Self Reflection, Intention Setting, & Dance
When you apply what you learn through action, i.e. journaling, dance, story, this action aids you in kinaesthetically and psychologically conditioning your muscles and/or thought roads. Practice, whatever that may be, plays a role in re-wiring your brain and body to respond differently as you repeat new behaviours.
Just like sharing stories and writing down your feelings can be therapeutic, dance can also be helpful for expressing your complex emotions through movement, shape, pace, and intensity. For me, dance has provided a unique container, unlike that of sacred circle or a free stream journal. In dance I am offered space both inside and outside of my body to process what I am currently experiencing and what I am carrying from the past.
In many of my dance communities, our trust is nourished by our choices to co-create space together and doing so with care. In these communities I felt ready and capable of ‘keeping myself safe’, and through interacting and playing with others while dancing or in contact dance, I was healing and enlivening in new ways! In this container, I can explore at my own pace, connect within, channel, and fill up!
In a moment dance will invite me in to deeper awareness, and in return, self-knowing. Sometimes a connection point comes through sensation, be it an opening in your heart or a tightness in your back, other times it can be a story or a memory surfacing and asking for release or acknowledgement. Dance has provided me with a space to reclaim my ability to decide what I want and need and then respond from that place of authenticity and vulnerability.
So, where does self-reflection and intention setting play a role in dance and movement?
Just as I step on my yoga mat and set an intention, I can also set intentions for what I want to let go of and/or receive on the dance floor. Sometimes I dance to interact with, feel, challenge, and meet the different parts of me that otherwise, in my day to day routine, go unnoticed, unheard, or unloved. Dance is another medium for me to communicate with my body and gain more connection, insight, and wisdom from self and Source. I have gained more agency in my life through dance. I have felt incredibly uncomfortable and swamped in my own self judgement and shadows of fear. I have released worry and stress about not moving with grace on every turn, fixating on “looking good” and punishing myself for that one off balance tip toe. I have felt my heart whip open and leave the shrouded mind behind as my feet felt sensation like never before. I have been so present that I could feel the impact of my presence on time and space. Dance is a catalyst for both dancer and witness. Dance is a practice where I can both take up space and feel it. It is here, on the dance floor, that I first met the Wild Woman within me. The dance floor was the first place, in this society, where I felt like my wildness, my undiluted sexiness, my full energy, was accepted, in raw, authentic form, to shine and be seen.
Come and join me - us - in (a) movement. I will meet you there, barefoot, on the dance floor.