The Casual Dance Teacher's Podcast

Hey everyone, this is Maia. Listen, before we get into the episode, I just want to share one thing really quick. I promise it's not salesy.

I am truly just trying to help and put resources out there for everyone. So from December 1st through 12th, I'm offering the 12 texts of Christmas. All you have to do is sign up with your first name and phone number, and I will send you one text per day from December 1st through 12th.

Each text will have some sort of holiday or winter themed activity that you can implement in your dance class, as well as a song suggestion, and some other fun little tidbits that you can implement in your dance classes, regardless of what style you teach, where you teach, what levels, ages, it doesn't matter. It's going to be very varied. There will be value in it for everyone.

In order to sign up, you do have to share your name and phone number with me through the form that is available only in the Casual Dance Teachers Network Facebook group. Join the group. Be sure to answer the group questions when you ask to join so that you will be approved.

You will find the form to sign up for the 12 texts of Christmas pinned at the top of the group. Again, all I need is a name and a textable number, and you will get that content sent right to you daily. I thought it would be fun to do that in a different format, similar to an advent calendar where you are actually opening something every day looking forward to like, oh, what is this fun little tidbit? What is this little gift that I'm getting each day for the first 12 days of December? I know that's a wild time to be a dance teacher.

Things can get really crazy in classes just with the energy of the students and everything else we have going on personally during this time of year. So what better way to like, keep us engaged and keep us pushing through until the end of the season by every day having some little kind of fresh inspiration that we can implement that very day or whenever the next time we have dance classes in our classes. 12 Texts of Christmas, make sure you sign up in the Casual Dance Teachers Network Facebook group.

I will link that group in the show notes for this episode, and I hope to see you there. Now let's get on to the episode.

Welcome to the Casual Dance Teachers Podcast. I'm your host, Maia. No matter who, what, or when you teach, I'm here to share all my best tips and tools, along with real and practical conversations with fellow dance educators to help you be the very best dance teacher you can be.

Let's talk about it. Hey, everyone. Thank you so much for joining me.

I am so super duper excited for today's interview and today's guest, Mariah-Jane Thies. You may also know her as the Radiant Dancer and maybe have come across some of the many, many resources that she shares online. Just to give you a super brief overview before we get into the actual conversation, I will let her share more in her own words.

Mariah-Jane Thies has over 39 years of experience as a dance educator and choreographer. She is an international speaker and presenter and teaches masterclasses, seminars, and workshops in a variety of dance genres and topics. She's a registered RAD ballet teacher, as well as an RAD teacher supervisor and mentor.

She's an Evans Laban-based modern technique certified teacher, Blomberg rhythmic movement training certified consultant, and she was trained in brain dance from the creator herself, Anne Green Gilbert. That is just such a teeny tiny little sample of Mariah-Jane Thies' work. Let me turn the conversation over to her and let her tell you more because she is truly the pro in this field.

Without further ado, let's welcome Mariah-Jane Thies to the show.

Mariah-Jane, I really am excited to delve into all the work that you do with brain-body integration, what that means for dance educators. I just want to start by asking you a little bit about your own background with dance and specifically what it was that led you to get so invested in becoming a dance educator that focuses on the brain-body connection and really thorough understanding of the whole dancer.

Mariah-Jane
Well, that is a fantastic question and I'll try to make it a short answer for you and for your listeners. So like many other dance educators, I did dance when I was young. I think I probably started about age six or so when my sister had asked for dance lessons and I just kind of tailed along as her younger sister with my parents deciding that, you know, got to make it fair.

And I do remember enjoying it, but it didn't feel like a big love. It was just another activity I did because I was a super active kid, grew up in a great neighborhood where, you know, you could climb the trees and build the forts and we had a jungle gym in our backyard and I'd ride my bike to school and it was just that type of free and easy active life. This would be in the 70s.

So you were also the type of time period where you could disappear for 12 hours in the summer, you know, just come home for food or something. So doing my dance and just, you know, ballet and a little tap here and there. It was okay.

