What Dancing Teaches You About Living
Sometimes we dance for others, but mostly we dance for ourselves.
For as long as I can remember, I have loved dancing. Growing up I never considered myself a dancer. Then, for two years in my mid-twenties I explored salsa and hip hop dance. I used to daydream with Dan about what we would do if we achieved financial freedom, how we would spend our time. My dream was always to fill my week with classes, especially dance. Today I’m part of a semi-professional salsa dance team as well as a professional dance production company. I train 4 days a week, and I dance every single day at home. It’s a dream come true, and it has changed my life. These days I say I feel high on dance life. Yet having trained as a dancer for 18 intensive months, I can tell you that you don’t have to be a professional dancer to enjoy the benefits of moving your body. I could have danced every single day leading up to this chapter of my life. My embodiment journey could have started a lot earlier, but this was the way my journey had to unfold.
One of my most amazing personal transformations is reconnecting with my body through dance. For many years I was disconnected with my body, ignoring its signals. I pushed through to deliver on tough demands with the mantra “mind over body”, and not the healthy kind. Even after I left my demanding start-up job in 2020, I continued to numb physical and emotional pain. For another two years I sat for long hours browsing the internet, took intense workout classes, and distracted my mind with endless audiobooks. This all happened between bouts of mindfulness practices like yoga and meditation. Yet only when I returned to dancing did I start to learn and experience true self-compassion. Through dance movement I cultivated the last bit of self awareness that I needed to finally take better care of my body. What started as a regular weekly dance practice grew into my greatest journey of embodiment and self discovery. I have changed how I live. I have felt my relationships transformed, including the one with myself. These are some of the simple and life changing lessons that I have learned from my dance practice:
1. Be In the Present Moment
Nothing teaches you to be in the present moment like learning dance choreography and performing it within a 60 minute class. You simply can’t learn the steps if you’re not living in the present moment and actively observing instructions from the teacher. There’s no time to be self conscious, to question why you showed up, or to feel that you are falling behind. Every negative thought makes you fall back more and takes you further away from the learning experience. At some point, you simply accept that where you are — where you are in your level of dancing, where you are in how you feel that day, where you are in learning the choreography up to that point — is where you are meant to be. Dancing, whether you are alone in your room or at a group class, is the perfect training ground for getting out of your mind and stepping into your body.
Being in your body is an essential part of learning and performing because the pace of class is often too fast to intellectually recall the choreography. In class, you repeat a sequence of moves with the time allotted until your body roughly remembers what comes next based on the flow of your physical posture and how you relate it to the music. Connecting with how you feel in your body while moving to the music is an essential precursor to performing it. This is the embodiment part of learning dance choreography. Only when you know how you feel while dancing can you emote with the conviction that makes you and the audience believe that you mean what you dance.
2. Listen to Your Body
When your body is your instrument and your method for delivering art, you develop a much deeper connection with it. The more you move your body, the more you regain sensitivity to the sensations in your body. You start to notice aches and pains that have long been ignored or suppressed. When I began dancing, I started noticing so much tightness and achiness in my right leg, especially in my hip and hamstring. Moving my body revealed a deep imbalance between my left and right sides. Perhaps it came from years of living with right-side dominance. Perhaps it developed from years of tensing my right side when I was experiencing stress. The revelation also revealed the solutions. The first was that I needed to strengthen and condition the left side of my body. The second, and perhaps more important, was that I needed to release the tension I was constantly holding in the right side of my body.
Thus began my embodiment practice, which has expanded to include physical therapy, massage, stretching, freestyle movement, meditation, and breathwork. I’m taking much better care of my body, taking an active approach to rest and recovery. People notice the difference — I set better boundaries for rest and recovery, I have more energy when I spend time with friends and family, and I simply seem happier (it’s because I am!). As an athlete, I challenge my body to develop to increasingly more advanced levels. I also have the healthiest relationship with my body that I have ever had. I used to sit in front of a computer for hours at a time without moving and without drinking water. At that time it was a sort of badge of honor that I could push my body to perform in such a way. Now I can’t sit with my smartphone for 5 minutes without fidgeting and taking a much-needed break. The aches and pains were always there and they would have grown if I continued to suppress them. Now they’re impossible to ignore and I can only address them.
It may seem like a double edge sword, but being able to observe the pain and relaxation in your body has only true benefits. Ask any dancer if they feel their achy joints and tight muscles when they train. Ask whether or not they are working to resolve chronic pains. Every single one will say they do — it’s simply a part of being human. Although dancers make it look effortless and seamless, they’re constantly observing, managing, and caring for their bodies. The key is to be able to listen to your body and give what it needs.
