for the love of dance

3 Comments » // June 10th, 2009

I just got back from Ecstatic Dance and am feeling so utterly fabulous right now…which is particularly incredible since I was sooooo not feeling that way at all today.  I was really having an emotional day so I decided to go and dance it off.  I got a monthly pass for ED recently and it was a smart move on my part, because it is making me go when I don’t think I normally would.  Every time I go, there is at least one song that just gets me going crazy….tonight there were about five!  The DJ was right up my alley, mixing a ton of hip-hop with East Indian tracks and many more inspired mixes.

I’ve also really been enjoying exploring movement again in such a free-form environment.  While I love hooping and taking specific dance classes, I just also love moving my body with however feels right at the moment and to music that is unexpected and new to me.  I find that I start playing around with different ways to move different parts of my body or how fast/slow I move to the music.  It helps if I am getting “bored” with one of the songs to all of a sudden focus on a certain body part and lead my whole dance with that.  Or to change up my whole style of dancing to that music in general.  Maybe move faster than I normally would, or slower.  Tonight I found myself moving through some really jumping songs like I was in water and keeping it really flowy and then running around and leaping and changing levels through the slower tunes.  It is so good for the nervous system to be changing it up like that and I could feel it expanding my body, mind and spirit.  I also noticed tonight that I have a tendency to turn to my left a lot.  I didn’t used to turn when I free-form danced very much until I started hooping…now hooping has changed my dancing to where I love to spin and spin even when dancing without the hoop.  But I hoop to the left mostly so I realized that I pretty much was only turning to the left when free form dancing.  So I mixed it up tonight and spun a ton to the right throughout the evening and I could feel my spine unwinding and my brain being activated on how to curve my body differently.  I could feel my hips and low back opening up too.  It was a freeing feeling not being stuck in my ruts of movement.

I am grateful to have found such a wonderful space to go to twice a week…it has brought back my love of dance and taken it to a whole new level!