Free-Spirited Movement Medicine

I am a big advocate for movement as medicine. And awareness into the body to create pathways for free movement. I have been dancing 5Rhythms for over a year now. I dived straight into this form of dance after discovering the mental and emotional benefits while I was travelling alone in Thailand.

It’s something my body craves and has become a great way for me to land into the present moment as well as shake stuff out. I use it to work out areas of tension and to assess what’s going on for me in this moment. For me, this kind of movement has become intuitive, loose, and wild, over the last couple of years. Now when I do it I don’t think about what I look like. I just move and see what unfolds. And it’s something I’m starting to share more often with people.

This is a method of therapy and healing that I think has the ability to help so many. No matter your current mobility or restrictions, there’s a way of moving that can provide freedom for you. And more importantly, movement that doesn’t require you to be in or remain in pain. When we move mindfully we learn to move around the pain. And when we discover how to do this, we open up the body to form new movement patterns.

There’s no advantage to being inspired, being envious, or appreciating the way someone moves if you don’t apply the lessons to your own movement practice. Immediate rejection and separation between you and them is only harming you further. You can never be exactly like them (and that’s not the aim). But if you never try, if you never begin, you’ll be stuck in your same old limiting beliefs with a body that you don’t understand.

What would happen if you set aside your fear and your doubts? How would your life change if you didn’t take it so seriously? If you tried on a new way of moving and tuning in that allowed for expansion? That meant you stepping out of your comfort zone? When was the last time you did something for you?

“Those breaks (that prevent people from doing things) are provided by your fear of the unknown. You are clinging to the past and you are afraid to move into the unknown. You are clinging to the known, the acquainted. It may be painful, it may be ugly, but at least you know it. You have grown a certain kind of friendship with it.”

-Osho, Courage: The Joy of Living Dangerously