I did always play school. I will say that I never played with dolls very much, but I always played school. So I think I always knew from a young age I wanted to be a teacher.

That seed was planted early and my mom had trained to be a teacher as well. So I know she liked that. But there I am as an active kid and one fateful November day at recess, I was out jumping rope or people are doing the rope for you.

And my rhythm, their rhythm, who knows? But the rope caught my ankle and I jumped full force down on a twisted ankle. And of course, I knew I'd hurt myself, went home, told my parents. Yep.

And by that point, of course, it was swollen up like a grapefruit. Yeah. So, you know, what do they do at the emergency room? Oh, you twisted your ankle.

Here's some crutches. And that was kind of the end of it as far as any medical intervention and exploration. But it did change my life on many different ways that are actually all relevant.

You know, when you look at the story of your life, you can always say, well, if it weren't for that, then this wouldn't happen. And that ankle sprain, it actually changed who I was, is the short answer. Meaning I was no longer a kid who trusted and had joy in my body.

I couldn't walk properly for practically a year. I was on crutches for months. I gained a bunch of weight because I'm now just sitting around.

And I just, I switched to academics. I wasn't out playing in the backyard and climbing trees. What was I doing? Well, I guess I might as well become a, you know, an A student.

And as I moved into middle school there, I just focused on that. And dance lessons ended because I had been off for so long. And I got kicked out of my body and didn't trust it anymore.

Because unbeknownst to me, the force of the ankle sprain was so strong that it crushed the bone on the inside and flaked off a little bone chip, which would then rattle about in my joint. And it, it did hurt at any given time. I would say my ankle aches.

I'd say something like my ankle clicked and then it aches. And then it would click and then I'd feel better. But it was weird.

Nobody ever heard of this. I complained about it here and there. But mostly what happened is I just became a klutz in the view of my parents, everybody around me.

Because I could just walk along and at any given moment stumble and fall. Because there'd be a bone chip in the middle of my ankle joint and I didn't function right. This went on for years and years and years.

It was eight years later that Aupana returned to dance, thankfully, because I was part of a very unique high school back there in the mid 80s now, that actually had a dance department. And I got to start dancing again. And I, this time at 15, I loved it.

I was a different person. And I was so thrilled to have the opportunity to try to get back into my body. Because being kicked out of it just felt so wrong.

I mean, it's your home. The four walls and your address are not your home. Your body's your home.

And I wanted back in and I wanted to trust it and love it again. Well, I wound up getting a pain on the outside of my left shin. It was my left ankle that I hurt.

And oh, wow, we get an x-ray for it, thinking there might be a stress fracture. And they happened to get my ankle in the picture and went, Oh, guess what we found? Like, oh, my God. So eight years of me telling them there's something wrong.

Finally, there was something wrong. They went to do some surgery to clear it out. They didn't find the bone chip.

Oh, okay. I only found that out six years later when I needed a second surgery. And this time was told to get a desk job.

I had destroyed the inside of my ankle so much from that bone chip and it not being found in the first surgery that that thing of you wouldn't be walking by the time you're 40 is what I was told. And this diagnosis came to me about a month after I just got my dance teacher degree, because I immediately knew once I was back in dancing, I want to be a teacher and I love dance. Boom.

Of course, it goes together. So clearly, I ignored that advice, but spent all my time wanting to get back into my body, wanting to trust my body. And then as a teacher going, my biggest goal is for no student to ever have an experience, a cue, a correction, anything that would kick them out of trusting their body and feeling the joy of being in their body.

And if I may be so blunt, which I maybe that's why I'm here. I think there's a lot of things said by teachers that inadvertently not just hurt the self esteem. I think we can all talk about that and realize that certain comments do do that to students.

Like I remember being told in college to get my stomach off the floor when I was standing up. Yeah. As in trying to encourage me to use my abdominals.

