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.