Growing up, my dad never let me dance. If he caught me dancing, he’d physically beat it out of me. To him, dance was for people overidentified with the superficial world and he wasn't about to let me be one of them. Instead, he taught me how to fight and wrestle. He taught me how to shoot hoops in basketball, and would make me do endless sprinting drills on the track. My body became strong and decently athletic as a result, and I played competitive sports for most of my childhood. Yet the spirit of music and dance kept calling me out, inviting me to cultivate a relationship with my body that wasn’t solely driven by performance and achievement. Going deeper, dancing allowed me to experience what it was like to feel at home in my body. This was a feeling I had to actively create and maintain, given the physical abuse I endured for many years.
Despite my dad’s attempts to condition me, I would dance my ass off whenever and wherever I could. I would bounce, spin, turn, and twist to every genre possible. I loved the feeling of gyrating my hips in ways that weren’t sexual as much as sensually liberating. If dance could produce this level of joy, confidence, and pleasure within me, I knew I could trust it. This reminds me of a quote I saw somewhere: feeling safe is the freedom to cultivate your own expression and existence. Dancing is my safe place.
When a sense of safety arises in my body, I can own my vulnerability, risking emotional exposure and losing the armor. I become open and accepting of however I want to be or feel in that moment. The deeper my vulnerability, the deeper my dance flow. I let the music come alive in me. When I stumbled upon the ecstatic dance community at the Church of 8 Wheels in San Francisco in my early 20s, I fell in love with what I saw and felt. Everyone was expressing themselves the way they wanted to. There was no status quo, no standard of being. Some were still in meditation, some were swaying, some were thrashing, some were doing their own combination of unique movements. All expressions were welcomed and accepted.
Dance is an active meditation, a practice of embodiment. The mind lets go of full control, and the body takes over. There is no endpoint to embodiment. Just deeper awareness, integration, integrity, and depth. And then we might notice how this influences and changes all aspects of our lives.
These dance videos serve as a diary of my movement, expression, and evolution as a freestyler dancer. I love sharing it with the world. Over the years, I’ve seen my movement evolve in beautiful ways. Hope you enjoy the snippets of today’s dance!
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