Well, that doesn't feel very good. But that there's a lot of stuff that goes on that confuses people and misunderstandings and misinterpretations that actually, in essence, kicks them out of their body. And even when I think of the word training, like dance training, I'm like, Oh, the word training implies this conditioning and this narrowing of ways of being of going, you must do it this way.

And this is particular for the dance aesthetic of ballet. And you must be trained to do this. And so many of the cues that I was taught then and that I know are still floating about are so contrary to how the body actually functions that if you were a keen student like I was when I was coming back to it at 15, 16, 17.

And I remember learning things. And I remember being so confused, you know, hearing from my teacher, squeeze a quarter between your butt cheeks, right? Like forgetting to turn out or whatever it was. And I'd be there going, OK, well, I don't want to be a difficult student.

But how are you supposed to keep your quarter in place and take a grand plie at a second, let alone a grand battement at a second? These things didn't make sense to me. And I was such a keener. I was so thirsty to get back to my body and love it and do everything I could to make up for lost time that I would listen to what they'd say.

And if they didn't give us some clarifying thing of like, well, feel it here, you know, feel it when you close your leg, but not when you're opening your leg. Like they never said that. And so what happened was you tell me to do something and I'm a keener and I will do it all the time.

You want me to have my shoulders down? Got it. And I will try to do everything I can ever do with my shoulders pulling down. Well, I now know and I did know then on an intuitive level that that doesn't make sense.

That's not actually how the body functions. So I became very keen to get back. But questioning, questioning what I was taught because it just kept still feeling wrong.

It kept feeling limiting and I was confused. And so I started to really wonder about language. You know, my dad always said I should be a lawyer because I like splitting hairs and I like to argue.

And I was like, no, it's not that I like to argue, but. You know, what do you really mean is really my answer always. And so when I started to teach, when I did get my degree and ignored the get a desk job advice, I really wanted to pay attention to the precision of the language to avoid all the misunderstandings that I know I did that felt wrong in my body.

So it's like my teachers weren't wrong, but it's like they were right 30 percent of the time, you know, like tell me to do X, Y and Z and I'll do it. But it's not something I'm supposed to do all the time. I mean, I think teachers forget that.

Let's say just a plie and a rise, there's a down and there's an up. Why would they not have opposite queuing for when you go down and how the body functions to absorb shock versus how it functions when the shock absorption, that potential energy being used to go up their opposites. So why am I going to hold my sits bones together because I'm squeezing my butt cheeks when I go down? That's not absorbing shock.

Oh, but maybe I'm going to draw them together when I go up. Yeah. And guess what? That's actually true.

There's a change in the pelvis when you land a jump versus when you're going up. But I was never taught that. And I honestly don't know whether my teachers knew that or whether they just would say a cue at one point in time and me, along with probably most other students, would apply it everywhere.

And I think a lot of teachers make that mistake of we're here to only move, move, move, move, move. But what happens is a lot of dancers don't actually understand what's going on. And if the cues given, especially given at a certain time, it kills the natural instincts and natural wisdom of the body.

And I could feel that happening again. And I didn't want that to happen to my students. So I started to really educate myself.

But I'll be honest, this is like back in the late 80s and 90s where there wasn't a lot of education out there for that. There really wasn't. So I mean, I did my anatomy training and all that.

I did the RAD correspondence course, but it was still very dry. And so what I started to do was just constantly ask questions. What does that feel like to you? How does that feel? Because I was so concerned that it felt good to them and felt right to them.

Again, I'll tell you, I think that's probably the biggest thing that makes me a different teacher even back then. Like we're talking now, what, like, oh my gosh, 30 years ago, is that I would ask my students questions. I didn't come in thinking that I know everything and I'm just going to pour that into them like there's some empty vessel to be trained.

I was just so curious to learn more and to realize that I only know what it feels like in my body, but what does it feel like in your body? And can we work together here? We're a team. I'm just the guy, but you know your body. And that also comes from that ankle thing where I said, you know, I was just a kid at 10.

What do I know? So they just sent me off with crutches. Nobody thought to take an x-ray. Even when I complained for years, nobody thought to take an x-ray.

