Finding my tribe...

When you find people who not only tolerate 

your quirks but celebrate them with glad cries of

"Me, too!" be sure to cherish them.  Because those

weirdos are your tribe.

I have been feeling out of sorts lately and it wasn't until I reread this quote that I understood at least part of why I was feeling this way - I've lost my tribe.  Feeling as if I've lost my tribe has made me incomplete and that has caused some inner struggle/turmoil.  Because I have often felt as if I walk/dance to the beat of my own drummer, to find individuals who move to the same drum are priceless.  On the flip side of that though, because I'm an introvert, I find it difficult at times to keep with the tribe.  Maybe that's it - I didn't lose my tribe, I was the one who wandered away without leaving a trail of breadcrumbs to find my way home...

Losing this tribe may not have been a bad thing - maybe this is my opportunity to find/join a new tribe.  I'm sure this will mean me going outside of my comfort zone but that may not be a bad thing for me.  I often try to avoid situations that make me feel overly uncomfortable but there are times the most growth happens because of those uncomfortable situations.  If nothing else, when you feel as if you've hit the bottom of the barrel, the only place you can go is up.

Wow... rereading what I've written, I've used quite a few metaphors but I think they help to sum up pretty much how I've been feeling lately.  I'm also trying hard to stop edit my posts as I write them - if that's what popped into my head as I wrote, why overthink it and then change it?  I encourage other people to recognize/embrace how they're feeling at any given time and then I edit myself.  That's something I want to get away from.

This past weekend, I taught at two different studios and I will teach class again tomorrow.  My instructor took a couple of days off so I taught for her yesterday and will teach for her again tomorrow; and I subbed again for the instructor I did last Sunday.  At the studio yesterday I had a private lesson for almost a half hour, a beginner class with 5 people for an hour and then ran choreography rehearsal with 8 people for an hour; the class today was for an hour and a half and there were 6 people in that class.  While my body is sore, I did enjoy taking the opportunity to help these dancers find their "lightbulb moments" when it came to their dancing.  I had dancers tell me that they are thinking about moves in new ways and able to figure out moves that they hadn't before so that's exciting to me.  These "lightbulb moments" are some of the things I miss about teaching...

Something that just came to me is maybe I need to find ways to create "lightbulb moments" for myself in different aspects of my life and see how that works for me.  I want to start challenging myself to not only go outside of my comfort zone but to also do things to push myself above and beyond.  One aspect I definitely want to challenge/push myself is at work.  I know that I need to do something to turn things around at work so it's not such an effort to make myself go in on a daily basis...

Well my dear readers, I have given myself some things to think about and I think the time change might also be catching up with me so it's time to bring this to a close for the evening.  Next weekend we have a huge dancer performance (one of our biggest of the year); I'm running the rehearsal tomorrow after work, Wednesday is our dress rehearsal and some of the gals have asked me if I would work with them either privately or in mini-classes in the evenings - so we'll see how all of that goes...  I hope you have opportunities this week to find your own tribes!  =)