Activating Desire And Energy in Dance

Have you felt the desire “I have to dance” before? I have…..It feels like a need sometimes. A need to increase joy, love my body more, express something, feel the universal flow and allow it to move thru me…..Sometimes its a practice for me to “get more energy” or meet the moment with the most amount of honesty I can muster thru listening to my body.

Desire itself can be described as “want” or a wish to fulfill….longing…..An interesting thing to consider as during the pandemic there has been so much expression of longing/lonliness. I wonder if the dances can help build and feed neural networks that reinforce our ability to work with this desire and to self generate confidence of finding ways to satiate our own longing, activate our desire when it gets shut down, and create love stories that generate deeper connections within and with others even not in physical proximity.

To me as a woman of 53 desire is shifting and dance helps me express this. In my younger years the urge to have children was the most organic, real and powerful desire I had ever felt. It didn’t take thought to surrender to it, it was like I was being directed and having children felt like the clearest path in evolution that was natural and supported effortlessly. As Ive aged desire is more of a pulse like dance instead of the wave I felt younger. Dance has been my mainstay to find and work with my own desire on a regular basis. What feels good? What am I avoiding? What will feel satisfying and how can I savor that feeling?

Fear or nervousness, self consciousness or risk taking can all be perceived as “avoid at all costs” diminishing desire or can actually be an impulse to increase and navigate desire. Our pandemic has been an interesting dynamic and tension to work with desire and fear. In times of heightened stress true desire from our bodies diminishes while “wants” and “needs” that are more immediate or self soothing take precedence. Addictive desires are the repetitive actions or choices that are our way of avoiding or protecting something we feel we can’t handle. Its a way to NOT be present to what is happening as a feeling about what is happening is being triggered and the comfort of just feeling that feeling is overwhelming. We look for a way out ….instead of a way in. Its very human……and no judgement. Just an observation and defined difference between desire and a more desperate or less conscious way of finding immediate gratification. Dancing to find that good “ju ju” all the time, the “high” of the connection or feeling someone gives you are examples of this. Dancing as a practice is a bit different. It can be a scaffolding that gives you more energy and increases desire instead of a fulfilling of something limits ultimately.

Instead of waiting for desire to naturally occur we can work with the state of the body and tension ….activating some tension in our choices to help initiate a little bit of “fire” or natural energy that feels so good. This requires some courage and willingness to “see thru to the other side”. Investing energy in the bigger vision and going against distraction or self sabotaging patterns. This takes a deeper self awareness and can be a great step in becoming all that you are intended to become with integration of all you’ve experienced and lived. A true empowering dance of life practiced and lived and rewarding and sexy in recalling it AFTER and savoring the feeling of satisfaction of being a creator and artist in life.

In babies when they cry or reach out repeatedly and then their cries are not heard or ignored they stop reaching out…..they learn their desires don’t matter and lose some self efficacy very early on. We are all on this spectrum somewhere with how we were raised and how our brains formed themselves. If we can learn to “witness” the self in the dance we can choose to over ride these old impulses and recognize what’s asking for attention behind the movements. Its a great opportunity to give yourself the holding, self nurturing, inner talk and listening more deeply to those muscle tensions as well as to our genius creative spirit that can find a “game” to help nudge the psyche into some new ways of experiencing desire.

Creativity, movement, being in the moment….fully in the moment without trying to control things. These are some of the sexy desire building tensions that can make a dance feel really divine for me. On a deep level of honoring the feminine ( yin as in a quality not a persons physical or psychological sex identification) aspect of desire……its a natural way to magnetize a vision for the future instead of feed into one that isn’t sustainable. All of us can access this together thru presence and create beauty together each dance….finding the way each time, reflecting on what our dances are about at the end, sharing what the journey is offering…..and staying true to our uniqueness along the way.