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THE PEOPLE IN MY HIPS
Contact:

If you would like to contact me personally, I can be reached at:

thepeopleinmyhips

@gmail.com

 

Follow me on TWITTER 

@peopleinmyhips

 

I post to TWITTER every time I post here.

How to read this...

If you are new to the site, after reading the "home" page, click on "my story in sequence", and read it from beginning to end,  and then log on at your leisure to follow "my story - daily" which is posted on a daily basis. (more or less.)  I am hoping to do at least 5 entries a week if not more - (knowing me it will be more.)  

If you wish to follow one thread, (i.e. INSIGHT) - try searching the site using the thread title and then magically each entry in the thread will appear.

Also, feel free to comment after any entry or tell your story on the "tell your story" link up right.  Thanks again for logging in.  Namaste!

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Review of

The People in my Hips by Ken Wolf

“THE PEOPLE IN MY HIPS is one of the most extraordinary pieces of theatre I have seen on or Off-Broadway in years.

Mr. Wolf’s script is nearly flawless in its eloquence and is one of those rare pieces of work that reminds us of our common humanity. 

Mr. Wolf’s one-man performance is exquisite, inspiring, courageous
and beautifully constructed. I laughed even as I was moved to tears. 

See THE PEOPLE IN MY HIPS soon.

Because you will want to see it again.”

Lise Avery, Anything Goes!!
Internationally Syndicated Radio

 


Untold Stories
How I will be sharing my story...

At this point in time, there are going to be four threads or themes that will power my story. They will be numbered in sequence as I post them.

THE TALE: will tell my People in my Hips story from the beginning through all my "crazy" struggles until the therapeutic "BURP" which healed me 3 years ago.

INSIGHT: will explore in depth and talk about Yoga, depression, PTSD, mental illness, multiple personalities, therapy, childhood sexual and physical abuse and more - often connecting my People in my Hips stories to stories posted on the discussion page, in the news and more.

PLAY: will be about my experience of sharing this story on stage and speaking with individuals after, finding the courage to finally present it, posting pages from the play, posting video of live performance and anything else coming out of that experience.

SOUL: will be about our possibilities, our positive and/or limiting beliefs and our innate power to heal ourselves or to lead ourselves to healing.

And then, we'll see where else this will go.  

 

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Review of

The People in my Hips by Ken Wolf

Martin Denton · January 17, 2009

NYTHEATRE.com

The People in My Hips, written and performed by Ken Wolf, is unlike any theatre piece I've ever seen before.

I feel like I've been saying that a lot lately; the indie theater scene in New York seems more inventive and vibrant than it even usually is these days—a very good thing. But The People in My Hips stands out among the fare I've encountered recently. It's the kind of show that makes me want to put an adverb in front of the word unique—but I won't attempt to modify the unmodifiable.

Playwright-actor-director Wolf attempts something just as impossibly zenlike in this one-man play of his: to revisit the unrevisitable. The People in My Hips is an autobiographical work about events that happened to Wolf within the past seven years. One day, at a yoga class, Wolf suddenly started to experience excruciating pain in his hips. Eventually he came to understand that this pain was a manifestation of energy related to abusive events from his past. Wolf ultimately identified the "people" in his hips as "Little Ken"—himself as a young boy—and the "Dark Man"—some unknown evil presence who had apparently hurt Little Ken decades before. Through a lot of painful exercise and therapy, Wolf was able to exorcise these personal demons, and the pain, he tells us, is now gone.

Except that he warns us, before the show proper starts, that he fears that this very performance may trigger their reappearance. And as we witness the wrenching re-enactment of illness and recovery that Wolf has structured for us in this play, we believe that such a re-emergence could very well occur...may, in fact, be occurring before our eyes.

The play itself is a narrative of the history of Wolf's "people in hips" illness. It's shaped chronologically, with Wolf telling us the story and also commenting on it; he also shows us some videos that he made during the course of these past seven years, which he sometimes interacts with and more often seems eager to be out of the way of. Wolf also, on prerecorded audio, portrays various individuals who attempted to help him find a cure (which, for traditional psychotherapy, would mean unlocking the repressed memories of what "Dark Man" actually did to "Little Ken").

The main theme of the play is to reject that traditional treatment and to embrace the healing powers that each of us innately possesses. The climax of the piece comes with a yoga-fed acceptance of the past rather than a dramatic whodunit-style revelation. Catharsis is nevertheless achieved.

It's hard to tell where Wolf the actor-playwright ends and Wolf the still-evolving-and-healing-human begins, which may itself be a testament to Wolf's performance prowess. The show is consistently compelling and a lot funnier than I'm sure I've made it sound. It's involving and maybe even harrowing in places, but at the end of the journey we feel lifted up. Wolf cautions in the program that The People in My Hips is a play and not a seminar, but there is certainly advice offered here that audience members can choose to accept or reject. "The seminars will begin after I get on Oprah," Wolf adds in his note.

The determination it took to make this play may well land him on TV.

 

The People in my Hips is my story.  

It is a story that took me 2 years to tell because I was so afraid that people would think that I was crazy.

I finally shared my story (with real video of my experience) in my one man play THE PEOPLE IN MY HIPS which was performed in NYC at Manhattan Repertory Theatre, Jan. 17, 2009 through April 18, 2009. (It was revived again with a new real life new ending last April, and hopefully, it will be brought back this Spring.) 

