Release Stress Stored in Your Body

Dancing is surely the most basic and relevant of all forms of expression. Nothing else can so effectively give outward form to an inner experience. Poetry and music exist in time. Painting and architecture are a part of space. But only the dance lives at once in both space and time. In it the creator and the thing created, the artist and the expression, are one. Each participates completely in the other. There could be no better metaphor for an understanding of the mechanics of the cosmos.” 

                                                                                                  -- Lyall Watson 

This quote, from Lyall Watson's excellent Gifts of Unknown Things  (a scientist's perspective of an island culture) is not meant to denigrate other arts, which I love and am, in some, gifted, but to express the need to release, at this time, the tense energy stored in most of our bodies.

       If you are a fellow dancer, you may know that unstructured dancing can always be a release, often placing us in a state of grace that relaxes the body and eases worry, therefore cleansing us physically.  

       With warnings of global disaster, a growing divide between rich and poor, increasing gentrification, repeated corporate and political corruption, and worldwide conflict, we need to express ourselves and release tension in every way possible.

       Animals do this naturally -- by shaking after being frightened.  If they didn't do so before resuming normal activity, they would die. We, on the other hand, usually suppress the urge to shake when shocked or stressed. 

       Peter Levine says in Waking the Tiger, unlike animals, human bodies hold onto rather than immediately releasing stress.  This can lead to severe physiological and psychological imbalance and illness. Even a vacation can be stressful. As remedy, yoga works, or just a walk outside. But the arts, especially dance, take us out of ourselves.  

       There is so much more to us than what is understood, and Gifts of Unknown Things (a book written before its time) discussed some of this.  

      This is why I repeatedly return to creative release and tuning into the wisdom of dreams and intuition.

      Dancing is one of many ways to do this.