Journey Towards Embodiment

My mother enrolled me in dance class when I was 4 years old.

The teachers taught us stretches, plies, skipping, and an assortment of other moves I can’t recall.

What I do recall is stretching to touch my toes and feeling a struggle, while the other little girls, all smaller and thinner than me, folded like spaghetti.

This was probably my first brush with feeling self-conscious about my body.

I felt totally out of place, and quit before my first recital.

I was more mesmerized by the shoes and leotards than anything else anyway.

My family made sure I was well loved—and well fed.

I grew up gorging myself at all-you-can-eat buffets, and thinking it was normal to eat until I was miserable.

At 10, I figured out the art of counting calories, and attempted to go long periods of time without eating, saving my calories for what I really wanted.

This just made me loathe my body more, and go through phases of eating “well”, then giving up.

I hated physical education class, and simply thought that “my talents lie elsewhere.”

I was deeply disconnected from my body.

Enter the college era:
I was 18, “plump” as my grandmother once called me, secretly drowning in self-consciousness, and majoring in theatre arts education.

The other theatre majors talked about “Triple Threats,” performers who could act, sing, and dance.

Somehow, in my naivety, I dreamed of being a performance artist without the physicalization piece.

I thought my passion to convey emotions through my facial expressions and voice would be enough to carry me.

Deep down, I yearned to dance, but I was so uncoordinated.

All these “triple threats” were probably the same kids that could fold like spaghetti at 4 years old.

That wasn’t me.

But then, my perspective changed under the influence of two theatre arts professors, both certified in the Alexander Technique—a mindfulness approach to movement.

The Alexander Technique was my introduction to somatics—a field that focuses more on the feelings or internal sensations of the physical form, rather than just the aesthetic of the physical form itself.

I learned how to FEEL into my body, and use these sensations to awaken ease and bliss, planting seeds for me to cultivate a more loving relationship with my physical self.

My professor Missy (in the theatre department, we called our professors by their first name) led us in experiential movement.

We’d have an anatomy lecture, then we’d walk about the space to physically explore the anatomy we’d just discussed.

She would guide us with words and the gentlest hands-on assists, that sent euphoric waves from my tailbone through my crown.

”Up and free,” she would say.

"Allow,” rather than “do”.

We were unlearning, undoing, getting out of the way, so that innate energy could freely flow through the body—bringing us back to the way we were as babes, before the traumas of life adulterated our finesse.

One class we spent the entire hour standing then sitting down in a chair.

Another class we spent the whole time walking up and down the stairs.

We felt into ourselves to observe the nuanced subtleties of our movement, and observed each other with an outside perspective to see the physical form in process.

I was hooked.

I wanted to do this work forever.

When not in class, I carried my new found knowledge with me everywhere—
while eating, studying, or rehearsing for a performance.

I even learned how to give myself full-body euphoria while standing in line at the grocery store, by making micro-adjustments to my posture and connecting to my breath.

So simple, so exquisite, so yummy.

Even still, my self-consciousness and body loathing pervaded.

At 20, I picked up smoking, and fell head over heels in love with nicotine.
It was the perfect pick-me-up late nights while I stressed over completing school projects and meeting deadlines, and the best companion when friends and lovers couldn’t be bothered.

It soothed my stresses and calmed my nerves, and better yet suppressed my appetite.
I lost weight rapidly—no more baby fat.
I took great satisfaction in this, and finally I got the body validation I’d always craved.

I was discovering my body’s geometry through somatic exploration, while feeding myself on nicotine and hollow starvation.

What a paradox.

As I entered my senior year my lack of time management skills, chronic procrastination, and poor coping strategies finally caught up with me. I graduated but experienced severe burnout, and halted my pursuit of a career in the school system as a theatre arts teacher.

But where to go and what to do?

Most hope seemed lost, except that same year, my friend gifted me a hula-hoop.

It became my beloved dance teacher—the one I had been waiting for my whole life.

With the hoop, I spiraled outward and inward.

I found repetitive movements that calmed me deep in my core—in some kind of way that was beyond the physical.

Much like the Alexander Technique it helped me tap into a current, and move in a way where “I” got out of the way, and allowed my body to unravel.

For the first time, I fell in love with my body.

I fell in love with everything that she could do for me.

I saw her for the first time. I saw the potential in her, and I began to appreciate her.

I began to dance daily, first with the hoop, sometimes for hours at a time, then without the hoop.

I went to hooping retreats (yes it’s a thing).

I met others on their journey with embodied movement and dance.

Beyond flow arts (which umbrellas hula-hooping), I discovered Gabriella Roth’s 5 Rhythms, Ecstatic Dance, acro-yoga, contact improv, and countless other ways to explore movement and flow.

I decided the next step in my professional path would need to involve touch.

If I was going to help people feel into this current, I wanted to be able to touch them.

I enrolled in massage school, acquired a “license to touch,” that is, my massage and bodywork therapy license.

I began playing with this flow through touch, and discovered myofascial release, a modality that gently works with the connective tissue to release stored up emotional and physical tension. I had my first emotional release from bodywork during this training.

My next emotional release from a body-based modality, came during breathwork (which is worth its own blog post).

In 2018, I completed my first 200hr yoga teacher training.

By 2022, after losing my mother, I did a second one. This time, in a 3 week immersion in Costa Rica.

Here, I had my first emotional release from movement.

After our first yoga class at the training, I sobbed.

The movements had opened my body in a way so that I could release my grief.

I had no words—only feelings and a body response.

The energy moved through me, and I allowed it to see daylight, without judgment.

My mind clung to a 1000 stories, yet my body required no such tellings.

She only asked for one thing—full presence. So I sat with her.

My quest for fully embodied presence and mindfulness is lifelong.

There is no perfect destination, and as a wise healer recently told me,
“There is no other place to go besides being here, now.”

“Here, Now,” is the most trying place to be sometimes, but I think it may be the only place we can actually access in this physical form.

My journey towards embodiment has changed my perspective on dance, movement, nutrition, consumption habits, and my relationship with my body.

I’m learning, daily, to love my body— to give her compassion through her every ebb and flow, to nourish her but not restrict her, to weigh her less and dance with her more.

I now consider myself a dancer—not to someone else’s choreography, but to my own internal rhythms.

On my 33rd birthday, with three cakes before me, after setting up to vend at a festival, I listened to the organizer give me a shout out on the mic,
“She’s a vendor, a sponsor, AND a presenter. A TRIPLE THREAT!”

Perhaps she didn’t know the significance of those words, “triple threat,” but I did.

It was a sweet little reminder that the label I once aspired to be, despite feeling unworthy, somehow found me anyway.

I am good enough, and I am allowed to inhabit this body—fully.

In gratitude for this journey and its many dances.

Life is a Flow.
Align and Spiral with it.