Jill Henderson at Shands Arts in Medicine dancing dancing dancing 

from our book, Creative Healing, http://www.artashealing.org/creativehealingonline.html

How dance heals

Dance for healing is about  moving.  With every movement you embody the creative fire.  There within the dance, your body has a life of its own.  Within every one of us is a dancer.  The dancer within us is the seducer, the seductress, the one creates a healing spiral around us.  If we are seduced enough, we move into the dance and are part of the movement of healing.  If  you are a nurse, a mother, a person who is ill, you start to dance from room to room.   You are in the midst of tasks, and if within all of this,  you close your eyes and see yourself as a dancer, you see that you live in the dance of your own life.  Instead of rushing from place to place, you shift your body’s perspective.  All of a sudden, you see yourself dancing through your own life.  You become graceful and beautiful by a deliberate conscious act, an intention.

Through this possibility of dancing at any moment in our lives, dancing in any moment, we can see ourselves in total grace and beauty.  In the dancing moment there is  level of spontaneity and fun.  You can move in any way you want to, you dance and twirl, allow yourself to stretch, to open.  Embody movement that is natural and flowing like a river.   Your movements become art, they become a dance.

Dance heals by spiraling us down inside ourselves to a center where tensions are released and there is a freedom and spaciousness.  To dance is to harness the fire inside your belly that moves you.   You are always in movement, you go inside where you are held in place, and then move outward.  You thrill to the momentum and the movement that frees you.  You feel the wind as you move, it alivens your senses. You twirl, you move, you feel your spirit's rhythm.

Dance is vehicle for emotional expression, an opportunity to embody emotion.  When she teaches, Jill has people dance an image of a scene, become a forest, an animal.  Each person chooses their image and dances it to another person.  Then they dance together.  Then Jill has people dance a moment of pain or illness.  She uses the dance as a way to connect to someone.  You can become sensitive to how you move, and how another person moves.  You move with them and let them push on your hand. You connect  with the essential energy each person has inside themselves. Each person has a specific energy, a way of moving.  You connect with it and harness it for healing.   You start to move, you get into your energy, you get tingly, alive.  Your cells vibrate, you tap into your own energy source.   As you move you feel the imagery within you become real, you feel it become alive.  If you imagine you are a tree, you move your arms as branches and you feel like a tree.  When you dance with someone who is ill, your very movements flow to them, lift them or caress them and send them your healing energy. 

All the imagery does is take you into the dance.  What is healing is the actual dance.  You body and spirit become one and really  free.   The energy of the experience becomes palpable.  Writing, painting, song, and dance are like a continuum that goes from thought to movement embodying  the creative process.  In dance you  are truly embodied, translating thought and emotion into movement.  When you get cells moving there are neurotransmitters flowing, there are endorphins flowing.  You express any fluidity that you are capable of.  Whatever is tense, is let go. The body itself leads you where it wants to be naturally.