healing dance

 

Healing Dance

Laurie Corzett

 

La danse, c'est le mouvement, et le mouvement, c'est la vie.

("Dance is movement, and movement is life.")

--Ludmilla Chiriaeff (Founder, Les Grands Ballets

Canadiens)

 

What is is about dancing, in a group, with an intimate other, or alone, that can give us that mystical rush and promote wellness on so many levels? Is it the pre-cognitive memory of the rhythm of the heartbeat keeping us safe? Is it the emotional-spiritual connection to the natural world we feel when moving pleasurably in our animal body? Is it some atavistic source of healing from our primal days?

This is my quest -- to discover the healing properties of dance and how to best use and promote this simplest and most profound gift of our physical being.

 

Throughout our history, dancing has functioned as a healing and balancing component, a form of social communication and transcendent spiritual ritual. Though patterns and forms vary, expressive rhythmic movement is a very basic means of relieving emotional tension and has from the beginning been associated with religious ritual and healing. We celebrate by dancing at weddings and

festivals, and join others in dance as the quintessential romantic experience. Dancing alone, feeling the rhythmic sway and getting in touch with the extension and contraction of muscles in a pleasurable context, is uplifting, healing. Dancing definitely helps to bring up my mood and promote more sane reflection. When I can get so caught up in the dance that I no longer feel separate from the music and can move within it, it seems to free something very profound within me.

 

I have been working with dance as a self-healing resource and looking intuitively and through on-line research to open my knowledge and understanding into the possibilities and realities of healing through dance.

 

My work is based on the intuitive feeling I have been developing for quite some time about dance. There is something very primal, very basic in regard to our species and dance, involving healing in the holistic sense and the intrinsic energies of life/form/time.

In every culture there has been an emphasis on dance in not only entertainment, but as a healing force. And, then, entertainment is of course part of healing and cultural unity.

 

In my search I am finding a wide variety of healing modalities, spiritual activities and holistic therapies based on our natural expression of energies through dance, as well as community and individual art projects promoting creativity and wholeness.

 

 

 

all is interconnected

each is territorial

life, death, re-emergence in changed form,

a nightmare tarantella

a wiggly microbe dance

re-imaged into macro

by degrees of the eternal

This culture obfuscates

the basics of sex and death --

binds them up in moral outrage

and damnation for the masses

to feed upon in maenad frenzy

We expect subterfuge to fuel salvation

when all we need saving from

is the resultant confusion.

 

 

 

We are all changing all the time.

We look to the crowd to find the security of the same.

Mirrors merely show us what we expect to see.

Look, inside, all around, throughout eternity.

Feel the change.

Dance it into the change you want to be.

 

 

mirror neurons let you dance by watching others

motor neurons let you dance by moving to the music

in whatever way you comfortably can

body/mind connection, ain't it wonderful!

 

 

Wisdom, so common yet so fragile and rare,

peeking out of storybooks, popular lyrics,

offhand remarks.

Days go on and often with little thought

wound up in routine, dance steps to

elevator music, or music only recalled.

Then, on a silent walk to some unsung errand,

bursts of beatific choirs take flight,

circling like mythic birds of joy.

 

 

Maybe put on music that feels good and move with it,

let the images, ideas, memories dance with

you.