Why You Should Dance
“When you dance, you can enjoy the luxury of being you.”
I did not grow up in a family that danced. My dad was a Baptist pastor until I was in 2nd grade and thereafter we remained in pretty conservative evangelical churches. In other words, no dancing.
It wasn’t like a Footloose prohibition of dancing. I just don’t remember music being played (except for the occasional Christian hymn being sung) and so there wasn’t a reason anyone would ever dance.
I remember going to junior high and high school dances and slow dancing with girls or acting goofy with other boys. But no intentional dancing occurred. I also remember trying out a mosh pit a few times in high school. That was more like running around in circles and occasionally hitting each other.
I didn’t actually dance until a friend’s mom took a handful of us to a rave early in our senior year of high school. She was going through a mid-life crisis and thank god. Looking back, I’m not sure my friend group would’ve landed at a rave without her.
But that night I remember going and watching all these joyous people dancing totally uninhibited. Maybe I had seen this on a music video, but never in person. I remember trying to move to the music and feeling completely incompetent. My friends felt the same way so we all left and smoked joints in the parking lot.
But dammit we were undeterred. We found out when the next one was happening and we came prepared with a big bag of psychedelic mushrooms. Lo and behold, I could dance. And not just dance but commune with the music, each and every beat. It felt as though dancing was something inherent in my body. I just needed to get out of the way.
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Anthropologists note that dance is a fundamental part of ritual in all hunter-gatherer communities ever observed. It is likely that dance even pre-dates language among Homo sapiens and was a crucial building block for later forms of communication and forms of social cohesion like religion.
Pause on this for a moment.
Dance is more fundamental to our bodies and brains than language. Dance is an essential aspect of being human. And yet how many of us grew up in families that did not dance? How many of us live lives today that lack dancing? How many of us start feeling nervous when we think about dancing in front of others?
Now replace the word dance with talking. Imagine a society that talks as little as ours dances. We would say that society has big problems.
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I believe that free-form dancing to rhythmic beats is a form of emotional fitness. Why? Because dancing helps us make that journey I talked about last week from our head to our heart. It does this by:
Getting us out of our heads and into our bodies,
allowing us to feel what our bodies are holding,
allowing us to release the emotional tension, buzziness, and tightness that our bodies are holding, and
allowing us to make more space inside for our hearts.
This is why I’m soooo excited to start leading conscious dance events, starting this week in Savannah. (Get your tickets here if you’re nearby.) If you can’t make it, then just put on this playlist, turn it up, and dance!