Dancing Into the New Year: On Healing, Dance, and Re-Writing Harmful Body Narratives.
It is January 1, 2020. I said farewell to 2019 with a kiss shared with my fiance (still a word I am getting used to), in the middle of dancing in the beautiful, swirling, twirling, organized chaos that any contra dance embodies, especially one on New Year’s Eve. I looked around as I danced, and I caught glimpses of my friends’ faces—some who have stood by me for years through the hardest seasons, and some who I am just beginning to get to know. Their expressions exuded joy and love as they spun past me, but I, along with most of us who have found ourselves thriving after being thrown or guided or pushed or coaxed or however we wound up in the contra dance community, know that if you push deeper, below the smiles and laughs, the heartstrings being plucked to make music on our faces are actually the feelings of something deeper—
Belonging. Feeling seen, valued, and safe.
As Peter and I progressed down the line, I could feel the giddy anticipation in the room increasing as we knew the last minutes of 2019 were ticking down. See, the band and caller intentionally started the dance at a time when it would begin in 2019 and end after midnight, in 2020. We literally were dancing into the new decade.
Before 2020 arrived, somewhere in the middle of the dance tears began to well in my eyes as I looked around at the community that surrounded me. I became aware of how grateful I am for the sense of belonging I have found in dance communities I have been a part of over the past couple years. I pushed further inside myself to ask what the tears were trying to tell me. (Well, as much as I could while still remembering the steps of the dance and not accidentally messing up the entire contra line with my internal contemplation.) I remember thinking to myself as I balanced, swung, allemanded, do-si-doed, and twirled,
“Dancing has radically changed my life, and finding my body’s voice through dance has been one of the most healing experiences I have ever had.”
You see, I grew up in a tradition where I was raised believing that bodies were bad—all bodies, including mine. Like many who are raised within the fundamentalist evangelical Christian institution, especially as a female, I was handed a very small box in which my body was allowed to take up space. To fit inside that box, I had to learn some very important skills, which at their core, mostly involved learning how to take up as little space as possible with my body.
These skills were constantly reinforced by the messages that purity culture sent me, from pastors and youth group retreats, always talking about “temptation” and “sin” and “sexual immorality,” constantly reminding me of all of the reasons why it was so important that I kept my body inside of the box.
I, like many women growing up in conservative Christian traditions, heard things like—
1.) “Your body is dangerous, and it is up to you to make sure you keep all cleavage, nipples, curves, hips, and waistlines hidden, because if not, you might cause someone to sin.” —> The underlying message here was that if I as a woman showed too much, I was going to be a temptation for men to “sin.” —> This trained me to believe that it was my responsibility to keep men in their place by forcing myself to take up less space, and if I got negative attention, harassment, or even abuse from a man, it was probably my fault because I should have taken up less space, I should have made sure I drew less attention by keeping myself tucked away. Yuck.
2.) “Your body is bad, and the messages it sends you cannot be trusted.” —> That whole “flesh is sinful” thing that so many of us hear growing up. —> Since I was told that church was a place that always gave ultimate truth, I believed that being in and listening to my body was dangerous, and I learned pretty quick how to silence the voice of my body in response. This not only disconnected me from physical symptoms manifested in my body, but also emotional symptoms that manifested in my body—like being able to notice how my body holds grief as an ache in my chest, or how it holds anxiety as tightness in my throat, or how it holds anger as a burning sensation radiating at the top of my ears, or how deep I can breathe when I feel safe, or how love, and sometimes too much coffee, feels like electricity running through my veins. I wasn’t able to even begin learning what emotions felt like in my body until the past couple years because most of my life I was told, both directly and indirectly, that my body was bad, and I couldn’t trust it. No if’s and’s or but’s.
3. “Moving your body is dangerous, especially in a sensual way.” —> I took this to mean that if I moved my hips too much in a public setting, I was basically asking to be taken by a creep. I remember always having this fascination with hip hop dancing from a young age, but I was always scared to try any moves because I was scared that I would be viewed as a whore, because that was the only language I had heard associated with people who danced with their hips.
4. “Desire and pleasure are dangerous and sinful, and if you feel it, you need to ask God for forgiveness.” —> OH THE SHAME, yall. So many young people have the same experience as I did, believing that feeling pleasure, even the pleasure of platonic, consentual touch, in your body was a sin, which does nothing but heap shame onto young people who are just trying to figure out what it means to have a body that has feelings.
These messages and beliefs, combined with much more that there is not time to dive into now, left me as a young adult completely disconnected and disembodied. I had stored all of my trauma in my body, but I didn’t know how to access it because I had silenced the voice of my body for so many years that I didn’t know where to go or how to listen to what my body was telling me. There was me, and then there was my body. And I waged war after war on her for many years.
This looked like many years of disordered eating—micro-binges and micro-purges—constantly fluctuating between +/- fifteen pounds of my natural body weight, which made the constant battle in my head and body very subtle and mostly unnoticeable to the outside observer. No one could hear the internal shaming. They couldn’t see me waking up every morning and immediately walking over to the mirror to look at my stomach, assessing if it was somehow just a little flatter than the day before. No one could see me standing in my kitchen alone, tearing my way through a whole bag of potato chips on a binge because I didn’t know how to process my emotions and needed something to ground me in reality. No one heard the voices in my head as I worked out an extra hour the next day to punish myself.
