How journeydance found me

Early in 2022, I began researching yoga retreats. I needed to get away, somewhere that would allow me space to process and heal. My beloved mom was entering the final stages of dementia. Losing her in this way was the hardest thing I had ever faced. She was the only person left on earth who had known me my whole life and was one of my dearest friends and confidants. Caring for her as we navigated her disease was vital, but it was taking a toll on my own physical and mental health. I required nourishment so I could fully be there for her in the final phase of her physical life.

I had practiced yoga for many years but had never been on a yoga retreat. A week of yoga and time in nature could be the balm I was seeking. I did a lot of googling, various yoga retreats in Mexico and the U.S. but kept getting drawn back to a place called Kripalu. I had some vague awareness of it – remembering that one of my college friends had gone there long ago – but I mostly felt a force prodding me to go. There was an event called “YogaDance” on the schedule: every day at noon. Although I have always loved dance, it honestly looked a little hokey from the pictures. I didn’t realize what a profound impact the YogaDance classes would ultimately have on my life.

My week at Kripalu was deeply healing. I discovered that I actually liked meditation! Who knew? Each meal felt nourishing to every tissue in my body. I explored the outdoors including a new concept to me of forest bathing and tried stand-up paddle boarding. My first ever labyrinth experience was revelatory – where I saw how my surface-level frustrations and irritations as I supported my mom, were really covering a much deeper grief. I peeled the onion. I talked very little and slowed down. The abundant silence throughout my experience perhaps allowed me to connect even more with the music during my YogaDance explorations.

YogaDance at Kripalu includes several different dance types, such as Shake Your Soul and JourneyDance. I LOVED all of it! The JourneyDance classes were powerful. I had danced for much of my life exploring all kinds of styles, but never had I experienced the profound healing and transformation that dance can provide. In my first fire ceremony, I realized how much fear I was holding inside. Fear of losing my mom, fear that I wasn’t providing her with enough support, fear of all sorts of potential failures, fear of uncertainty. Of course, a single fire ritual didn’t allow me to release all this fear, but it allowed me to see how much I was carrying and to let go of some of it. Another dance included a ritual in which we connected with our inner wise woman. I’ve never been able to visualize easily, but I was in such a deep hypnotic state that I saw her clearly. I felt cracked open. I had to bring this type of dance into my life.

Since the classes at Kripalu are just called “YogaDance”, it took me a few months to figure out that the most impactful ones were a style called JourneyDance. I also discovered there was no one anywhere nearby offering JourneyDance classes. After a few online classes with Toni, the creator of JourneyDance, it was clear that this modality was for me. The following summer, I went back to Kripalu to embark on teacher training.

I have been teaching JourneyDance for over two years now. It’s amazing to consider all the ways it has changed my life – especially the people I have met both through my teacher training and through my teaching. Beautiful friendships have been blooming. It’s also what opened me to exploring sound healing, which has been another direction I couldn’t have foreseen just a few years ago.

Sometimes it’s painful to think about how the most devastating period in my life later brought such immense joy and connection, that the seeds of this new path were planted in the dirt of grief. Yet, I’m aware that life tends to be that way. We can simultaneously hold much sadness, trauma, and pain while containing the capacity for abundant joy, unconditional love, and creativity.

As I look to the future, I don’t know what will unfold. I hold an openness to possibility, a spirit of curiosity and adventure, and a cultivation of love and compassion. Midlife can be a time of transition; I’m planning to keep my eyes, ears, and arms open to embrace and delight in new potentialities.

How I let an old story go

Sometimes we can get caught up in the stories we tell ourselves. Even when we want to let them go, it can be extremely difficult to do so. For years, I had a story on loop in my head about all the difficult things that had happened in my life. Major challenges of each decade of my adulthood. It usually started with being diagnosed with cancer when I was 28 and went from there. I would focus on the troubles I’ve faced, the perceived unfairness of it all. The loop would play; I would feel sad and sorry for myself. I’m not trying to downplay the difficult times that I’ve faced or that anyone else has had to contend with in their lives, but how can we acknowledge these difficult, even traumatic and terrible, events and circumstances in our lives but not spiral into despair? How can we hold space for what we have experienced, how it has shaped us, but not let that be all that we are? How can we make space for joy, connection, wonder, and whimsey while acknowledging the grief, pain, and hardship that human existence involves?

