ON MOVEMENT AS MEDICINE AND DANCE AS PRAYER.
““When we give ourselves over completely to the spirit of the dance, it becomes a prayer.””
My foray into conscious dance and the merging of the somatic and the shamanic as an intentional and embodied prayer deepened on the dance floor almost twenty years ago as part of my healing process to reverse dis-ease in my body.
A decade before that, I was part of NYC’s late ‘90s rave scene. I loved the subculture—the collective movement, the exploration of expanded states—but I often found the chaos and overuse of drugs overwhelming. My refuge was in the dimly lit, bass-filled basement rooms pumping jungle and drum and bass, where I didn’t need anything other than the music. The rhythms moved deep inside my soul and gave my body no choice but to surrender to the beat. The chaos and overwhelm disappeared, and I was present, connected to my body, the rhythms and deeply in the groove. Instead of needing to take something to move, I was being moved - naturally with only the music as my medicine.
Years later, I discovered Gabrielle Roth’s 5 Rhythms, which rekindled that feeling but with deeper awareness and intention. This time, I wasn’t in a dark club but in the light of day where nothing could hide, surrounded by sober people, all there with the sole purpose of dancing so they could deeply inhabit their bodies.
At first, it was intimidating. How do I really go inside my body, to the places I thought I knew but was discovering I actually didn’t? At least not as well as I thought I did. How do I meet the feelings and traumas I’ve been holding inside with love and care to allow myself to move through them so they can transform into something different? That first year of dancing as prayer cracked me open to the most beautiful un-becoming, allowing me to shed layers of who I thought I was to keep meeting deeper parts of myself hidden underneath. It forever changed my life and its trajectory. It’s funny how edgy it felt back then, and now, 20 years later, I couldn’t imagine living any other way. Being deeply tuned into this body and fully inhabiting it unlocked the path through grief and sorrow toward more joy, healing, and the deepest sense of homecoming.
Before this, the word “prayer” genuinely made me cringe. But as I went deeper down the pathway of dance and Indigenous ceremony, I began to understand prayer as an intentional and embodied co-creative process with something greater than one’s self—a desire to heal, to reconnect, soften, open, and allow. I began to pray all the time - to the dance floor, the earth, the waters, the plants. Prayers of gratitude, prayers for guidance, and for clarity—to see what I needed to see, even when it was uncomfortable, and for the courage to make the changes that truth required.
After almost every dance offering, many people share how deeply they were able to go into their own process, to travel deeper into their body with just a bit of gentle facilitation to help them remember, connect, and feel their whole selves more deeply. And that remains my deepest prayer for all of us: that we keep finding our way back to ourselves, to our bodies, and to the fullness of being alive.
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