Moving Into Healing—Pt. 2, Dance
your issues are in your tissues
In Part 1 of this Moving Into Healing series, we were talking about how so many of us are not really fully present in our bodies a lot of the time, and how that can show up in our lives and create challenges. At this point, there’s a good foundation of research that shows us that, indeed, our issues are in our tissues—our bodies are registering and responding to the thoughts and emotions we are dealing with, day to day and over time. Bessel van der Kolk’s book, The Body Keeps The Score, is an excellent overview of the topic and an exploration as to how it specifically applies to trauma. He, and many others, have learned that using physical movement is an incredibly effective method of basically metabolizing our issues and allowing them to find some release after having been stuck inside us. As a therapist that specializes in anxiety treatment, I find that even very simple movement interventions can be incredibly helpful. Moving into our own bodies can empower us to create a sense of safety, agency and autonomy in our own bones and muscles, and hopefully in our own lives.
“If you can’t get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you’d best teach it to dance.”—George Bernard Shaw, playwright
I love all kinds of physical movement options for healing and release but I’ve got a little bit of extra love for the avenue of dance. And I don’t mean dance class with choreographed routines and doing the steps all the same as everyone else and keeping the body disciplined and controlled, checking in the mirror to make sure you’re doing it right. Nope. I mean dancing like how three year olds dance—dancing from the inside out, letting the music and your internal stimulation move your body to express whatever is happening inside at that very moment and wants to move through you. It can be gentle—rolling and stretching on the earth, or swaying and stretching up and out; it can be vigorous—jumping, shaking, swinging; it can be joyful or angry or playful or deeply sad. It can be in time to music or in your own time. Maybe it’s pretty, maybe it’s not. But it’s real.
Way back in the mid 1990’s, I made my way to the Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health for the first time. I had found yoga in my final year of college and was amazed at what it did for my mind and body (I’ll get into that more later in a separate yoga blog entry in this series). The teacher that I loved that year had been trained at Kripalu so it was a goal of mine to get there for a retreat. The experience was fantastic in so many ways but the biggest surprise was this gift of having the opportunity to dance in this inside out way for the first time since I was a tiny child. And with other people all doing the same thing—dancing their own inside out dances too! No mirrors, no booze or substances of any kind (back in that day not even any caffeine there!), no corrections. Just some basic guidance, encouragement that there was no way to do this wrong, music (sometimes recorded but also sometimes live which was even more amazing), plenty of space, and people inhabiting their bodies in a way that I didn’t know really existed as an adult. I wasn’t 100% comfortable to be free in my body in this way yet, but I got enough of a taste of it to be hooked and was inspired by noticing others that really did seem to embody that kind of liberation in their movement and emotions (people would laugh, whoop for joy and even weep on the dance floor). It was a like discovering a secret door to freedom that I hadn’t even known to look for before.
I went back year after year, saving up all year to get a couple of days in a place where it felt like I’d come home into my body. Much like cleaning out a closet or under the bed, I’d discover stuff inside myself that I’d tucked away and forgotten that it had existed. Sometimes the discoveries were joyful or peaceful; other times long-buried grief or anger or longing surfaced. Year by year, I learned that I could find my way in to this discovery and release through the body—through yoga classes, and hikes along the mountain trails, and especially through dance.
research confirms experience
I started down the road of all this just for my own wellbeing and release, before I even thought about being a therapist. When I did get into the mental health profession, it was fascinating to find all the research that helped me make sense of these experiences that I’ve had. If you look up information about the therapeutic benefits of dance, you’ll find a treasure trove of positive outcomes—emotionally, cognitively, socially, physically. It’s quite remarkable! Most of those benefits are found through any kind of dancing—line dancing, Zumba classes, social dancing, dancing in your own living room. If you have any willingness to move and dance it out in any fashion, go for it! There’s likely something positive in it for you.
transformational dance in maryland
There are a number of different varieties of the inside out kind of dancing, going by lots of different kinds of names (ecstatic dance, conscious dance, transformational dance, religious and spiritual dances, etc). People found specific approaches on the idea and created frameworks that could be shared to find others that wanted to go on a bit of a similar movement adventure and named those approaches (Authentic Movement, Five Rhythms, Trance Dance, Shake Your Soul, BioDanza, JourneyDance, etc). They share some similar traits and also give their own unique spins on the idea of expressing and releasing through dance and movement.
Living in the Maryland/DC area, I was fortunate to find some of these forms being taught and led locally so that I didn’t need to travel to Massachusetts to get a taste of this. But there wasn’t much offered locally that fit my particular niche interest—explicitly combining dance movement with emotional processing work, which I’d experienced in the approach of JourneyDance events, which uses imagery, ritual and storytelling layered in with music and movement.. So, I figured I might as well go learn to facilitate it myself so that I could then offer it to others that might be interested too and we could all get to dance and move together. What an adventure!
It’s been one of my favorite parts of my whole professional life. Every time someone else discovers that secret door to greater freedom in their bodies and emotions, it inspires me all over again. A few years ago, I was invited to be the guest dance teacher for a week at the Omega Institute retreat center in Rhinebeck, NY, in charge of creating and facilitating all dance programming that week. Optional dance/movement classes were offered to anyone on campus booked in any program twice a day and I was able to offer separate events for staff as well. One of the retreat programs running while I was there was a self-care retreat for women veterans. It was a profound and deep honor to see a few of them show up again and again at every dance session, loving themselves into their own bodies and releasing whatever didn’t serve them any longer through movement, as a supplemental part of their self-care efforts that week.
“[Improvisation] is your one opportunity in life to be completely free, with no responsibilities and no consequences. You don’t have to be good or even interesting.”—Twyla Tharp, choreographer & dancer
My primary purpose in my work as a therapist and in life is to help people (myself included—I’m people too!) to suffer less, bear the suffering we cannot avoid, and enjoy ourselves more. There’s a whole variety of doorways and paths that lead to those goals. Dance is one doorway in and one that I enjoy sharing with others. If you are interested in giving it a spin for yourself, you don’t need a lot to get started. What if you were curious about following whatever way your body wanted to move for just one song, in your own space, all by yourself? Maybe even just starting with one part of the body—how would your hands want to move for just one song? Could you experiment with getting out of your head and more into your body for just that one song? Have you ever gotten caught up in the music and start moving without even thinking about it? Maybe you end up nodding your head or swaying your body as the music catches you in the grocery store or in the car or at the gym. Can we take that tiny ember of embodied presence and fan the flame enough to let it sweep through our whole being for a minute?
working with a maryland therapist, informed by transformational dance
If you really want to test drive this idea, try out a dance event with others and see what happens. If you are in the Maryland/DC/Virginia area, you are invited to join me at any upcoming dance events I’m facilitating. Check my home page for any updates. If you are interested in learning more about how I work with mindfulness and various mind-body practices in College Park and throughout Maryland, you can find that information on my pages about mindfulness based therapy and embodied healing
