a Journey of Healing

I have always loved dancing. I feel free and like I can just be myself. During my late teens and early twenties, I danced the night away in clubs and at parties without realizing what a saving grace it was. I had a tough time growing up.

Forward many years and many stories later.
I had gotten married. It was a mess. Looking back on it now I cannot remember that I stopped dancing, but I must have.
I have however always believed in something, some guiding principle helping me along my journey, and an urge to dance emerged at some point.

I started dancing again. I did Nia for several years and made some great friends. My favorite part of the Nia routines was the freedance and I knew I needed something less structured.
There were 5 Rhythms offered in my town and it intrigued me but it still seemed so very strange so I never tried it.

Forward another couple of years. In 2018 a traumatic event brought about severe depression and I was stuck.  I was working with an amazing therapist but I was stuck.
Every night after work I would put on music and just dance. My guiding light was telling me I could dive deeper and dialogue with my hurt places instead of just jumping around the living room. I had been practicing active imagination and I tried it as a movement practice. I danced with my shadow, my inner child, and my wise old crone. We laughed and we cried and we moved.

My existing therapeutic practices were complimented by including the body and healing slowly started to take place.

I started doing research and devoured texts on movement and dance therapy, authentic movement, and embodiment.  I learned that the very simple reason why embodied practices such as conscious dance are so effective is that you are instantly connected to feeling. The invitation to drop out of your head and into your body is an invitation to connect to feeling and not get stuck in the mind. You cannot think yourself out of a bad mood or reason with a critical thought, but you can bring gentle compassionate awareness to your inner experiences and process it through movement. It was difficult for me to connect to certain feelings when my default coping strategy was to escape into the intellect, but allowing feelings to be felt and processed was like unblocking a river that has gone stagnant and letting the waters run free and clear again.

The following year I found the Awake Human Being academy online and I was so excited to join the community from my living room! It wasn’t long after I joined that the lockdowns were enforced and the dance was an absolute saving grace.  I decided to train as a facilitator.

The journey to becoming a facilitator took me to places of unresolved trauma in myself and pushed me out of my comfort zone. I danced more than ever before and it was a difficult journey but very rewarding.  I am allowing my voice to be heard, even though it is terrifying. With each class that I teach I am learning more. It becomes easier, the fear doesn’t drown out my intuition and my voice is coming through clearer.  I found it especially hard to feel or to listen into the space. To listen to what is needed. But I had to learn to trust the process, to be gentle and compassionate with myself.  To continue letting the dance lead me.

I’ll be a forever student, unfolding and growing with my students. Dancers joining for the first time who was very self-conscious, disembodied, and stuck in a story start to blossom after committing to their practice for a couple of months. They become more comfortable in their bodies and able to let the dance dance them.

Conscious dance is a courageous act of self-love. I’m very much in love and I love to see my students falling in love too ❤