How Dance Saved My Life

Dancing Your Bliss; Freeing the Body Ecstatic, or How Dance Saved My Life
I move and dance to save my life.
This is where we begin and end. In our bodies. The body does not lie; it invariably identifies what is present in us as well as what is lacking.

Dancing Your Bliss was birthed out of my own broken pain. Had I not experienced every moment in my life, just as I have, I do not know if I would have the tools to share with you what I know, what I believe to be magical, wise and true.

Our bodies are brilliant, stunning machines. They speak, sometimes we listen. They cry out to us, we shut our ears, shut down, and ignore the messages we desperately need to consider. So the messages get tucked away under our work, our addictions, our inventive styles of shut-down. We smoke our wants, eat them, fuck them, rage about them. I took mine into psychotherapy for 15 years, always wanting something more from the sessions. I saw that the power of dance was transformative, but also isolative, competitive even. Therefore, I was not sure how to gain that power and clarity in the world of dance. Traditional psychotherapy seemed the answer to my struggles.

I believe that emotions manifest in specific tensions and disconnects located in particular body parts. Our bodies serve as metaphors for our life experiences. When we move our stories, or “mythologies”, as the Halprin method I have trained with calls it, we can begin to experience shifts and growth.

I have been so moved by the work of Mary Stark Whitehouse. Developer of “authentic movement”, she worked primarily one on one with high-functioning adults. Drawing from Jungian psychoanalysis, she emphasized the revelation of the unconscious through movement. Like Jung, she believed that deep, inner directed movement can lead to an experience of the “transcendent.” For Whitehouse (1999), “the body is the personality on the physical level and movement is the personality made visible” (p.52, “the tao of the body.” In P. Pallaro (ed) Authentic Movement Essays by Mary Starks Whitehouse, Janet Adler, and Joan Chodorow. London: Jessica Kingsley).

I learned to live fully in my body through my own curiosity, and hunger. I knew that my body sought pleasure – through exercise, dance, sensuality, connection, touch. I also knew that I hated my body, as I believe many women are taught to, and ignored it’s many sensations, wants, pains.

Through a synchronistic series of events, I was asked to counsel women with severe eating disorders, addictions, and severe histories of abuse in a psychiatric facility in Philadelphia. I saw hundreds of women, and every one of them was disconnected from her body. Every one of them had denied herself the wisdom and kindness that the body offers. I see all of us on a continuum of disconnect, my brave patients on one end, myself vacillating, and you, where are you? Well, it shifts every day I would imagine.

My shift was most profound while my father was dying, when I was 24. At this time, I was unable to dance, even socialize, for over a year, as I suffered severe panic attacks, depression and agoraphobia. Nearly housebound, my therapy sessions were spent navigating how to manage the bus ride home without profound terror, and panic.
In order to survive, I began experimenting with conscious movement; mixing guided imagery with dance and movement, alone, in my living room.

Discovering a world of improvisational movement and creative expression, I had truly come home. All the ingredients were present for my healing, and my life opened immensely. Slowly, my own pain moved into the powerful expression that now is Dancing Your Bliss, where I always ask participants to please leave their critic at the door, and to remember that the body always speaks our truth.

Today, I experience magic each time I work with a client and give her the space, the breathing room, the permission to move her body in exactly the manner that she wishes. I see magic as her body points her in the direction that she needs to go in, gifts her with a metaphor for her unnamed, unknown feeling.

The body never lies.

I recognize that power in all of the body, each part, and ask that you notice which parts of you choose to move when you dance, how they move. With what force, what speed, what repetition. I hope that you will embody your spirit, and mood (s) and notice, (the key here) how you can move in and out of your emotions, and not become a slave to them.

I hope that folks will no longer say; “I can’t dance, or “I feel embarrassed dancing”, and instead, dance that awkwardness, that unsteady, unsure place inside, until it gels with your own heartbeat, and becomes exactly what it needs to be. I hope that you find music that inspires you, and space to move. I hope that we all will continue to reach out to meet our edge.

One of my many great teachers, Daria Halprin, daughter of legendary Anna Halprin, describes this as the intention of movement based expressive arts therapy (2003):

“To assist people in developing awareness, creativity and embodied expression; to facilitate an in-depth exploration of personal myth, pathos, and potential, and to catalyze breakthroughs into new ways of being” (p. 102, The Expressive Body in Life, Art and Therapy: working with movement, metaphor and meaning. London: Jessica Kingsley).

I embody new ways of being each time I move consciously. I offer you the opportunity to feel this too. Starting exactly where you are.

Rachel Fleischman is a Licensed Body Centered Expressive Arts Therapist, with a private practice in San Francisco. She wishes to thank Manfred Fischbeck, and Brigitta Hermann of Group Motion Philadelphia, http://www.groupmotion.org, and Daria and Anna Halprin, of the Tamalpa Institute, Kentfield California, www.tamalpa.org.


www.dancingyourbliss.com Connecting Motion with Emotion