Dance is medicine

I’ve danced more in the last six months than I had in years.

Not because I wanted to, but because I had to.

Not because these have been the greatest, happiest months of my life, but because they have been the toughest I’ve ever lived through.

There is this misconception, and thus the expectation, in our modern world that we dance only when we’re joyful and celebrating, but when we’re in pain, we stay still, frozen.

It is still a sort of taboo for people who have experienced great loss to go out into the world, listen to music, let alone dance. It can be perceived as insensitive, disrespectful to the one who is gone…

And yet our ancestors knew differently.

They instinctively knew what we now know scientifically; that -all- emotions live in the body and require expression.

They need to take space and shape. Voice and rhythm.

They need to be moved. To be given a way out, after we’ve travelled deep down within ourselves, to meet them.

And dance is one of the most powerful ways to do so.

Our ancestors lived and breathed what we’re only starting to re-member; that dance is medicine.

Dance was present in every part of their lives, every milestone -not just those that amplify, like the births and the weddings, but those that bereave us too; the deaths, the wars, the disasters.

They knew that dance is ritual, and that ritual is vital.
To our soul. To our lives.
Essential in marking an experience, processing it, having it be woven deep into the fabric of our being, and, eventually, stepping over the threshold, into a new reality.

Over the past six months following my nephew’s passing (it’s been eight so far in total, but in the first two, I was indeed frozen), it hasn’t been a talking space I’ve been looking for, not even a therapeutic one. And that’s interesting for a therapist to experience.

I’ve wanted to dance.
I’ve wanted to move.
I’ve wanted to read and write poetry.
I’ve wanted to dream and imagine.

Not to fix.
Not to overcome -there is no such thing in these cases anyway.

Just to experience.
Life. Moving through me. In the midst of Death.
Myself, shifting.
My soul being pulled apart and put back together, different.

That is the direction my work is moving into as well.

Away from the healing, the treating, the fixing.
The therapising.

Toward the experience. The ritual. The making of soul.
The Dance, with Life 🌹