The Dance Of Life

Have you ever felt stuck in denial? Like you're in the middle of a dance, and all of a sudden your knees lock up and your legs become heavy and stiff? Or maybe a memory you’d rather not acknowledge suddenly surfaces from the depths of suppression, causing your hand to gravitate down from the thrill of movement to cover your face in fear.

Oh yes, I describe the horror of denial and repressed memories so well because I have experienced them many times. I am no stranger to the intrusion and interruption in your life’s dance, but I am also no stranger to the process of acceptance, integration, and in the end, absolute adoration for these unexpected movements and moments of pause. A dance that follows all the prescribed steps and taught faces may look nice on paper, but it’s the dance that dares to feel and braves the stumbles into art that truly shines in real life.

Step 1: Deep-Rooted Healing

Much like walking through quicksand, denial of a past event, trauma, or emotion can cause resistance in your stride as you try to move forward. Without taking the daunting step of staying with and facing whatever blockage you buried behind, you will find that the harder you struggle to move on, the deeper the emotional and mental pull from beneath your feet. In order to overcome this immobilized state, you will have to learn how to accept yourself for everything. In order to move forward and emerge victorious, you will have to learn how to integrate, brave the truth rather than deny, and make sense of the whole.

In this first step to integrating trauma, you will have to dig up the cancerous blockages and truly feel them before alchemizing them into something more beautiful. This can be a controversial step, as many meditative practices steer people away from personal connection with their emotions in order to focus more on the present moment, but I find deep feeling vital to overcoming the more subtle, long-lasting negative emotions of resentment, regret, disassociation, and neglect. I would personally rather fully feel an emotion, hard and fast, than allow a trickling strain of unfelt emotions to taint my overall personality and day-to-day life. Much like a cleanse, purifying yourself can allow full expression of a traumatic event, which in turn can help you move on without lingering traces of experience that still nag to be validated and tended to.

Through my own discovery of a healing process I dubbed "deep-rooted healing," I learned how to uncover and fully face trauma safely from my past by using art and metaphors. Much like the earth beneath a tree, I started viewing my life as the soil in which my roots needed to grow, and the rocks stunting and deforming my roots' growth as my burdens of trauma----that is, events in my life that I had chosen to bury rather than face. Over the past four years, I have devoted much of my healing work to excavating these rocks of trauma in order to fully face them, feel them, and eventually let them go. I did this by listening to music, singing, writing, drawing, walking, hiking, and dancing----anything that allowed myself to release and explore my experiences freely, where they could be untangled from the knot inside my head and blossom instead in an outside medium.

This outward release and extraction of trauma into art opened up the previously sealed off well in me to feel, and this ability to truly feel became more healing and important than ever before. When traumatic life events are buried, feared, and never fully felt in the moment, you can find yourself left with an overall disconnected personality. Before excavation and expression, I always felt cut off from the present moment and as if I could never quite touch the world. By allowing myself to swim in the waves of my emotions for the first time, no matter how scary, sad, terrifying, or weird, I was able to break down the walls within that were blocking me from feeling my own feelings.

As I’ve learned, however, it is best to do this messy process of uncovering buried trauma and exploring in your own private space, or as privately as you can. Not everyone will understand the process, and in fact, many may want to hinder it and control out of their own fears. As I have healed both in private as well as publicly, I do know from experience that healing in private is a much smoother and safer route to go. You know yourself best, the things you’ve been through, the things you’re capable of, and the metaphors and artful truths that come out. There is a freedom in healing publicly and doing so with confidence and without regret, but there is also a danger as inside excavation can ignite fear without, and outside judgements can compound the trauma and fear.

Step 2: Awakening

As I successfully dug up and explored trauma after trauma from the soil beneath my tree, I found myself more in touch, rather than in denial, with my whole self as well as my higher self above. This unexpected spiritual connection was both motivating and profound, especially since I grew up in a household that did not believe nor welcome any thoughts of higher beings and abilities. The deeper I purified my soil for my roots to grow, the higher my invisible branches above seemed to grow as well. I learned that the denial and blockage of earthly truths had also blocked me from celestial ones.