Why? Well, what do you know? You're just a kid. And I look and I go, nope. I was so limited in my life because somebody went, well, I'm the doctor, for example, or I'm the teacher.

And I know your body better than you do. And that is just not true. The only thing I know is what the ballet aesthetic is meant to be.

And I'm going to give you some guidance on how to get there. But you have to tell me how it's feeling in your body. And I got to know if you're understanding it.

So I got to ask questions. And so maybe it's because I'm a natural chatterbox. I don't know.

But I started off teaching dance where there was more discussion in a class. Then I know what that I had. And I think that's an important piece.

Now, I'm best served, honestly, now and even back then, probably, doing more like a workshop thing where I'm digging in with students. Because there does need to be the teachers out there who just do the, let's keep going, let's keep going, build up the stamina, build up the endurance, and rehearse that exam material over and over and over. I love it when I get to work in a team where somebody else gets to do that.

But that I know, and maybe they know, that there's not misunderstandings, misinterpretations, and blockages of the body's wisdom happening. Because nobody ever took the time on the discussions.

Maia
Can I ask you about that phrase right there, blockages of the body's wisdom? Because I have not heard that before. And sounds like that might be the key to what really sets you apart. How are you honing in on finding that? And how would you maybe, once again, this could be like a 15-hour conversation. But, you know, in Sparknotes' version, how would you define that?

Mariah-Jane
Oh, gosh. Okay. Yeah, great question. And I think you're right.

That's probably what really separates me from many, is that I believe in the body's wisdom. I just do. Always have, always will.

And therefore, if there's something that I'm struggling with, or a student's struggling with, is it that we really need to get stronger, more flexible, or know something more? Or do we need to open up the intelligence of the body? And I think it's the open up the intelligence of the body. The body knows how to move. The body knows how to absorb shock landing from a jump.

The body knows how to take off. The body knows how to stretch. And so, yeah, I became curious with what are all the reasons for the blockages? And is it imbalanced in the muscles from training? Could be.

Could it be that cue that's misinterpreted, that's holding something? And it's often that the student is trying to do something from the outside in. They're looking to the aesthetic. And so they're not asking the body to create it.

So how would you go about changing your paradigm, which might be a little bit ego-shattering, to kind of go, your students show up knowing a lot. Because if they're 15, they've been in their bodies for 15 years. If they're eight, they've been living in their body for eight years, and they've leapt over puddles before.

They know how to do a leap, right? They actually know how to do it. So let's watch what we're telling them about that. No, no, no, you don't know how to do a grand jeté.

Well, maybe you don't know yet or you haven't refined yet the look of a grand jeté, but you do know how to leap. So let's always start there. So my suggestion would be looking into the developmental movement patterns.

That we all ideally go through and to just look at those basics as being something that's ideally encouraged to fully emerge and to always draw that part out first. And that our job is to draw that out completely and to just be very, very careful and patient with the refinement of the movements. I think teachers ask too much refinement of an aesthetic too soon.

And therefore, the emergence of that basic fundamental pattern that's there gets interfered with. I even do that in a class. Let's say, of course, my 10-year-olds would know how to skip.

I believe that they should be allowed to skip in what some people would consider to be a horrifyingly sloppy manner. But to do that first. Why not start class with, you already know this.

Okay, off we go. You're just taking some skips. It's like progressions.

Going up the ladder and letting yourself go, I'm going to do a basic skip. Then I'm going to pay attention to my sense of space. Oh, then I'm going to pay attention to maybe being a little bit more intentional about my push-off.

Boom. And then I'm going to neaten up the shape when I'm in there to kind of organize myself. And bit by bit, you refine it.

And I think so many teachers are so eager and students buy into it. They're so eager to make the movement look right that they kind of kill the essence of the movement in the process. And so studying the developmental movement patterns would be huge.

So I got my teacher degree in 93 and started teaching and doing RAD and all that. And thankfully, just a few years later in 99, I came across a gentleman by the name of Bill Evans and began studying with him. And where he brings the Laban work and Vartuniev work into modern dance.

