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Cynthia Moore has been an award-winning playwright, performer, therapist, and now author. Her captivating book is Dancing on Coals, a memoir of an over performer is a story told with humor and heartache about overcoming dysfunctional role models, navigating turbulent relationships, and, ultimately, finding love, stability, and joy with her family. It’s an unforgettable ride through a life as colorful and complex as the theater stage she once graced, to a decades long career as a mental health counselor. Dancing with the Coals, endorsed by her friend and one-time theatrical collaborator, Whoopi Goldberg, is a compelling story of transformation, resilience, and finding peace. I began the conversation asking what motivated Cynthia to write the book.
Cynthia: I had to figure it out. Why did it happen? How did it happen, and what did it all mean?
Terry: Dancing on the coals begins at the end, with your present-day domestic bliss. What inspired you to structure the book that way?
Cynthia: Well, I think I wanted to get to a point where I had a teaching story, something to give young women, something to give young performers, something to show, especially people who have spent a lot of their years trying to belong or fit into systems that don’t. Quite fit them or accept them wholeheartedly. As I did, I worked in many all-male theater groups and tried really hard to fit in and you know, the definition of fitting in is cutting off parts of yourself in order to get acceptance. And I did that. I cut off parts of myself to do that. I wanted to finish the book with the clear ending of self-acceptance and having come to some peace with that whole journey that I went through in my life.
Terry: What attracted you to theater?
Cynthia: Well, when I was six years old, I lived in Nassau in The Bahamas, and I was a cast in Yul Brynner’s King and I. They had a touring production. And I was one of the 6-year-old children. And I loved it. It was heroin. I was completely addicted. Staying up late at night and having my hair dyed black- it was just wonderful. And I continued in the theater until 20 years ago.
Terry: How does a 6-year-old process all of that?
Cynthia: It feels like love, and I didn’t have a whole lot of love in my family of origin, so it was a great replacement, which was a bit of a problem. As you can tell, it led me in a bit of a wrong direction, you could say, but I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t turn it around. I wouldn’t change it for the world. It was a great journey and I loved it.
Terry: Without giving us away too many spoilers. What can you tell us about that journey?
Cynthia: Well, I think it was really a journey of a woman trying to find her voice and trying to find it in a male world and trying to find a masculine version of a voice, which was sort of performative and extroverted and macho and very physical. And that was fun. It was worth trying, but it wasn’t authentic. And so what I did was I did a bold pivot halfway through my life and. As Carl Young, the psychologist says, in your midlife, you turn from an outward focus, from the ego focus to a more inward focus of the soul and the spirit. And I think that’s what I did. I turned inward and I became a therapist, and I learned what authenticity was. I learned what vulnerability really was, and I wrote this book to try to make fun of my. My pain and my traumas make them funny and laughable. You know, my favorite, um, critique is when someone says, I laughed out loud.
Terry: So you laughed at your own pain.
Cynthia: Annie Lamont writes beautifully about vulnerability and pain and insecurity. You laugh at the same time as your heart is breaking. Right?
Terry: Dancing on Coals subtitle is “The memoir of an over performer.” How did you become an over performer?
Cynthia: Well, it started out as a memoir of a performer because I felt like performing was a metaphor for what I did. Not just performing on stage, but I was performing myself in a way. And, um, the publisher actually came back to me and said, that feels a little broad. Let’s, and we. Batted back and forth, a few titles, but the over performer kind of brings in this hungry ghost, uh, concept. The title, dancing on Coles comes from an Anne Waldman poem and she’s a Buddhist poet, and her poem is called Sleeping with the Hungry Ghost. And The Hungry Ghost is a Buddhist concept of someone who’s insatiable and craving and striving, and the poem he goes. Sexy ghost, a performer, a demon, a gad fly, never having enough, being enough, doing enough. So that’s where the title comes from.
Terry: You sound like a very complex and well-read person. What was your attraction to knowledge?
Cynthia: To knowledge. Interesting. Well, you know, in The Bahamas it’s a British school system and it’s pretty rigorous and it was very important to succeed academically for me. And so that was my drive in life was to succeed academically. And so I think I developed a pretty strong prefrontal cortex and I’ve capitalized on it ever since.
