, it became very obvious to me that we needed to bring in tools of meditation. We needed to really bring in that space of drop in. We can’t expect people to enter an art form coming directly from their story. So it was really playful. It just it I I would breathe, everyone else would find that breath and I started to realize the impact and the power in that. And I also want to couple this with 17 years ago in Crested Butte. I started studying energy work through the School of Light Running, and that paralleled my experience of teaching dance. I think it was, you know, those years of just putting it into practice together that I started to realize how profound what was happening in that dance room was. It came together because of deep meditation being brought into dancers. Asking us to arrive and using energy tools. I’m going to say it. And my teenagers would vouch for me in a very sneaky way. Not in like a deceitful, sneaky way. But calling something jazz class and then having a transformational experience was how everything multiplied. And I think that was another big part of my superpower. Running a nonprofit, feeling into community. What does community really need? Oh, it needs for this to feel. Accessible. It doesn’t need to be exclusive, It doesn’t need to be one thing, But so many more people will find this space if it is that open. And I think that that’s the part of it too. I was feeling not only within the classroom, those vibes and those energies and how much more impactful movement was when we came to ultimate presence, but also the more expansive container around us, what our actual community needed and how our mission was really rising up to serve that. Yeah, it’s so.
00:13:28 Matthew Kuehlhorn
Cool. It’s so cool. Adge. I love the the fact that you’re talking about feeling, and I’ve got a question that I kind of want to tee up a little bit. And for the listener, I think this is important. Whether you as a listener are running a business or a family or a community member, this all applies because I think I want to get your insight on this Adge, but I think from my perspective. Like, growing up, I definitely was disconnected from my body, and in that disconnection I lose a little bit of the ability for intuition and empathy and I stay way up in my head. Now when you were talking about people coming into the classroom and bringing their stories with them, like one of my questions is what does our body carry and how does dance in a connection to feeling the body? Help move some of the maybe all disempowering stories.
00:14:31 Adge Lindsey
Beautiful question. I would like to relate this to a part of my intuitive dance methodology that I play with called how energy can move from the outward body to the inward landscape or vice versa. And I think with dance and body sentimentality, we’re really talking about that outer body into the inner landscape. We have this world of meditation around us where maybe sometimes we can really aim to be that Buddha that’s sitting under the tree, perfect place of Zen, and life doesn’t really match that. That’s what I feel. I’m a fireball. Like I said earlier, I have a lot of energy that just like sitting down and dropping in and letting everything fall away took a really long time of training when I think of the actual physical body. We have so much information that allows us to not have to just go right to the center of the mind, that zero point, but instead we can start with literally, like, where am I right now? Touch myself in time and space. Literally. Oh, I’ve arrived right here in this room. Why did I arrive here? A bigger question immediately becomes, oh, why did I write her to listen to my heart? To listen to my breath. To be right here, right now. To get stronger. To learn choreography, to make a show Okay. Suddenly presence is pulled in and intention is naturally made. The physical body alone also just store stuff, right? We take a moment to close our eyes and breathe. We can feel the little glitch in the neck. We can feel the hip feeling a little unsettled. We may naturally take. A few little like movements in our office chair. Once in a while we are moving energy. Even when we were doing something that simply, it is most often the outer body giving us those signals. So how do we then, in a forum of more intentionality and spiritualism, just use that information, It is readily available and it becomes our dance. It doesn’t even have to be. A giant extravagant dance. We’re not talking about that. It’s a dance of breath and heartbeat rhythm. If we can just allow that space of like this is how I feel right now and this is how I’m just going to move that energy. There is no judgment, there is no attachment and for sure there is no expectation of outcome or exact pinpoint goal. It is just to allow and that’s the practice. We’re always talking about these modalities being a practice to life. Here I am right now. Why am I here? What am I accomplishing? Let’s move energy toward that. I got this.