And I immediately felt like I found my tribe. Where I'm like, oh, wow, if I just think like this and my body's open to organizing around my spine. Boom.

It's when I suddenly felt smart again in my body. My very first class, and I'm getting goosebumps even talking about it. My very first class going, if I think of, you know, this particular full body organizational pattern when I'm doing, let's say it was just Samadhaj in the center.

Suddenly I felt smart in my body again. I felt like I had the coordination. I had the strength.

And yet, you know, a week before I would still have been like, well, when I get stronger. And I think that's a mantra teachers impart to their students that it's always about strength or flexibility. So looking to the patterns of connectivity coupled with language, it finally gave me the language to actually be clear with students about what the real foundations are.

Mm hmm. And so that one, that changed my life for a while, just delving into that. And there's a lot of places you could look into that if you wanted to look into like the work of brain dance, for example, a term coined by Anne Green Gilbert.

Yeah, that's all about developmental movement patterns. And I've done my own course on it, of course. And then, you know, driving to the part that's really different that we introed about like the brain integration piece.

Like, when did that start? Because again, I think there are dance teachers out there that do come from the developmental patterns perspective. I think that's more in modern dance. I'd love to see that more in ballet.

Yeah, but the brain integration piece, honestly, I'm going to credit Bill Evans, you know, doing that. And then I heard about Anne Green Gilbert calling it brain dance. And quite literally, it was a Google search to learn more about brain dance that I don't know, a page or two down on a scroll.

I came up with brain gym and I was curious. I went, well, what's that?

Maia
I had the same question. Actually, it wasn't until I was reading up on you. That was the first time I ever saw that phrase.

Mariah-Jane
Yeah, well, it was just kind of that lucky scroll. I mean, sometimes we scroll and we never get anywhere.

But somehow, the algorithm did not give me more brain dance. It gave me brain gym. And unbeknownst to me, too, one of my closest friends at the time, her husband taught brain gym.

So this was in 2008. And poof, that summer, what am I doing now? Well, of course, I'm taking a brain gym course. And I went down all of that for years, got certified in 2014.

And then the next year also got certified in the work for the reflex integrations. And that's when I kind of go, OK, now I'm really on to the real foundations that we all need. And I don't know if the dance world's ready for it.

I hear some people say they are and some people say they're not. Because I think of a little snow globe and I'm coming along and shaking it up and saying, hey, guys, you know what? How we've been warming up in the dance world for decades or centuries even. No, sorry.

We're missing a piece. We're missing a piece. And maybe that wouldn't be true if there's people listening who've been teaching 20, 25 years.

You would definitely go, oh, yeah, students of today are different than they were before. And yeah, they are. And then you could even talk about the pandemic.

They're different pre-pandemic to now. And the differences are, quite frankly, that students didn't have, like when I said, you know, I could go out in the summer for 12 hours and play and climb trees and run and do all that. They don't have that anymore.

And they have different pressures and stresses, including screens and looking at screens, which is stressful because it's confusing to the brain to look at a two-dimensional thing. So the students of today come to us in a stressed state in ways that they never used to. And that stressed state affects their ability to learn and to perform.

And if we do not address the brain integration state prior to starting all the other stuff, I liken it to you're pouring all this wonderful, all these great ingredients, let's say, into a bucket with a hole in it. And I think teachers of today and students of today are getting so frustrated because they're not doing first things first, which is going, you know what? If your student is coming to you from school, learning is inherently stressful. And there's good stress and there's distress.

And the tipping point between the two is different for everyone. So if I'm at school and I'm learning, it could be great. Maybe you love the classes you did today, or maybe today was a stressful day and there was a social pressure.

Oh yeah, and I spent an hour on my phone, so now I'm disconnected. And I show up, it's like, no, you're not ready. You're not ready to learn until we get the brain integrated, ready to actually put the learning into long-term memory, where you actually retain things, whether that's choreography or just an idea.

