Written By Swati Mohan
In 1998, with a 5-6-7-8, black jazz shoes, dance pants, leotard, and colourful ankle warmers, I embarked on a dynamic journey, with dance as my unconditionally loving partner. The experience of presenting myself to the world in a star-like ‘sensual’ way instilled within me an unwavering confidence. Moving to the beats of Britney Spears (‘Baby One More Time’), I gave my body permission to be passionate with movements and music – even with all eyes on me! And with the bold public acceptance of the body, and the self-admiration I found in the jazz studio, I began an ever-evolving journey with dance, one that continues to help me know myself deeply, and connect to my authentic self for overall growth.
The foundation had already been laid by performing Indian dances in school, which blossomed into training in western dance – jazz, contemporary, and classical ballet – in my adulthood. Looking at dance practice through a scientific inquiry-based lens has not only widened my artistic horizon but also deepened my probe within. It’s a huge blessing to be on this pilgrimage to my unique centre, where I am unveiling phenomenal insights into the inner connections present between my body and mind – insights I would never have been aware of had it not been for dance! While my body has literally been in the spotlight as a dancer, it has also become my main source of research into the incredible and robust landscape of my inner world and soul.
Listen to the body and the mind will follow…
The body is easy to understand but is also highly complex in its mechanisms. And the reason why we need to stay in constant conversation with it is so that we don’t miss out on the inner truth it is trying to reveal to us, through the many layers of information embedded within. We usually pay attention to the body when it is hurt, when it has survival needs (like hunger or thirst), and perhaps when we have to present ourselves in public. But it speaks to us all the time; if we listen to it with a keen ear, we realise how accurately it is sketching our emotional and mental landscape for our spiritual evolution. Sleep patterns, carriage (light or heavy?), quality of digestion, whether there’s pain or tightness – these are a few ways in which our body talks to us.
With dance, our sensitivity to understanding the language of the body increases. Dancers train the body on a daily basis, informed by its anatomy and biomechanics – this is the most fundamental step towards building a relationship with our body. While mastering a dance move, we must endeavour to be aware of the micro and macro movements of the musculoskeletal, nervous and breath systems. As dancers, we also study how the moving body is behaving with the space in order to complete a particular move – research in dance practice begins right at this moment. With each move, different body parts and organs are becoming engaged; this in turn affects our higher energy system for overall health and well-being. The felt experience of the dance, enlightened by the visceral intelligence of the body, transforms the process into a meditation.
In daily life, tiny body movements – eyes blinking, hands gesturing involuntarily, tongue, teeth and lips moving, etc. – reflect the state of mind. Dance attunes the practitioner towards these signs, subtle and vulnerable at the same time, and communicates a larger inner story, which presents another perspective to further understand one’s experience.
When in doubt, talk to the body and you will certainly find answers!
A holistic practice, a way to healing
Observation is another key learning dance has taught me, helping me navigate my outer and inner space. The mirror in a dance class encourages dancers to focus only on themselves, without comparison, to observe the body simply to correct steps without judgment. This I feel is the most precious takeaway for anyone engaging with dance. For, the root of most human suffering is judgment and comparison, and shifting away from such conditioning entails a lifelong process.
Along with studying the physicality of the body, practising creative expression through dance brings us face to face with the motion of inner energy (E-motions), which eases us into a fearless and playful dialogue with every kind of feeling. Hence, integrating the myriad layers of the body is second nature for a dancer – all in a fun environment, with nice music and an open-clear space, allowing one to take a joyride in their own body! Whenever I feel my energy depleting, or the weight of things on me, I dance to my favourite music for instant relief, because blocked energies move at all levels when one is dancing.
Neuroscience research on dance has also explored the brain’s role in movement coordination and learning, and the impact of dance on motor function, cognition, and mental well-being, particularly in the case of individuals with neurological conditions. A 2003 study in the New England Journal of Medicine by researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, discovered that dance could decidedly improve brain health. The study investigated the relationship between leisure activities and the likelihood of dementia in the elderly. The researchers looked at the effects of 11 different types of physical activity, including cycling, golf, swimming, and tennis, but found that only one of the activities studied – dance – lowered participants’ risk of dementia. According to the researchers, dancing involves both mental effort and social interaction, and such stimulation helped reduce the risk of dementia. Other studies show that dance helps lessen stress, increases levels of the feelgood hormone serotonin, and aids in the development of new neural connections, especially in regions involved in executive function, spatial recognition, and long-term memory.
So, dance is a holistic practice because a dancer yields awareness of the whole being through all of the layers present in dance practice, which in turn relaxes one mentally, emotionally, and definitely physically.
Through the body and dance comes healing…
Apart from performance and daily training, a dancer also learns to harness the skill of integration to rehabilitate from pain and injuries, a common professional hazard. Having had my fair share of injuries in a career of over 25 years, I’m thankful to dance for equipping me with the courage to accept such setbacks, to consider it an inquiry rather than an unwanted obstacle, and to then attempt to understand the reasons behind it, at all levels, so as to transform it.
In my soul-searching through the body, I have gathered that it keeps a score of all our experiences and thoughts by default. Each one of our emotions and mental belief systems are mapped on the body. For example, ‘life is a burden’ is the mental energy behind shoulder ailments, jaws are related to anger, and so on. Positive affirmations to re-programme a belief, aligned with treatment of the disease, speeds up the healing process.
Today, I understand that pain in my knee is partly a result of the fear I was carrying from my teenage years. The social expectations I was asked to conform to, as a girl and young adult, made me quite fearful because I was free-spirited at heart, someone averse to being caged. I began to walk with knees quite locked, painfully steering between the frictions of these opposites. The mental connection to knee pain is inflexibility in life; emotionally it relates to a fear of an absent future, while physically there can be any number of reasons for knee issues, which need to be kept in mind.
