Article Past Dated: May 2019
My Favorite part about dancing is that when I dance, I don’t feel sick. I feel perfectly healthy.
There is something about me, about this chapter in my life that I leave off the marketing materials. I don’t want this detail to define my current story. But, this detail holds an important lesson.
In February, I was diagnosed with stage 2B Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.
My diagnoses came 4 – 5 weeks after I created Kinetic Meditation with Leah & Quinn. It was two months after I stood at Bogart Park with P at Midnight on New Year’s Eve and decided teaching dance would be my North Star of 2019.
Then my life came to a hard pivot of February 13th. Things changed quickly.
Within ten days, I was diagnosed, met my Oncologist, had blood, lung, and heart tests, had a biopsy, a port installed, and started chemo.
Just before the last two items on that timeline, I held what I thought would be my last class until after treatment finished.
I then had my first chemo. I took one week off and realized that not only could I still teach dance; I needed to teach dance. On the second Sunday after treatment, I was back leading the class.
I teach every other Sunday before I get my chemo on Tuesday. In these 90 minutes’ that we dance, I feel completely healthy. My energy is not what it was, but I feel fantastic.
Dance is the most important part of my healing process.
It’s how I can leave it off the marketing materials, and most people wouldn’t guess that I’m a chemo patient dancing with cancer.
This is no coincidence.
It’s the thesis from Dr. Joe Dispenza’s You Are the Placebo. I’m paraphrasing, but he makes the case that your body does not know the difference between thought and action. If you can imagine your body as healthy, your mind & body will start to act as if it was perfectly healthy, thus becoming a vessel that can heal itself.
Dance is that plus more. Not only do I feel in thought that I am healthy. I mirror that belief in action. In movement. In dance. I am aligning my body and mind, thus giving way to a sense of spiritual healing.
Dance is a boost in my spiritual strength that armors me for the effects of my chemo treatment.
Movement helps me to heal the physical pain in my body.
This is the lesson I needed to share.
If you are not moving or dancing because you hold some physical pain, I ask you to try dancing with us.
Move how your body wants to move. Move around, and with the pain, and you will start to feel something.
We have this notion that we should curl up, stop, and just “rest” when we feel hurt. But it’s in that period of stasis that we worry, we stress, we give time for the swelling to settle in. We create a belief that we are currently “limited.”
We miss the point that…