One impactful teaching was when I was talking with my therapist about my grief. She helped me to imagine that I had a physical sphere of grief. When we are in the depth of grieving, that bubble of grief may be all there is. We are inside the grief bubble. As we move forward, the size of our grief doesn’t necessarily get any smaller, but outside of that grief we begin to build layers of hope, happiness, love... We expand, allowing ourselves to hold all these feelings and emotions simultaneously.

Dance helped me to step out of the loop of focusing on the hardships that life has brought my way and to build those beautiful layers. I don’t diminish my experiences, bury them, or pretend they didn’t happen, but I no longer replay them again and again in my mind. I acknowledge them along with the pain, grief, and loss that went along with everything I have been through, but simultaneously I am able to feel into those other layers, experiencing my grief wrapped in love, joy, awe, and light. The dance floor provides a space to tell old stories, maybe telling them for the last time before they transform into something new. It allows us to acknowledge our pain, express our anger, frustration, and fear and then unfurl, making space for something luminous, bigger, and infinitely more delightful than we thought possible when we were in the depths of our pain. We can invite in what we want more of in our lives, dancing it into existence.

Our bodies can be a key resource in our healing. Dance can provide a doorway and a path towards repair and wholeness. Movement is truly medicine.

From body betrayal to body trust

When I was in my teens and early 20’s, I mostly had a positive relationship with my body. Maybe some parts were smaller than I wanted and others bigger, but I generally felt fine about my appearance and had confidence that my body would do what I asked of it. I was a runner and swimmer through high school and parts of college. Ran a couple of marathons. Danced a lot including many years of ballet and middle eastern dance. I never really faced any serious illnesses, just the typical colds and such. Then, in my late 20’s, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I didn’t have a family history that I knew of. None of the genetic markers came back positive. I was very young to be diagnosed and there was no explanation for why.

This illness changed my relationship with my body. I had a grueling year of treatment, including surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation. I opted to forego reconstructive surgery, leaving my physical form permanently altered. I had very little energy for exercise and have never really been able to get back into running in the way that I could before cancer. Perhaps the worst part was that I felt betrayed by my own body, like it was literally out to kill me. It seemed that I couldn’t trust my body anymore and felt anger for essentially losing a year of my life. I had a lot of fear. Would the cancer come back? If it did, would I be able to beat it again? I no longer felt invincible. I had to come to terms with my own mortality.

In the following years, I also faced unexplained infertility, which felt like another betrayal, especially when society sends so many messages that a woman’s worth is tied to her ability to have children. It felt like my body had both tried to kill me and then wouldn’t do what seemed like an essential function.

In the past few years, I’ve realized that I wanted to reestablish a friendship with my body. To stop viewing my body as an enemy or a disappointment, but rather as my sacred vessel, my physical form that provides me with safety and insight. After the challenges, how could I reconnect with the different aspects of my body, not just the physical tissues and bones, but the emotional body, mental body, and spiritual body?

Dancing has been a way for me to connect with all those layers of my body and re-build body trust. It has been deeper than acceptance of my physical appearance. Dance has been the conduit for realizing that my body has within it deep wisdom. Tapping into my own intuitive way of moving, being present with sensations and the breath, tuning into my own internal vibrational state, these are the paths of my healing, of deepening trust and discovering even greater opportunities for my life. Focusing on what my body can do rather than limitations. Reveling in the magic that lies within each of us. Finding how the dance can take me into hypnotic states that are needed for rewiring my own neural circuitry. Dance has changed me deeply and unlocked doors of possibility.  

If you are interested in exploring how you can reconnect with your body, I invite you to dance, whether that’s at a JourneyDance class, alone in your living room, or with friends. As you go deeper and deeper with the practice of moving intuitively, I hope that you can tap into your own wells of wisdom, find healing where it’s needed, and delight in your earthly form.