3. What We Focus on We Attract More Of
Through music, you can visit a whole range of emotional experiences, such as romance, sensuality, joy, regret, anger, or celebration. We’ve all changed the music for our mood. We play Queen when we feel amazing or want to feel amazing. We loop Adele when we feel heartbreak. We blast Linkin Park when we feel angry. We often use music as a way to experience our emotions. Imagine that catharsis being 10 times more powerful when you dance it out.
I have learned that dance amplifies the emotional experience that I focus on. When I interpret dance choreography, I tend to focus on the positive and uplifting narratives in my life. I like to focus on joy, romance, sensuality, personal growth, play, and celebration, because these are the emotional experiences I want more of. An essential component of my daily morning routine is 10 to 12 minutes of freestyle movement to a sensual and uplifting playlist like Londrelle. I sway my hips, roll my body, and undulate my arms in free flowing movement however I feel at that moment listening to the music and feeling my body. It loosens me up and works out my crunchy knots like no other practice, and it’s so much fun and feels so good.
Although it feels indulgent to express pain and sadness through music and dance, I find that it requires a follow up of intentional self reflection in order to grow and ultimately rise above these difficult emotions. Once, after learning and performing a choreography to Billie Eilish’s “Happier Than Ever” I began crying uncontrollably. I had slept poorly the night before, and over the course of the hour I could feel myself losing it, giving in to the painful emotions called out by the music. In the past I would have internalized it, but suddenly I had no choice but to release it in a safe space. I gained so much insight as I reflected out loud to listening classmates. It became clear that I needed a nap, followed by an honest and vulnerable conversation with somebody dear to me. If I hadn’t reflected deeply on my emotional experience at the end of the hour, I’m not sure I would have learned anything from that dance class. I would have simply reburied the emotions only to resurface and relive days, weeks, or months later.
Freestyle or choreographed movement can be a powerful means to accessing and processing the harder to address emotions if we are disciplined enough to examine them. Finding a healthy way to examine negative emotions is essential to learning and growing so that you can overcome or overstep them more effectively in the future. We all experience a range of emotions — it’s part of being human. But for a more thriving inner world, focus on the positive and uplifting experiences in your life more than you do the negative ones. Our focus influences our decisions, how we move through the world, and how we move through life. What we focus on, we simply attract more of.
4. We Are At Home in Our Bodies
The relationship that I have today with my body is a far cry from what it was four years ago when I was working 10 hours a day, in a chair, in front of a computer screen. The greatest benefit to becoming more sensitive to your body is that you become more aware of when you are activating your sympathetic nervous system, which is the one responsible for fight, flight, or freeze responses. You also become more aware of the opportunities to activate your parasympathetic nervous system, the one responsible for rest and regulating body functions like digestion. The more I recognize my sympathetic nervous system being triggered, the more effectively I can take inventory of my physical surroundings and current physical and mental state. From there I can choose not to perpetuate the stress response. I can take a deep breath, sigh it all out, and resume relaxed and continuous breathing. It’s the way I learned to manage stress as a baby but somehow forgot and needed to relearn over the years. It’s the way I breathe during warm up and cool down for a dance practice. It’s the way I breathe to stay in a state of flow during a dance performance. You can’t train in dance without training your breath. As it turns out, you can’t live life to the fullest without learning how to breathe.
Relearning how to breathe was the first step in my embodiment journey. When I move my body and notice my breath, I remember that I am at home in my body. I remember that I am so grateful for my body. It’s the vessel that carries me through life. It’s my means to experiencing and interacting with the physical world. As I move through the day and the environment, staying in tune with my body reminds me that I don’t need to perpetuate worries, fears, or anxieties. My body instantly relaxes because I have awareness. What was once an insurmountable challenge with practice becomes the easier and more obvious choice. I can observe in real time that regulating my nervous system to live life more fully is as simple as practicing this choice.
Dance Like Nobody’s Watching
We’ve all felt the irresistible and awesome experience of watching somebody dance. Dancers show us what’s possible for ourselves when we are embodied. They model for us a strong connection between the body and the mind. They show us what it feels like to be in control of yourself, to be free, and to be authentic. We perceive that they possess a mastery of self. It doesn’t even matter whether it’s performance or truth. We interpret the story and we believe it. We become inspired to move differently through our own lives.
Sometimes we dance to perform, sometimes we dance to connect with others, but mostly we dance for ourselves. All dance is simply movement. To enjoy the benefits of dance, you don’t need lessons or years of training, and you don’t need an audience. You can explore movement in your living room, on a wedding dance floor, around your neighborhood, or in an elevator. Play a song and move the way the song makes you feel. You might feel a little self conscious at first. You might feel release after a long day of work. In any case, begin to move like nobody’s watching. Dance is rarely a performance for others. It’s an expression of your inner world, of what you desire to feel in your body, of what moves you as a human being.