00:17:13 Matthew Kuehlhorn
Yeah, I love that. I mean, emotion is energy in motion and the body, the movement, the breath. I had a great voice coach in this forum and we were talking about something similar to where. The breath, the voice, the movement can all be a door that opens you up to presence, spirit, and that can get pretty woo. But there’s a lot of practicality to it as well. And So what are some of the benefits that you’ve seen in yourself or others, just as they engage with movement and start feeling the body again?
00:17:56 Adge Lindsey
Wow, I think. I’ll give you the biggest whammy and it kind of more so relates to the last question you asked. It actually allows the story to arise. You know, we are in Fast forward motion, So much of our lives and our cells, our very cells show us the science of energy, shows us that we store information and we repel information and we’re doing this in our atoms all the time, right? Like this is a nobrainer. Our bodies are made-up of all these atoms and cells doing exactly this over and over and over again. If we lose the opportunity to slow down and allow all of it to come kind of out in the field in front of us, and then we get to breathe into each one and decide what parts of those things in our story are really important to integrate and what pieces were not ours. We have to have that personal odometer of saying, like, OK, this much isn’t mine and I’m going to dump it out. How do we dump it out? We have to find that rhythm in our own selves, and it doesn’t look the same for everyone. We have to be able to figure out how we gauge those places. And the physical body, like I said, already has the information. Are we really tired? Then what does that dance look like? How does it look to feel so sluggish day after day? You know what? What does the voice sound like in that realm? How do, how does it change everything in your physicality? Okay. Let’s and now take those concepts and try to place them into a word or a texture or emotion that it’s probably representing that we’re processing. And now how are we going to process that out? We’re going to figure out cleansing it with breath, Cleansing it with heartbeat. And really releasing it. And that is the dance. It is so risky. It is so challenging and it is so rewarding to allow your own information to arise, to let it literally be embodied by every cell to the point that it is moving you. And then really taking that moment of integration for all of it to land exactly where it needs to land. And stepping back into our lives with new breath and energy, as well as like that concept that it’s going to just change in increments. That’s why we have to do it a little bit every day, a little bit every day. This is not a big whammy one time, you know, experience. This is our little bit of dancing every day with ourselves.
00:20:41 Matthew Kuehlhorn
On that note, I’m curious from your perspective, like couldn’t you take the perspective that? Every day, every moment, every moment you’re in dance.
00:20:53 Adge Lindsey
1000% I mean, that is really the pinnacle of what I teach, how I teach, what I believe, and what a lot of what was founded in the dance community and Crested Butte revolves around. Because that value system is strong. We were all born with a heartbeat. We immediately came into this world and sync with nature. Everything around us dances. We know this. These little isms and taboos in our culture have actually the most profound meanings. Everything dances, us included, for sure. We’re doing a dance with our teenager, right? Ooh, do I push them too far? I want this morning to go really well. I want to have a great dinner tonight. I want them to feel good energy today. How do I do this dance this morning? You know, we’re doing this dance with our work. Am I being seen? Am I putting enough into it? Am I getting enough out of it? What other decisions do I need to make? We’re doing the work life balance dance all the time, right? Am I working too much? Am I loving myself enough? This is all a dance. I mean, we are constantly breathing and dancing. That is the simplest way to put it. Absolutely yes. So.
00:22:05 Matthew Kuehlhorn
Let’s shift a little bit and we’ll start getting closer to summarizing this conversation, which I know we could. Probably open up and go for hours because there’s so many, there’s so many rabbit holes that can go deep in this conversation. But I want to get to practicality. So for a listener who maybe isn’t connected with their body or maybe they like dance, but they see it as spur of the moment stuff and and random like what are some practical pieces that can introduce some of these concepts? Ideas introduce the feeling of body. What might I be able to do this afternoon or tomorrow morning? Do you have some daily practice that you engage with? What’s some of the practicality? What can we give folks?
