My body always danced. I couldn’t stop it. Everyone can dance, but not everyone is a dancer. You know you are a dancer if you can NOT keep your body still when you hear music. Something physical happens to you. Your cells absorb and merge with the music, a marriage happens. You accept it, let it in, welcome it…the music, your divine lover. It matters not the beat, the genre, the melody, you become one and you surrender to how the music wants to move you. It is intimate, it’s a prayer, and a meditation. 

I’ve studied many types of dance. They all have a different feeling and have their own music. My three favorites are ballet, salsa rueda and hula. 

Ballet – To my visual cortex a ballerina appears to be angelic, to take flight, to defy gravity. When dancing, it feels rigid and structured on your body, it is pure disciplined graceful strength. Your focus is up to the heavens. As a ballet dancer your strength will double, triple even, as you propel yourself into the air, then landing ever so softly. It is akin to a superpower. 

Salsa Rueda – Salsa rueda is a Cuban partner dance done in a circle. It feels earthy, sexy and communal. As you switch partners every few seconds you look into another set of eyes, touch new hands, and smile at a new face. The music is fun. Everyone has permagrin and you hear laughing throughout.  As a woman/follow I am led by the man/lead – he twirls me, catches me, moves me around like a play thing and I let him. He is in charge and taking care of me while we dance. I surrender to him. All I can say is this feels amazing. 

Hula – This is a sacred Hawaiian dance with song or chant. It tells a poetic story and it can also be for entertainment or sacred rite. When I dance hula I feel my heart crack open. Sometimes I even get teary eyed as it moves heavy emotions out of my body. Hula is done barefoot. You feel the Earth absorb everything and transmute all back into light. I float like a wave, literally syncing with the tempo and rhythms of Earth itself. You become the flow. You mimic mother ocean, the wind, the trees. It’s like you become a channel for all living things as you impart the message through your hands. 

If you are an expecting mama join me for my online prenatal yoga and dance class where we learn birth specific yoga and ancient dance movements that were used during birth to help ease babies into the world – this is the original form of childbirth education. I combine movements from brain dancing, ballet, hula, Egypt, Greece, and Persia. All of my students tell me this is their favorite prenatal class. You can now stream anytime.

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Birth dancing is one of the oldest and misunderstood forms of dancing. It has been greatly misrepresented in popular culture and even has a negative connotation among the less informed. As featured in the Winter 1996 issue of Habibi magazine, a birth dancer, Morocco, said:

“Dance du ventre, or belly dancing, is not at all what Western society thinks it to be, i.e. a dance of sex and seduction. This is an erroneous and ignorant belief, reinforced and perpetuated by stage and movie writers too lazy to do research. Neither is it a ‘belly’ dance, since much more is involved than just the stomach muscles. Oriental dancing, as the Arabs themselves call it, is one of the oldest forms of dance, originating with pre-Biblical religious rites worshipping motherhood and having as its practical side the preparation of females for the stresses of childbirth. Thus it is the oldest form of natural childbirth instruction.”

All the best,

Zoe

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