Dancing our way toward healing

How do we come home to our own bodies?

When I was six years old, I would go spinning, spinning, spinning my way around the living room, until I fell over, dizzy with delight. It was an experience of total pleasure and joy.

In the mystery of movement, in the ecstasy of embodiment, I felt fully alive. To borrow from the second century saint Irenaeus — in that aliveness, I experienced the glory of God. I knew inherently that my body was created for joy, and that my body was deeply good. Why else would I know such delight?

Photo by Laura Fuhrman on Unsplash

As a preteen and teenager, I danced prayers of joy and longing in my room, expressing myself to the God who gave me this good body. Late at night, I leapt and twirled my way across my tiny bedroom, as my boom box quietly played CDs of favorite worship songs. I would dance for 20, 30 minutes, an hour even, until my parents, overhearing the thud of my feet as I landed a leap, gently implored me to go to sleep.

At church youth group, I would occasionally go to the back of the room to dance along with the worship music. I tried to be somewhat discrete — we were more of a “frozen chosen” bunch than a Pentecostal people — and I was a bit self-conscious, but I always felt so free, and so thoroughly myself.

In college I began deconstructing the evangelicalism of my childhood. Along with my critique of the screaming absence of women pastors, I also grew suspicious of what I saw as “emotional” responses in worship. I was skeptical of raised hands and other embodied expressions that I surmised were more the result of going along with the crowd than an authentic spiritual experience.

I went from being the kid who danced in spite of everyone, to being the young adult who took it as a point of pride that I was not raising my hands with the crowd. I now see in this younger self a person who longed to be authentically at home in her own body. She wanted to rediscover a childlike abandon unfettered by the gaze of others. But in her desire for authentic expression, she became judgmental of those around her. Judgment in turn led to a fear of being judged, and an unnatural physical restraint. A growth spurt toward the end of high school hadn’t helped — I was nearly 6’1”, gangly and unsure of how to move in my body. There were times I wanted to hide in a corner.

Fast forward to my third year of college, which I spent abroad in Granada, Spain, where I shared an apartment with two lovely Spanish students. The apartment itself was nothing pleasant to write home about. My roommates’ smoking habit had turned the walls an unsettling shade of yellow, and in the cold months all the windows were closed to keep the heat bill down, so I would shut myself in my bedroom to avoid inhaling too much smoke. To achieve some semblance of privacy when showering, the bathroom window needed to be covered with a towel, which would promptly become soaking wet. Suffice it to say, I spent little more than my sleeping hours at home.

Fortunately, the apartment was redeemed by its location: three floors above El Medievo, a kitchsy dive stylized with a suit of armor standing guard at the entrance and coats of arms covering the walls. Every Wednesday at 10:45 p.m., the bar offered salsa dancing lessons. After an initial invitation from some Spanish friends in my Bible study group, I went faithfully every single week for the better part of a year (still managing to roll out of bed for an 8 a.m. class the next day. My course notes, of course, were indecipherable).

Salsa proved to be a shortcut back to a more soulful, less critical version of myself. While dancing, I was aware of myself and my partner, with only a peripheral sense of those around me (to avoid getting stepped on, or inadvertently smacking someone else with what a future salsa team would affectionately call my “Condor arms”).

Once I had the basic steps, and no longer needed to count the beat, I became lost in the music. This allowed me to move with a freedom and joy that I had not experienced since childhood. The more comfortable I became in my own skin, the better I danced. The better I danced, the more at home in myself I felt. I recognize this joyful practice as an experience of integration. My body and my spirit were brought back into alignment with one another.

I attended a few churches while living in Spain. But it’s fair to call El Medievo my church. Every Wednesday night was a beautiful conversation between my body, the music and the Divine. It was glorious, this experience of being fully alive. I was returned to myself.

Now, when I need to reclaim my sense of my truest, most spiritual self, I dance.

An example: a few years ago, I was very, very angry. I called my friend Rosa, seething. She listened compassionately, and then encouraged me to try another method to process my feelings. “Dance out your anger,” she said. I have rarely felt so fully seen — dancing was the exact medicine my heart needed. I poured myself with abandon into the dance, each pounding step shifting me from my head to my heart. I felt the anger’s energy radiate out from my gut, chest and spine, flowing through my limbs, to finally dissipate as it exited my body.

It was a wordless, passionate prayer. An act of self-compassion through the release of resentments. A movement toward forgiveness that set me homeward bound, back into loving relationship with my own body.

I was recently chatting with a friend from seminary who teaches dance classes that encourage just this sort of emotive expression. She discovered the work she needed to do in the world when her 4-year-old son had a tantrum, and she helped him express his feelings through dance. “Shake the anger out of your head,” she told him. “Good! Now your tummy.” She joined him, mirroring his movement. By the time they had moved through several parts of their bodies, his anger had subsided. Today, my friend helps children and adults express and release their feelings through dance. As students locate the places where feelings reside in their bodies, they come home to themselves.

This continual homecoming to the body is what I want for myself and my own children. My twin daughters are not yet a year and a half old, and they already love to dance. Together we bop our heads and bend our knees along with the songs that stream through our kitchen speaker, grinning and giggling, a gaggle of goofballs. I am in awe of the freedom of their movement, the unfettered joy of their expression. I give thanks that they are wholly integrated, body and spirit, and pray they might always be so. And, I hope they will remain in healthy relationship with their very good bodies, even as life deals them pain, change and questions.

“May you always,” I whisper, “be at home.”

I would love to hear your reflections! What helps you return to your body when life gets painful? When do you feel most at home in your body? How have you learned from your body as it has changed over time?