Dance training brought all of this to the forefront for me to see – because the body doesn’t lie! It can only act as a microphone for one to hear the original and un-remixed version of what one has ‘played’! As I acknowledged that fear, I began the slow process of letting go, to heal my knee injury. I redirected that energy into the cheerful process of dance, aligned with physiotherapy, affirmations, and inner visualisation. Thanks to ‘mindful’ contemporary dance and somatic work, there is a huge shift in my physical and mind space today. Improvising with simple principles like gravity, weight of body and momentum, and synchronising with breath and intention, my whole being feels lighter – and pain has reduced appreciably. From all of this, I learnt that healing is a multi-pronged approach. Also, dance showed me that when I soften my joints, I automatically soften my mind!
Besides, studying improvisation has helped me immensely in ‘being present’. Alertness is heightened when you make use of your senses consciously – the eyes to ‘see’ and not just ‘look,’ the ears to ‘listen’ and not just ‘hear’. When the whole being is just flowing in the moment with a ‘relaxed alertness,’ and connected to the creative energies of the universe, one becomes responsive rather than reactive! This is when one hears one’s unique creative voice as a dancer.
The potential of creative expression
“Question marks are a very essential part of the journey. But now is the time to flunk the exam of reasoning. I just want to have a glass of water and know that water is there. It has been and it will always be.” (Written by me for ‘Shenpa’, in 2015)
Fresh out of a jazz dance company, I remember working on my first experimental abstract performance work in 2009, inspired by Paulo Coelho’s words in his book, ‘By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept’. The ‘glass on the edge’ idea I found in his writing resonated magnetically with what I was experiencing in life then. As an independent practitioner bereft of enriching opportunities, I felt really lost in the wide, barren land of dance in the city – very much like a glass on the edge of a table! So, powered by the resilience dance had taught me, I began investigating. The choreography was an outcome of a process guided by an inner knowledge of the kinesiology (‘study of movement’) of this emotional situation. The everyday vocabulary of restless, shaking feet, to-and-fro movement of the agitated mind, repeatedly visiting the same place out of habit, physicalising the emotional risk through ‘lifts of partner’ work, and eventually falling (face forward on the stage like a plank) before rebounding with renewed faith, brought a kind of empowering resolution to the turbulence I was feeling.
The choreography lab introduced me to the concept of “staying in the creative process without worrying about the outcome.” The idea is the leader, and as a conduit of the universal divine energies, I learnt to relinquish control and just go with the flow without intellectualising the process. Intuition is my best friend not just in the creative laboratory but also in life now. ‘Experiencing vs. doing/thinking’ is a treasure I have discovered through my dance practice. The answer given to the eternal question, “Why I am here?” by many spiritual teachers is, “To experience!” and nothing else. Dance or any creative practice aligns with this automatically from the core of its being.
In 2015, in an attempt to explain to me what I was feeling at that time, my teacher brought into my sphere a Buddhist concept called ‘Shenpa’. In Tibetan, this means ‘attachment’ but a more descriptive translation (shared by a lovely monk named Pema Chödrön) is ‘hooked’ – or a ‘sticky feeling’ that triggers habitual reactions that are not in our best interests and leads to suffering. The ‘hook’ activates our tendency to close down and in that moment of tightening, we reach for the familiar. “We all want some kind of relief from that unease, so we turn to what we enjoy – food, alcohol, drugs, sex, work, or shopping,” says Pema. But to really get unhooked, she adds, we need to begin by acknowledging that moment of unease, learning to relax in that moment, and practising the four R’s: recognise, refrain, relax and re-frame.
The starting point towards incarnating Shenpa in the body was the concept of ‘instability’. I requested the dancers to move in a high-heeled shoe on one foot, leaving the other bare. The musicians, meanwhile, negotiated a wobble board and we all practised ‘being present’ following the teachings on Shenpa, through live improvisation. The whole performance is largely set to a score that plays itself out differently each time, since it is performed in real time.
All of us felt so empowered while engaging innovatively with our Shenpa and realised that this is actually what the whole of life is about! Together we laughed and cried, recognised our personal tendencies, and conceded that these commanded a re-frame – all in the trustful setting of dance theatre and creative expression. And the days of the rehearsals and of public sharing were similar in energy, a meditative celebration of our findings.
The creative laboratory I stepped into with my body, my ideas, emotions and thoughts, and my imagination and meditation, has never failed me in my quest for inner peace, joy, and a deeper understanding of life. Enabling all these to play out a life event in an energy space that is non-judgmental, accepting and filled with curiosity, has always brought forth fascinating results.
‘Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost’
Dance has been a liberating teacher, lovingly allowing me to harness my physical, creative and spiritual potential. It has opened up an uplifting space where I can freely decipher the meaning of my life and have a cosy heart-to-heart with myself, minus any restrictions and judgment. Without dance, I will be truly lost, as Pina Bausch admits. The daily dance of my life has transformed into an exciting venture – in collaboration with dance. Each time I interact with dance, it guides me like a patient teacher, activating at all levels the channel to my inner connections.
“How does all this relate to me?” “I am not a professional dancer!” “I don’t even know how to do this!”
Perhaps these are thoughts some of you may be having right now, while a few might be feeling inspired. In either case, the way forward is as simple as playing your favourite music and dancing your heart out, shedding all the worries of the world consciously – do this every day and see the results! Dancing on your own or with family members, joining a class in your neighborhood or online, will, I promise you, leave you delightfully alive! You can even choose to dance with words if you are a writer, or with colours on your canvas if you’re a visual artist and be pleasantly surprised by what it reveals to you. Because when you dance, the window to your soul opens and you find your unique and beautiful self eagerly waiting to be greeted and loved!