Terry: How did your sense of self evolve over your lifetime?
Cynthia: Mm, that’s a very interesting question. I would say my sense of self started out with how other people saw me, and many of us have that. We look to others for affirmation or for a reflection of who we are, and gradually it began to drop inward into a, what we call in psychology, a felt sense. That there’s a felt sense of integration, of integrity, of authenticity, and you can trust that there’s something you can trust in that. I think they call it confidence. And that’s what I really wanted to plumb and explore and express in my book that shift from outward sense of self to an inner sense of self.
Terry: And you write so candidly about the difficult relationships and influence of your parents. How did writing about these experiences affect your healing process?
Cynthia: It was helpful to write about it. I think forgiveness came out of it. I realized that my parents couldn’t have done any better. They were doing the best they could and I tried to make, make that humorous too. I think my mother comes across as a pretty humorous character in many of the places in the book and. She would’ve liked that. She would’ve enjoyed that. She was an entertainer of sorts.
Terry: Meeting your husband David seems like a pivotal turning point in your life. What can you tell us about that part of a story so deeply personal and positive?
Cynthia: Mm, so positive. I met my husband David when I was 33, and he absolutely calmed my nervous system. Over the first 33 years of my life, I was sort of flailing and striving and efforting, and my nervous system was pretty, as we say, in psychology, dysregulated. And then I met this man, and he was so calm and so peaceful in his inner being that I responded. And I said, this is the person I wanna spend the rest of my life with. And I come from a family with a lot of divorce and a lot of failed marriages, and that’s sort of the norm in my family. But I met David and I said, I’m not gonna do that. I’m going to stay married to this man and make love work. That was a real drive for me to make love work, and love is a verb. It’s an action. It’s a job that we do, and I think we’ve done a beautiful job. We have great kids. We have a fabulous grandson, and we’re still happy 43 years later. I. I’m proud of that
Terry: You can love somebody and have days where you don’t like them at all. How did you navigate through the ups and downs of a 43-year marriage?
Cynthia: I made him process a lot. You can imagine being married to a therapist sometimes isn’t that much fun. We gotta process everything, right? “Oh, that thing you said about the stove yesterday, I had some feelings about that.”
Terry: Process is a term that those of us who have had relationships with therapists understand completely. Define it for those who might not know what it means?
Cynthia: It means talking everything to death. It means taking something that may have been a small event, may have triggered a feeling in you that was just uncomfortable or that made you a little angry and not letting it go until 20 of those build up. But saying, you know, that thing yesterday about the stove, I’m just using that as an example. Um, you know, that triggered, I was a little angry when that, because I felt X, Y, and Z from my past. You try to take ownership of what you’re bringing to that. It’s not all you. “I had a history with my parents that led me to respond to your comment in this way.” and you can always move through things when you process them in that way because you, you get understanding of what actually happened, what the dynamic is, what the pattern is between you, and we’ve gotten really clear about what our patterns are and we can talk about them, and it’s just a blessing to have that kind of honesty and integrity in communication in a relationship.
Terry: In every relationship requires a decision to make it work. What made you decide to stick with this?
Cynthia: Well, I think, like I said, first of all, I was determined not to follow in my family’s footsteps. It looked so painful and I saw so many people ravaged by relationship. And I just determined I was not going to be ravaged by relationship. I was going to do it wisely. And I think at the I married David in 1983 and pretty much about eight years later, I started my master’s program in psychology. I immediately began to process everything and diagnose everybody within a five-mile radius.
Terry: Why the switch?
Cynthia: I was burned out on the performative aspect of theater, I was burned out on getting reviews and getting seen and having people’s opinions about me rule my life that I wanted to just go into something that was deeply internal and. Psychology is an exploration of the psyche, of the deep unconscious, and I love that. That is such a home base for me. I love that world. I love understanding it. I love operating in it. I love being with clients in it, it’s, it’s taking a comment or a phrase or a feeling, and. Excavating down. And where does that come from and how does that feel? And is that where you wanna land? Or do you wanna shift that to some other, uh, possible felt sense in your life? Can you shift struggle into joy? Can you shift, uh, anxiety into ease? Those are the questions I love to play with.
Terry: Can you describe that moment when you first felt that joy and that intense interest in your new profession?
