- To dance is to free ourselves from the trauma of everyday life.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t know how to dance, or dance well. There’s a rhythm inside of you waiting to be discovered. This isn’t a rhythm to be found during a song, but rather the rhythm that is inherent between your mind, body, and spirit that you’ve lost a hold of while moving through life.
It wasn’t until about a year ago that I started liking to dance. I was a very rigid and reserved kid growing up, always afraid of being judged or placed in the spotlight. The dance floor wasn’t really a place for me.
But for some reason there was this new urge inside of me that wanted to dance. This wasn’t any formal type of dancing, à la choreography or breakdancing, but rather just the freeform dancing that you’d see on the dance floor.
It was an urge for me to find the mental space and courage to be myself without being so self-conscious. This does require a bit of alcohol on my part to get the ball rolling, but now I love having the opportunity to just dance, and thus re-center myself into myself — freely, expressively, and without worry about what other people may think.
In 2013, Daft Punk released their song Lose Yourself to Dance, with Pharrell singing the lyrics of:
I know you don’t get a chance to take a break this often / I know your life is speeding and it isn’t stopping / here take my shirt and just go ahead and wipe up all the sweat, sweat, sweat
with a final ode to
lose yourself to dance.
This idea of losing yourself to dance, of taking a break from the speed of life, is not an act of running away from yourself and the challenges that arise in your daily life.
No, to lose yourself to dance is to find yourself through dance. It’s the necessary process of shedding yourself from the mask that forms through society’s expectations of who you should be or how you should live your life.
All of these expectations are a strange anomaly from our nature as human beings. But so few of us actually take the time to pause and simply ask “Does any of this even make sense?” The majority of our time, energy, and efforts poured into the work week but there is still this constant burden of always feeling behind in life. We work to stay afloat — work to barely getting by in life — as the ideals of freedom, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness come neatly packaged as our next purchase.
When our lives are consumed by such an egregious routine that deprives us of any sense of balance, dancing allows us to re-center ourselves. Endorphins are released into our mind whenever we dance. These endorphins reduce the pain, the trauma, and the stress that builds up from everyday life. And when these unnecessary stressors are separated from your being, there is a moment of clarity that arrives.
“Dance allows people to experience themselves in ways they didn’t know they could. — You can change your internal state through external movements.” (Miriam berger, psychologytoday.com: https://bit.ly/2ms8TUD)
This clarity reveals to us a truth that always exists inside of us. The truth of who we are, removed from the mask we have to wear in order to be accepted into society, a truth removed from the worry that comes from self-consciousness. This clarity reveals to us the truth existing inside our minds, our bodies, and our spirits, teaching us to care for things that the world around us cares so little of.
I found so much of my confidence and true self through dancing. It is a process of centering myself mentally and spiritually. And whenever I experience that clarity of thought that brings forth insights to my daily life, I see parallels with the shaman’s experience as they perform their healing rituals upon the bench.
Their act of jumping, combined with their chanting and instruments, allows them to isolate themselves from the external world so they can enter the spiritual realm. This is a trance, from Latin trans- meaning “beyond, on the other side of”.
Today, dancing is perceived as a mere activity that we partake in whenever there’s a party. But to truly dance towards freedom, where we reach a point of mental clarity, is to approach that state of spiritual trance that a shaman experiences. To dance towards freedom is to move beyond the spiritually deprived routines of daily life that we so willingly partake in.
The legacy of dance can be traced back 30,000 years ago through the paintings preserved on the walls of the Bhimbetka Rock Shelter in India. It is an act that has continued to free us from the bondage of trauma throughout the millennia, from our descent away from China to Southeast Asia, to our arrival here in America. The traumas placed upon our body, the traumas of our memories, they are eased away by the flow we find through dancing.