I mean, how many times has a teacher, you know, polished a pas de chat in the first 32 counts of choreography, only to have to stop a minute later and polish the next pas de chat? And you're like, what the heck? And that tells you they're not trying to be bad learners or lacking in motivation, all that. It didn't integrate. There was nothing for it to hang on to.

So addressing the brain integration state, I think, and it doesn't have to take long, but if we started to do that at the beginning of every dance class, almost on the assumption that they were stressed, we would see far different results. And that would be the piece that, you know, when you said about the blockages of the body's wisdom, if I'm in my integrated state, if I'm like, in essence, you know, the term like firing on all cylinders, guess what? I'm probably confident and motivated and able to trust my body. And boom, I've removed all the blocks right there.

Maia
Yeah, I love this because I have written down from your website where it says like the great, I forget, I might be botching the wording. I apologize. But like a great dancer has to be integrated, embodied and expressive.

And I wrote that down to kind of ask you about like what goes into each of those. And actually, over the course of our conversation, now I've gotten the answer to kind of each of those. It's a very condensed answer of, you know, once the body is integrated, and they feel embodied, then it kind of puts them in a state where they can be expressive. So it all goes together.

Mariah-Jane
Absolutely. You know, I remember a very potent moment when I was doing a private with a student getting prepared for an exam.

And I heard myself reminding her to smile while she jumped. And I suddenly went, wait a minute. Why am I reminding you to smile? Are you actually enjoying doing the jumping? And then she actually, in a private lesson, wound up crying and coming out with no, actually, I don't.

And I'm afraid of this and all that sort of stuff. And I went, oh, my gosh. So if we're busy reminding our students to dance and put feeling into it and smile or whatever it is, it's like, wait a second.

Isn't it supposed to be joyful? Yeah. Even in class and our unique expression. So the top of the pyramid to me is being an expressive dancer.

But I can't express anything if I'm not even in my body yet. And that was a piece the ankle injury taught me. And then the integration piece came later when by that point, I'd also had other life things that absolutely blew my circuits in terms of stress, like fight and flight and all that.

And I got to learn about brain integration. Part of my reason for doing all the brain gym studies was even just my own personal development of getting out of fight and flight from some life events that had happened that had really kind of, again, blew my circuits. So I then went, OK, I've been struggling in my life to be embodied, but maybe I'm struggling to be embodied because I'm not in a brain integrated state.

I can't be enjoying and feeling my body when I'm in a fight or flight or fight, flight or freeze. So then the brain integration piece, I'm like, well, that really comes first. Now, teachers and students, you know, maybe you want to still keep starting from the expressive part.

But I do encourage you to consider a bit more about the embodiment. And if the embodiment's looking at all like a struggle, again, go back a step and address the integration. It really doesn't have to take long, but it can be super profound.

You know, when you try to come up with a brand, right, like the Radiant Dancer. I mean, to me, that's about my inner light coming out with no blocks. So I'm radiating out.

And then also Radiant Dance Teacher. Now you're radiating it out and sharing it. So that expressive dancer is radiant.

OK, but if we remove the blocks to allow that to happen, it's actually different than teaching. If I'm honest, I don't always feel like I'm teaching. I feel like I'm guiding and releasing and encouraging.

And it's like giving gifts of opportunity instead of just knowledge, if that makes sense. Yeah, I love that. Yeah, it's a different it's a very different approach.

And when I was more pouring in and just reminding them to smile, remind them to point their feet and all that stuff. Wow, what a great recipe for burnout as a teacher. Yeah, because you feel like they're always boring your brain and you get frustrated.

Yeah. Yes, you're on a loop. And I remember also going like, I love this.

And yet, if I have to say point your feet another 10,000 times this week, times 30 more years, I'm going to shoot myself in the head because I cannot I cannot keep doing it this way. And so, you know, just be curious and say, well, hang on, how could I do it differently and still get the same results? And if you believe in the body's wisdom, that to me is your first thing. It's always coming back to that.

