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5 Signs that Dance is Your Soul's Language

Dance has always been a part of my life. I was the little girl dancing in the mirror in my bedroom, creating choreographies for me and my friends. At sockhops and high school parties, I was always the one that couldn’t stop moving, reciting the songs and moving to the beats in one big ball of expression. Maybe you were something like this too?
 

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I didn’t realize until much later that dance was an integral part of my essence - one of the major languages of my soul in fact. It took honest and reflective conversations with friends and deep introspective time with myself to come to the realization that dance was not just something that I enjoyed, but was a transformative method of healing for myself and through me, for others.

 

I know that I am not the only one that has been given this gift either. I know that there are many other souls who speak through the language of dance. Whether they dance professionally, around the house, on the weekends or just in their own bedrooms, dance moves them and speaks for them in a way that is truly unique and special.

 

My guess is that if you’ve been drawn to read this article, you might be one of us.

 

But how do you know for sure? Well these 5 signs below are clear clues that dance could be a primary language of your soul. Welcome home if so <3! I’m creating a community just for us - to nurture and nourish the dancer’s soul - mind, body and spirit!

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1. You can’t help but dance - even when you’re sitting down.

Whether it’s bopping around in your car or sitting down for dinner, you can’t help but move. Friends and family often point out to you that you are dancing around to music that only you can here. You probably don’t even notice - it’s just an involuntary response, the same way someone twiddles their thumbs or taps their foot. Your body just needs to move and express itself, even if just slightly.

 

2. When you are happy, you dance.

This is another one that you probably haven’t noticed until someone pointed it out. When you are happy, you start dancing. Eating food you really enjoy? You start bobbing your head or shimmying your shoulders. Just got some good news? You break out into a little dance jig of celebration. Dancing is definitely one of your soul’s way of expressing happiness and it’s your default all the time.

 

3. You could watch dance videos - instructional or performances - all day long.

You watch dance videos the same way people watch music videos or gaming videos - video after video, hour after hour. Each one excites you even more, eliciting deep emotions within you - from tears to high-fives. What’s more, you imagine what it would feel like to be doing those actual moves. You envision how awesome it would be to learn the routines and you might even find yourself walking through some of it - rewinding that video just a few more times until you get at least one part of it down.

 

4. When you hear music, you automatically see choreography. In your mind’s eye, you are constantly seeing different ways to express the emotions you feel in songs.

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You can envision huge ensembles and solo acts to your favorite music. You can sometimes even feel the ache in your bones to give a song a visual interpretation. You probably have a secret list of songs you would love to create your own choreographies to. I know that I do :-).

 

 

5. You were the closet/mirror dancer as a child.

You were the child upstairs in his or her room, pretending to be Janet Jackson, Michael Jackson, Chris Brown, Ciara, Beyonce or any of the world’s other pop dance icons. You imagined yourself in your own music video - not singing, but *dancing*. You memorized all of the moves from their latest videos and performed them over and over again for yourself and whoever was willing to watch. You probably did a few family reunion and neighborhood talent shows too. You could spend all day happily dancing.


If you identify with even a few of these, dance is much more than just movement for you. It’s a need to move that feeds your soul. It gives you life just as much as you feel that you express your life through it. It is the ultimate form of nourishment and nurturing for your soul.

 

Oh if it were just that though. But dance also has its shadow side. In the pursuit of dance, we also run right up against our insecurities, fears, doubts and secret worries. In the expression of dance, we lay ourselves out in the most prostate and vulnerable of ways, exposing ourselves to the opinions and approval of others and challenging ourselves to be unaffected and undeterred by them. Dance lovingly gives us the opportunity to love, sometimes with toughness, on ourselves and face all of the things that make us want to shrink head on.

 

Its gift is multifold and dynamic in its highs and lows.

This is why I’m creating the Dancer’s Bliss Community - an Academy to Nourish the Dancer’s Soul - Mind, Body and Spirit.

With dance as our vehicle and connection, DBC will help you to navigate the terrain of growth that dance inevitably will introduce you to. No matter if you are an amateur dancer in love with social dancing as many nights as you can, a dance major auditioning for your first paying gig or a weekend professional dancing on stages to the wee hours of the night on Saturdays and punching a clock at your 9 to 5 on Mondays, this academy is where you can grow within a community that understands you, your passion and your desire to evolve and expand.