Each night, as I recounted my crazy tale, presenting real video of my "People in my Hips" experience that I had self-filmed over three years, I would say to myself "What the hell am I doing? What the hell am I doing?"  

How in God's name could I share this? 

But, you see,  I had to...

When The People in my Hips first manifested, as I was struggling to find a cure, I made a commitment to myself that I would indeed cure myself and then help people with similar problems. This crazy commitment to help others was what kept me going, kept me from taking drugs, kept me from despair.  

The commitment that I made to tell this story to the world, saved me.

Remarkably, I received rave reviews.

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I am a Personal Trainer, Yoga Instructor, Playwright and Actor.  

I started Yoga Teacher Training in August 2002 at BeYoga (since sold to Yogaworks) in Westchester and New York City.  For over a year, as I trained intensely in Yoga, my body started to remember things, things from my childhood I had since long forgotten, and physically, my body tried to help me remember.  

And then, all hell broke loose!

I developed severe PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) and I developed Multiple Personalites in my Hips.

I'm not kidding.  

My body would cramp up unexpectedly, I would shake and cry, (especially during Yoga,) and, at other times, I could communicate with a child part of me from long ago (whom I dubbed "Baby Ken") who was living in my hips along with someone or something I named "The Dark Man."

I know this sounds crazy.

And it is.  

But I am NOT crazy and have never been.

This website is here to tell my story to the world, and to be a forum for people with similar problems to be heard, to be given support, advice and help.  No one talks about his stuff.  It's time to create an open forum.

What I experienced was not mental illness.  It was a physical/emotional energy imbalance that I was unable to control. Through my "insane" perseverance in my quest to heal, after 3 years I discovered a way to physically balance my imbalance,  and inadvertently, yet intentionally, I found a way to send my child self "Baby Ken" and "The Dark Man" back into the my past where they belong.

It sounds crazy, right?

It is time we all look at "mental illness" differently.  Let's start right now!

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WHY I HAVE TO TELL THIS STORY...

As I mentioned above, what kept me going during my three year process of trying to heal myself from the People in my Hips was the commitment that I made to myself that someday I would heal myself and then help others with this information.  I am not a doctor.  I am just a Personal Trainer, Yogi, Playwright and Actor.  But what I discovered in my journey is profound.  

I was a mess. My body was bouncing around by itself.  My hips would cramp up repeatedly, I would be continually crying for what seemed like no reason, and a child part of me was taking over my body and telling me strange cryptic things. This was so not fun.  

I moved out of the apartment that I was sharing with my girlfriend, and I moved by myself to a little cottage up in the boondocks of northern Westchester.  Part of me felt I was losing my mind, but part of me persevered - the still strong voice inside me, call it my soul, call it my inner voice, or call it God, but whatever you want to call it, this still strong voice inside me refused to believe in anything but possibility, that someday, somehow I would cure myself of my crazy condition and I would help others with this knowledge.  My play THE PEOPLE IN MY HIPS was the first piece of this process.  This website, blog and forum is the second piece.

I was so scared to tell anyone about my condition.  What was happening to my body was insane.  I would be walking thru the Gym and all of a sudden I would be thrown into the wall by "The People in my Hips".  An old, brutally beaten part of me was acting up and causing my life to turn upside down.  

 

And now, thank God for it.

 

It is years later.  I am so much better in so many ways.

Now that I have healed my condition (I am sure I have more inner healing in store,) it is time to reach out and create a community where it is safe to share what other people might think crazy.  These thoughts, these physical manifestations and feelings related to PTSD are just that - thoughts, bodily somatic responses and feelings. They are not who we are. They are not a label called crazy.  They are simply the process of our body/mind going about trying to heal itself. 

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Here is a new trailer for the next production of THE PEOPLE IN MY HIPS at Manhattan this April.  I just put this together with some new footage that I recently discovered.  I am always amazed when I look at what I went through.

 

And here is the promotional logo for the April 2011 production:

And here is the original trailer video for my play THE PEOPLE IN MY HIPS which was performed at Manhattan Rep in NYC in 2009.

In this trailer is footage from the over 200 hours of video that I took of myself when this condition manifested.

 

On this site, under "my story" I will be posting my tale of The People in my Hips in great detail.  I don't think my story telling will be linear for I hope to tell some of my stories relating to the struggles of individuals who connect through this site, but I will share my entire "People in my Hips" adventure in the months to come, and also share about my on-going adventure too - the unfolding of this site.   

Along with some of my posts, I will be posting video that I used in my play and other video that I have yet to share with anyone.  When I first manifested The People in my Hips, I started filming myself talking about my condition and then I went on to film Yoga sessions where I shook and flew about the room. I even filmed psychotherapy sessions with my therapist "Dr. Freud" (Name changed so as to not freak out his clients.) In many of these sessions, I bounced, shook, talked with "Baby Ken" in real time and cried, cried, cried.  Filming my condition grounded me, kept me going, literally kept me alive, focused on a solution, even when the going got bad.  

And it did get bad...

 

 

 

 

 

 

Please feel free to comment or ask questions about my posts.

On the "tell your story" page is a discussion board.  

Please feel free to share your stories there about PTSD, depression, multiple personality disorder, Yoga and more. 

 

Thanks for logging on.

 

No more hiding.  

It is time to talk openly, honestly and unafraid.