Cynthia: Well, I said I’m going to take one class in psychology and see if I like it right as we do sometimes. And I had a one-year-old baby and a 6-year-old son, and I went to an Introduction to Psychology class, and we studied Freud and Adler and Sullivan. I was hooked immediately. But I have to say, the one I thing that I fell most in love with was the group process. You do a group therapy class in which you process together, and that’s so much like theater really, because in theater you’re working as an ensemble, you’re working with other people. You get very fluid and flexible in relationship, and so group therapy was just an eyeopener for me. I loved it.
Terry: In my conversations with performers, many tell me that a deeply seated unworthiness gene and imposter syndrome drive them to perform. Was that your experience? And how did your psychology education help you discover a way out?
Cynthia: Hmm, good question. I think it really led me to explore the unworthiness sensation and you know, in Buddhist, and I’ve been a meditator for 38 years, and one of the things I’ve learned is how to sit in the fire, how to sit in the uncomfortable emotions. Unworthiness is a perfect example. We could spend our whole lives avoiding unworthiness, running from it, escaping it. You know, drinking or acting or acting out or all kinds of ways we can avoid it, but to to really come home to it and sit in it and say, all right, this hurts. This is really painful. You find a way through; you find a way out. You find a way to the other side where there is a bigger sense. There is an almost sigh of opening and acceptance that comes from meeting that uncomfortable feeling.
Terry: Do you still feel like you’re an over performer?
Cynthia: A little bit. Every now and then I can feel it kick in, but hopefully not living from that place.
Terry: Let’s dig a little bit deeper into meditation. It’s so hard to step in to the fire. How do you encourage people who are afraid to do that?
Cynthia: I like to work with people in two ways. I like to do the cognitive version where you talk and they tell you what’s going on, and then I often, in a therapy session, I. Will ask a client to close their eyes and feel into what we’re talking about. Take unworthiness. If a client is saying, I felt this unworthiness yesterday with my boyfriend, I might say, okay, close your eyes and drop into that and tell me how that feels in your body. Once we name it in our body, we are really meeting it in a visceral, personal way, and I accompany them so that they feel safe because mostly we don’t feel safe encountering those tricky places, right? We’re like, no, I don’t want to. Sometimes they’ll even say, I don’t want to, you know, and I won’t make them. I’ll just, but they trust me. They know that if they do, they’ll end up feeling better because of it. We’ll go into that place and often I can also provide a kind of an opening to a bigger place that can hold that in them. Because we all have, as the Buddhist we call it a bigger self. And the bigger self can hold that little wounded place that says, I’m so unworthy, I’m in so much pain. And if they can feel that, really get that and also feel the part of them that can hold that with compassion. There’s a shift that occurs, and that’s what meditation has taught me, that that’s the magic.
Terry: All authors that I talk to have this fear when they look at that first blank page of the book that hasn’t been written yet. They’re sure their previous book was the last one that will ever sell, and the next one will fail. What were you feeling when you looked at that blank page?
Cynthia: I love a blank page. You know, I’m a person that loves beginnings. Because to me, anything is possible. You can start anywhere. And I believe in the unconscious If when I teach, I teach writing classes, and when I teach writing, I teach writing from the deep unconscious, writing from flow writing from the heart writing from a place that’s not coming from this prefrontal cortex here, but. Releasing, surrendering to something bigger. That’s where the muse comes, right? That’s where inspiration comes. If you can open and let something come out, then it’s not you that’s writing it. Something is writing through you. That’s the ideal. I hope something wrote through me. That’s what I pray for.
Terry: How do we get there?
Cynthia: Meditation. Well, there’s ways to train your mind to drop in, right? We can train our mind. I’ve done a lot of hypnosis, uh, in working with clients. It’s, it’s not traditional hypnosis, but dropping, learning how to drop into a deeper sense and writing is, is, takes that same process. How do you drop into a deeper place where you’re open to receiving inspiration?
Terry: Meditation, in my experience, has been an exercise in trying to empty everything from your mind. And if you can get to that empty mind moment, just realizing it makes it vanish. How do you maintain what can be an elusive practice?