Simply put, I get it and together we get it.

The doors to the academy will open very soon and I would love for you to know as soon as they do. If you’d like to be notified, just click here and leave me your email address.

I promise, you will be first to know :-).   

As a special thank you, I'll also send you my Woowoo Resources for Dancers Guide with two powerful resources to help you embrace the magick of dance even more!


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Mind, Body, and Spirit for the Dancer - New Project!

It’s been a soul searching kind of month :). So many things have come up! I’ve had to deal with lots of disappointment and with the realization that some of my dreams weren’t really mine and really needed to die. And that process has been hard. It’s been a constant job to maintain my happiness and hopefulness. On all levels, mind body and spirit, I’ve been struggling to stay afloat. 

But through this tumultuous month, I’ve also realized great comeback moments. I’ve been reminded constantly of my value AND of how I shortchange myself. I’ve seen first hand how my own perspective clouds a situation and creates an entirely different false reality. I’ve had so many opportunities to practice my word for the year Courage. There have been so many ways, all in the space of 20 something short days, to put every aspect of my will and belief in myself to the test.  And when I have looked and have operated on faith and have trusted, help has been everywhere. And the whisper of intuition and the Universe has been in my ear, on my mind, and in the words of other people to me guiding me to the light that comes after the little deaths. 

I want to tell you about one of those conversations today. If you’ve been with me for a while, you probably know how important a holistic approach to life is for me. You might be familiar with my particular struggles with mental illness and you might also know that I believe taking care of your mind body and spirit is necessary for a happy, healthy soul that can overcome mental illness’s hold over one’s life. You also probably know how important being a dancer is to me - how vital to my life it is and how much I’ve worked and sacrificed for it. 

Well in my work that spans the worlds of mind, body, and spirit, I’ve often had difficulty figuring out how to bring my dance life into that work. It felt like there wasn’t a place for dance in my holistic beauty, health and wellness training. I felt like I just wasn’t sure how the two meshed. 

I toyed with the idea of creating a community of dancers that all cared about learning more on holistic beauty and wellness and for a time I did that - but kept feeling like it wasn’t gelling. And so I let that idea go for a time. 

Then a week or so ago, I was fortunate enough to meet a wonderful kindred spirit who brought all of it back to me and showed me the way to do it. See, I used to have a non-profit organization years ago where I taught all about holistic living, natural health and wellness. My focus then was lower income communities because I felt like they were the ones getting left behind. What this kindred spirit helped me to see is that there are a lot more people being left behind and I, with my unique background, could serve one particular group very well.

 Dancers. Yes, I could serve dancers who inevitably deal with so many mind, body, and spirit issues.

I looked back on my time traveling and performing every other week and boom - I saw it all. Being rail thin and thinking I was as big as a house. Feeling inferior to other dancers for no reason other than skin tone or hair type or body type. Starving myself and being on the extreme side of strict to fit a certain aesthetic. Dealing with horrible skin breakouts from stage makeup and bad eating habits. Syking myself in and out before performances, auditions, and competitions. Asking God, the Universe, anyone what I was was supposed to be doing in this dance world and feeling lost and unanswered.  

So many things that I know other dancers deal with day to day. 

I realized that I have a unique voice that can speak to them and I realized just how much I would have benefited from a voice like that when I was in the thick of it. 

And so this is my new project. Am I am ecstatic about it. I’ll be perfectly honest. I don’t know how it’s going to unfold. I don’t know how I’m going to manage it with everything else. But I do know that some things that I thought were so important just aren’t anymore. I’m letting them fall away no matter how scary that is. I’m getting done with NOT looking forward to the things on my to do list. The old adage that life is too short and too precious is true no matter how you look at it. 

So the fact that the thought of this fills me up with excitement and a rush that I can’t explain in words is THE thing that drives me and is THE thing that is important. Feelings like this are what we live for. Feelings like this are what make everything else possible. They are the fuel for the impossible. 

I had to go through a lot of little deaths, disappointments, stark clear moments, and deep dark places to get to the light again. Getting to the fuel sometimes requires that, but if you let yourself flow through it all (that’s what I call operating on faith), I know you’ll find yours. 

 

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