And Bartenieff, that I'd study with Bill Evans, would be so pleased. Never met her, but I met one of our main people she taught, Peggy Hackney. Yeah, and her answer for all of her discoveries was, let's return to the body.

You know, as in like the body will always know. And the body doesn't lie. You know, the body knows.

So, yeah, if you're a dance teacher, isn't it because you love being in the body? Well, make sure you're keeping that piece alive for yourself and for your students. And just realize that the stresses of today's world. I mean, gosh, I wouldn't want to be a 13 year old today at going to school with social media and all that stuff.

Oh, yeah, it was hard enough in the 80s. But to do it now, we just have to accept that they're under stress. And it's our job as people who have the opportunity to do this is to help them to be integrated.

And because you do integration techniques through the body, it fits so perfectly in the dance world. Right. You know, because it's just use movement, but in this specific way for just a few minutes.

And now you're off and off you go. And what a gift. Yes.

Maia
Yeah. Speaking of gifts, you've given us such a huge gift by being here today. I really, truly feel like this is, as you said, just the seed, like planting the seed for people, because I would love to just talk your ear off now with follow up questions.

But for the purpose of the format of the podcast, let's just go into where can folks learn more? Because you offer a heck of a lot of resources. And so let's just direct people there and then they can delve in a lot more. So can you give us the rundown of where people can connect with you and learn more?

Mariah-Jane
So I do have a website, radiantdancer.com. There's a bunch of workshops and things there quite a few of my workshops have been turned into courses of varying Depth and degree and all that all of them though kind of fit into one of the integrated embodied or expressive depending on where you want to start. So radiantdancer.com and there's of course a contact email there. I Do have a private Facebook group, but generally you're accepted in if you answer the questions and I can tell you're a dance teacher .The Radiant Dancer on Facebook please join the conversation there.

There's about 3,000 members now. I'd love to see it get some not so much bigger, but I kept it private so that people could ask the questions that maybe they're sometimes shy to ask In other forums to kind of go know like let's all really support each other here. So I'd love to see that more.

I do have a YouTube channel where there's almost a hundred videos there.

So lots of resources there and One little extra gift I'm offering now is if you are a listener to this podcast I will keep the code up for quite a while. Maybe like even six months that if you put in the code Radiant25 because we're doing this in 2025 and it's for a 25% discount on any of the courses that I have

Maia
Awesome.

Mariah-Jane
Yeah, well and and may I just say I'd encourage people, you know pick your thing that most interests you like there's a foot course and an imagery course and a port de bras course so there's a lot of embodiment and expressive stuff there, but if I have Successfully said hey, let's look at the brain integration piece first Then check out the missing link course that would probably still be your best place to go first To kind of help move you along and some ideas. Yeah.

Maia
Awesome, Mariah-Jane. Thank you and I also will just mention that I will put links to these resources and that code in the show notes for the Episode that way folks that are listening, you know It's a lot to take in and they can just go right to the show notes and that information will be there.

Mariah-Jane
Oh wonderful. Thank you.

Maia
Yeah, of course I just really appreciate you taking the time to share what you could with us today And of course to close I wanted to ask if you have a favorite quote relating to dance.

Mariah-Jane
Yeah, actually I'm gonna go back to Bartenieff. Irmgard Bartenieff. "Let's return to the body."

Maia
Hey there, this is Maia joining back in just to close up with my final thank-yous; of course to Mariah-Jane again for sharing so much in such a short time We tried to pack in as much as we could and I really appreciate all of her insights I also want to thank GB mystical as always for providing the theme music for our show. And if you're looking to get some additional content share your feedback ask questions Anything at all related to the topic of being a casual dance teacher You can join us in the casual dance teachers network Facebook group or find us on Instagram at the casual dance teachers podcast. Don't forget to also leave a review for the show if you haven't already that helps us to expand and continue to reach new audiences as well as Reaching new quality guests to share even more great information with you.

Thank you so much, and I'll see you on the next one