Born to Dance!

“May you be true to yourself and dance to the beat of your own soul.”

_Gail Alexander

When I watch toddlers moving and giggling to the rhythms of music I can’t help feeling that deep down in our human psyche we are all dancers. The greatest sorrow is to witness the frozen body, the one that does not move, that cannot move because of trauma, repressive beliefs or sometimes sheer terror. It is our natural state to move, to explore and experience the world through our senses, including proprioception (the sense which informs us about the shape and location of our body in space).

Movement is located in our language. We say things like; moving forward, jumping with joy, slowing down the pace etc. This is because we make sense of the world through movement. Stuck in a dark room without that ability to move – we go crazy. We also learn through movement from the first time we reached out into the world as toddler. Most of our learning is embodied through movement. And we delight in moving through spaces, forests and water.

Dance has been around since time immemorial. And the connection of movement and dance makes it the ideal medium through which we can explore and expand our connection with the world and life around us – including relationships to self, other and the entire universe! If we can only remember and connect to what it was like to dance spontaneously, as we did as toddlers, we can access a the world of dance, full of wonder, full of fun, and full of life.

_Christos Daskalakos