BAD. WEAK. BAD. BAD. BAD.
For many reasons, I had developed a body narrative that told a negative, shameful, harmful story about myself and my relationship to my body, and it was best summarized with the word, “Bad.” I therefore did not feel that my body was a safe place in which to take up space, so I found unhealthy coping mechanisms and figured out how to just survive. I had no idea what it felt like to thrive in my body, to love my body, to be fully integrated, connected, and embodied.
****And then, I found therapy, meditation, and healthy, accepting community and began working through my emotional and spiritual trauma, which folks, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND doing as soon as possible if you find yourself in a similar situation.****
And somewhere, in the midst of that, while I was still very much recovering from being a shell of a human, my best friend, Julia, dragged me to a blues dance and a contra dance in the same winter of 2016.
Wait. Dancing? Moving your hips? Holding hands? Holding intimate eye contact? Being chest to chest with another person, and many times a person with a penis??? At this point I still hadn’t fully broken down the internal warning alarm that Christianity gave me, and it was going crazy.
“DANGER. DANGER. DANGER. ABORT.”
My still-healing-from-a-toxic-version-of-fundamentalist-Christianity brain hadn’t yet fully eradicated that back-of-my-mind conscience which still, to this day, sounds like a Southern preacher screaming in my brain,
“Now kids we all know that touch leads to sex, and pre-marital sex is just about the worst thing you can do to yourself as a young person!!! So to keep yourself from sinning, keep yourself away from temptation!!!!”
*Disclaimer* Friends, in case you didn’t know, it turns out, it is in fact possible to dance, in close contact, even moving your hips in a sensual way, with another human, without it ending in sex. WHO KNEW?
Jokes. But also slightly not, unfortunately.
I had never heard of platonic touch before—non-romantic, non-sexual touch.
And oh, my friends, do we need it.
That year, through dancing, I experienced what it was like to fully be in my body for the first time.
Slowly, my apprehensive, human-fearing self pressed into the discomfort, especially the eye contact (it is intense when you are not used to it!) and I learned to pulse. I learned to twirl. I learned to balance. I learned to follow. And most of all, I learned to move my hips,
with confidence,
AND WITHOUT CRIPPLING SHAME.
I completely and utterly threw myself in. I went to work shops. I went to full weekend dances. I was hooked. I remember in those first months of this newfound beautiful experience of partner dancing, I caught myself asking, “WHERE HAS THIS BEEN ALL MY LIFE?”
I felt robbed that I had gone 21 years of my life without knowing partner dance existed. Well, I mean, for normal people, and not just professionals, much less that I could be good at it and 100% authentically enjoy it.
And now, here I am, going on four years later, at a New Year’s Eve contra dance, surrounded a community that welcomed me in and told me some of the most important things I didn’t even know how badly I needed to hear:
“You are welcome.”
“You belong here.”
“Your body is good.”
“In fact, your body is good and beautiful, however it is, however you move it.”
“Move it however the hell you want, take up space, speak with your hips and feet and arms and stomach and ribcage and head and spine, and don’t apologize for it.”
Friends, last night I danced into 2020.
Full.
Embodied.
Connected.
Unashamed.
Beautiful.
Myself.
And I was welcomed how I was.
Is there anything we long for more?
AND, I wore the most sparkly, sexy, skin-tight, open-back dress. AND, my armpit and leg hair was out for all to see. AND, I wore full eye makeup AND lipstick AND gold glitter on my cheeks. I felt like I embodied both the divine femininity and divine masculinity within me, and as I danced I marveled at all of the various reflections of and presentations of the divine masculine and divine feminine in each person around me.
All of us.
Together.
In our uniqueness.
In our beauty.
In our humanness.
In our oneness.
Dancing is a political act. It is a statement that there are spaces where all of us can exist and hold each other and look into each other’s eyes with love and joy and tenderness, and hold our differences in tension without letting them separate us.
Differences dissolve on a dance floor. Dancing is a way to stand against the lie that we are separate. There is no agenda. There is no debating who is right and who is wrong.
There is just humanness, in all of its grace, fluidity, chaos, conviction, contradiction, love, pain, and healing.
I am learning what it is like to express myself with my body and not apologize for it like I did for so many years. Our bodies are not something we need to apologize for. They are good, safe, loving spaces that we can inhabit fully and love. I think we come into this world knowing that. And sometimes life strips it away from us, and sometimes, it takes a lot of healing to remember and believe it again, but it is possible.
I have not arrived, for we never arrive.
There is always more work to do.
But I am walking the long road towards peace,
and I am grateful for all of those in my life who are walking
and dancing
me home.
//
Thank you for sitting in a vulnerable space with me. May it be an invitation for you to be vulnerable in response. Maybe not to me, but to someone, even if that someone is just yourself.
//
Cheers to the journey, and may your Spirit always reside in a state of wonder.