00:22:51 Luke Hylton
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00:23:26 Adge Lindsey
That’s great. Well, that’s an easy one. In one sentence, everything I teach is following your intuition. So the first part of that is genuinely there is nothing more therapeutic potentially, than turning on a song you love and dancing to it. I mean, it is plain and simple. You actually don’t have to learn anything or in the car or you know, you can integrate it. In a way that is impactful without adding a whole lot of new training, I’m taping taking that a step further. A big, a very focused point of my intuitive dance method relies on something as simple as the brain dance. And the brain dance was founded by Ann Gilbert, and she has a few very simple measures that just talk about ways in which the brain specifically wake up. I used to tell the teenagers, just do these five things right before a test. And you have moved your body and awakened your brain, and those are tapping, brushing, squeezing, shaking and bouncing and anything cross lateral, so crossing the midline. So how quickly could you just make a little sticky note of those five actions and right then and there before your big day, you can do those I want.
00:24:40 Matthew Kuehlhorn
To repeat those again the five, repeat the five.
00:24:43 Adge Lindsey
Tapping, squeezing, brushing, shaking, or bouncing. Than anything cross lateral. Those are the five that I choose to use from the brain dance in my intuitive dance method. And I will only I’m going to give you one more acronym just for fun and we’ll see if it weaves in on a bigger scale. If you are a dance educator and you are someone already deeply connected in dance, I had a really fun download from Spirit and my methodology is now, you know, being trademarked. And it is the way that I’m spreading light to actual educators themselves to hold space and dance in this more spiritually aligned sense. And I just want to play that acronym is the word dancer. And my point in a class setting or in a daily practice is that every daily practice has DA drop in a alignment and a period of noticing C creating, E expressing and then R restoring. So that acronym of Dancer is where we want to start taking our classes and really bringing a well-rounded experience into the dance environment itself.
00:25:58 Matthew Kuehlhorn
I see a huge business application for Dancer.
00:26:01 Adge Lindsey
Whoo, isn’t that fun? I have a really fun graphic. I have a great support system right now. Getting that going.
00:26:08 Matthew Kuehlhorn
I love that. I love that.
00:26:12 Adge Lindsey
Thank you.
00:26:13 Matthew Kuehlhorn
Yeah, Adge. How do people reach out to you? You’re down in Nicaragua, I’m sure you’re on social website. And you know, if somebody’s interested in just learning about dance or you’re just speaking to dance educators themselves, how do we engage? How do we find out more?
00:26:32 Adge Lindsey
Super. Well, my name is Adge and that’s A D G E and I play with that. That is my whole tagline. So anywhere you want to go with that, it’s adge_of_wellness. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adge_of_wellness/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/adgemarz That started because of my yoga teacher Yoga teacher trainings. My fellow teacher started calling me that Adge of Wellness, epic Adge playing with my name. So e-mail awesome because it’s so direct and quick ageofwellness@gmail.com and then the website is the same ageofwellness.com and then Instagram handle the same @adge_of_wellness. Thanks for asking.
00:27:07 Matthew Kuehlhorn
Yeah, absolutely. We’ll include those links in our show notes and and make sure people know how to reach out to you. Adge, Closing thoughts. Where do you want to leave people?
00:27:17 Adge Lindsey
I would love to simply leave everyone with the sentiment, kind of. We’ve touched on this a little bit, but I would like to leave everyone with the sentiment that we all have everything we need inside of us already. That’s it, we do and when we. Create pathways with intention behind them to explore what is inside of us. Everything expands in our lives, everything becomes lighter, everything becomes healing. Doesn’t mean it’s not difficult anymore, just means we have the movement to kind of get through it. Really important stuff. So thank you so much for running to speak to it today.
00:28:01 Matthew Kuehlhorn
Yeah, Adge. Thank you. I appreciate what you bring into the world. I’m really glad we can connect. And what a beautiful message. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for listening to the Kooler Lifestyle Podcast. We count on your subscriptions, your likes, your shares, and I encourage you to do that. Now, if you’re watching on YouTube, go ahead and subscribe. Lower right hand button. If you’re on audio, download this, share it. And we look forward to having you on the next one.