My guest on the Souful Revolution Podcast today is Gabrielle Rivero, founder of the Lenae Release Method, a research-informed movement method that helps participants learn how to accept, express, and release emotions in the body through movement.
Gabby received her BS in Recreation and Event Management with a double minor in Dance from the University of Florida and received her Master of Art in Theology from Fuller Seminary in 2018. With her background in dance and her extensive research on the rejection of dance throughout Early Christian History, she connects movement to the body and the emotions, as she helps communities and individuals learn how to release, emote, and heal from traumatic and stressful events.
Our conversation about the power of movement covered so many themes, including Black Joy, interrupting generational trauma, and the kind of parenting that meets children in their feelings through compassionate, mirrored movement. The below excerpts are just a few of the highlights of our inspiring conversation, which you can listen to in full using the player above, on Apple Podcasts, or on Spotify.
Lauren Grubaugh Thomas: I want to begin by asking you to share about what it means to you to be a soulful revolutionary.
Gabrielle Rivero: Yeah, that's a beautiful question.
I was laughing about it when I first heard it because I kept asking myself, am I truly a soulful revolutionary?
But as I think through it and I process the work that I do and the spaces that I've engaged in, I think for me being a soulful revolutionary is basically being someone that allows for transformation to happen, that sits in the space to hold space for people to process, to engage with themselves, to engage with the world, to show up fully as ourselves, naked and exposed, being vulnerable to our emotions, being vulnerable to our bodies, being vulnerable to the world around us.
LGT: Naked and exposed. That's really striking because you include in your bio this line about having studied the rejection of dance. I'd love to hear you share more about why, in spaces of Christian faith, has dance been something seen as dangerous, as problematic? And how do you navigate that as you're welcoming people into the space that is naked and exposed, that is vulnerable?
GR: Yeah, that's a beautiful question. And one that I could go hours on, as I've done all this research. But to give a synopsis of what has happened throughout history, it's really that as a society, we have understood movement as sinful, and some of that comes from the language of the Bible.
In the New Testament we have this woman that is dancing. It's very vague on the type of dancing she's doing…what is happening in her movements, in her body, but she pleased the king. She pleased King Herod. And because of that, he then says, “I'll do anything you want.” (Her response) was, “I want the head of John the Baptist.” And we see John the Baptist being beheaded.
What happens often from that one passage of scripture is this idea… that dance elicits sin.
And then we even go back further to look at early philosophers, we look at Plato, we look at Fado. Those early philosophers…they saw the body as this thing that was disconnecting them from God, (and) they tried to get further and further away from it. But what they were really doing was they were actually trying to get further and further away from their emotions.
And what ended up happening is we end up seeing this long line of this rejection of the body. We see this rejection of the emotions.
So a lot of what my work ends up becoming is a space to say, “Your bodies are OK. Your bodies were made perfectly.”
And you can't actually connect to God without it.
LGT: What you're describing is that… movement is healing. Movement is nonviolence. Movement is how we reconnect with Spirit.
GR: Research is coming out saying when we move, we receive dopamine. That when we move, we can engage with the world in a way that actually makes us feel better, in a way that actually makes us feel whole, in a way that actually brings back memories to the brain. That movement allows us to engage with the world in ways that we haven't even processed yet, in ways we haven't even engaged with yet.
(Movement) allows us to connect to ourselves in ways that allow us to be whole and happier and healthier beings.
LGT: I wonder if you could speak a little bit more about how these spaces help folks to heal from trauma, particularly as you're working with (those) who are becoming aware of the trauma of white supremacy carried in their bodies, and what that means for you as a Black woman to be doing this work, to be holding space for yourself and for others to heal from the trauma inflicted by the violence of white supremacy in our world.
GR: I've been finding myself now in a space and time where I am holding space for Black women to process. We are giving Black women access to their ancestral roots that they have yet to tap into.
We miss this in society, where these women have not had spaces to process, have not had spaces to be angry. That’s a serious emotion to even engage with….we're afraid we're going to be labeled as the angry Black women. We're afraid we're going to get the cops called on to us. We're afraid for our safety that someone might hurt us for being angry.
So I said, “OK, let's engage with the emotion of anger together.”
For Black people — women and men — we often say we don't have spaces to express. We don't have spaces to be angry where we feel safe to process our anger. But inviting people… to come together and say, hey, express your anger, yell if you need to, let it out. That actually allows and invites healing into generational trauma that people have not even been able to access."
Learn more and sign up for an online class at the Express & Release web site. Keep up with this healing movement on Facebook and Instagram.
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