Cynthia: That’s the question, right? How do we keep it? And you can’t keep it, you know? I jokingly said to someone the other day, I said, I, I thought this book would be finished when I was finally enlightened. And then I realized that enlightenment is a fluid process. You’re in and you’re out. Right? You have that moment of awakening where your mind is empty and you feel actually present, and then it’s gone. Just like you’re saying, and it’s fluid, so we can, I wrote about that. I wrote about the fluidity of it coming and it going, and you get it and you lose it and you try to get it back and, and then you do. With practice, you get to that moment more often.
Terry: There’s a metaphor I like to use that we wake up every morning and put on a superhero outfit to face the day and hope that nobody discovers. Who we really are. What advice can you give to those of us who try to do that, to give us the courage to take off the outfit and be real?
Cynthia: Oh, that’s a beautiful question. I love that. You know, my daughter once told me the one thing. I said, “What would be one message I could give you as a mother that would be the most meaningful thing?” And she said, “Trust yourself.” I’ve tried to hold that for her. Trust yourself, and I would say that to the person in the superhero cape, take off your cape and trust yourself because something big is in you moving through you. If you can tap into that, you don’t have to pretend anymore.
Terry: How does one build trust when there have been so many bumps along the road that reinforce imperfection?
Cynthia: So many woundings, right? So many bumps and pains. I think it’s a process of, like you say, emptying your mind because it’s the mind that creates the worries and the mistakes, and where I went wrong, or how I did this wrong, or I shouldn’t have. That’s all mental chatter. And if we can quiet the mind and really come into a place of silence. We feel held in a way that I believe is trust. That’s what trust is, is that feeling of being held by something greater. Whether you call it silence or stillness or divine presence, whatever you call it. There is an energy that holds us and that makes us safe.
Terry: But we are living right now in what the Chinese would call “interesting times.” There is a lot of fear out there. How do you advise people to cope?
Cynthia: I think it’s crucial that we learn how to cope with fear right now. This is the number one agenda, and I think it’s critical that we learn how to navigate our own nervous systems. Because our nervous systems are being hijacked every day by the news and the news, whether it’s delivering an actual fact or not. A fact is – delivering it with such an intensity of emotion that our nervous systems are just going off the scales. I think we have to take in the news frugally, carefully, judiciously know how much you can take in. I don’t take in visual content because I’ll be hijacked immediately, but, but I can do, I can read words on a page. I can see the news, I can read the headlines, but I can’t see the images. So that’s one way. And the other way is to learn how to work with your nervous system so that you recognize when you’re being jacked up and you can calm yourself and enter a different, you know, the parasympathetic nervous system. How do you shift over from that fight / flight place that we’re all living in. We have to learn how to say, all right, I’m an eight on a scale of 10 right now. I’m going to dial it down. I’m going to take a breath. I’m gonna come into my body and turn it back so that I’m moving into that ease, relaxation state.
Terry: If you could create a map to a more peaceful existence, what three or four steps or practices be on that map?
Cynthia: Know where you are. If you’re an eight, on a scale of one to 10, if your anxiety is an eight, just name that I’m an eight right now. First step. Second step. Take a breath, come into your body. Because again, that’s the mind. The mind is running away with you. So, take a breath, come into your body, notice what you’re feeling. Notice what you’re seeing, hearing, sensing, smelling, very calming to the nervous system. Then you can have some images that calm you or even a, a mantra or a phrase that calms you like. “Be still,” or “It’s okay to relax,” or “I’m safe now,” and you can use these again and again to retrain your nervous system, to begin to calm down and come into a more easy state, a more effortless state. So those are three things that I would say you can start with and learn how to do that because those, those will be key ingredients to all of us as a culture coming out of hysteria,
Terry: We don’t have to do this alone. How can we as friends best support one another?
Cynthia: We can listen, listen, listen, listen, and ask deep questions like you’ve been asking me. That helps us to really know ourselves and feel connected with each other. These conversations can be deeply healing.
Terry: What do you hope people will take away from the book?
Cynthia: I hope they’ll take a visceral experience of what it feels like to move from desperation and striving into a state of calm and peacefulness, and I hope they can sense that that’s possible for all of us, and I hope they’ll laugh out loud.
This interview was slightly edited for clarity. Learn more about Cynthia at CynthiaMooreWrites.com.
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