In this extended connection above, you will gain a plethora of gifts, including confidence within yourself and confidence within your path. Suddenly, the pieces of your life that may have previously caused shame or fear will now reflect beauty and depth as they reveal the complex intricacies of your soul. With this higher connection, there are no failures or falls—only the certainty that everything happens for a reason, and your strength as the dancer is to hold faith and carry out the wisdom. Each movement blends into the next. With confidence, literally meaning “with faith,” your dance will gain a flowing momentum in line with the openness above, rather than a stumbling, close-minded, earthly uncertainty.

With this newfound higher connection and faith to explore, you will have some added challenges, though, including protecting your healed and healing bodily self. Friends and family members may not recognize nor accept you, preferring the less confident person from before. Some may want to stunt your growth for the sake of keeping the status quo, while others may want to snip your connection out of fear, jealousy, or other malicious feelings. No matter the reason, you must protect yourself. In some cases, you may need to break away, permanently or for a period of time, while in other cases, you may simply need a shift in your social circles. In family instances, certain members may just need time to accept the new, higher connected you. Growth and change can be painful, but it is important that you embrace the change rather than push it away for the sake of appeasing others. Surround yourself with people who support the growth rather than people who fear it.

Step 3: Motivation in Higher Purpose

What is pulling you forward? What is motivating you to keep reaching out and dancing? These are vital questions to ask yourself. Deep-rooted healing and awakening to your highest self will keep you growing, but having focus in your highest goals will direct your growth in the most fulfilling direction.

While steady income and a home will keep you grounded, money and material things are actually an obstacle in the way of realizing our highest purpose. They both serve as a false form of soul substance, and when they are at the forefront of our mind, acting as the ceiling for our confidence, we tend to feel rigid and on edge. These insecure feelings come about when we attach our self-worth to outside things—changeable and unreliable possessions—instead of retaining our self-worth in the certain belief that we are here for a reason. When we experience wealth within ourselves and the bigger picture of why we are here on this planet, we are then gifted the ability to affect other people in this bodily form.

At this point, you may be feeling shame, feeling perhaps that you were in line with your higher purpose but strayed in some way or lost your motivation. Know that you never lose your higher purpose, and in my opinion, you also never stray. If you view your life as a trail in the woods, each pull off the path is another chance to extend your reach and discover more. It’s also an opportunity to understand the world in its most wild form—to connect on a more genuine level to all beings, not just the tame ones with collars and leashes. From my experiences off the safe, well-worn path, the real world is not always pretty. It can be hard, disturbing, violent, and scary, but these darker experiences open your eyes and extend the reach of your highest goals. If you really want to change the world, you need to understand it from a variety of views, not just the one that’s pleasant and comfortable. You need to experience as well as observe.

In the end, though, the absolute greatest belief that will unstick you from self-doubt in your highest purpose and keep you moving in the dance of life is believing in the bigger picture. There are many ways to do this, but some of my favorites include knowing that everything happens for a reason and believing in multiple lives. During my first personal awakening, I experienced a revelation while watching the colorful aftermath of a thunderstorm in Rhode Island that this is my last life on earth. I’ve had many profound moments like this since, but this belief in particular has provided me with such strength, gratitude, and determination to keep going, no matter the weather. From the metaphor in the sky that evening, as well as the experiences in my life, I know that every time I brave through the thunder of trauma, fear, and doubt, on the other side, there will always be my highest purpose, even more illuminated and powerful than before.

Adrienne Elise, a wonderful astrologer whom I now follow thanks to my good friend Alex Goldenberg, describes our previous lives’ past deaths as moments in this life where our soul and aftermath inner light only grow stronger. You are here. You have survived, and you have even more wisdom to share. Let it all flood upward, into your higher purpose, painting the colorful sky of your life’s meaning even more vivid than before.

Step 4: Dance

Dance like everybody’s watching, and at the same time, like nobody’s there at all. I do believe we’re all more similar than we think. I do believe the more we allow our souls to grow and explore bravely, the more we will inspire others to excavate within and fully feel out their own journeys.

Take the time to heal and then share your newfound healing process, gifts, realizations, and understanding of your whole self with the world. View your life as art, and you are the artist. Each emotion stirred and event artistically woven in is a part of the bigger picture: the giant beautiful dance that is our universe. Don't fake a moment of it. Rejoice, feel, and move confidently with each step, knowing that it is all part of the synchronized choreography of the higher purpose. You are only stuck when you doubt and resist. You are only out of synch when you deny, regret, block, or fear. Don't fear. Face everything: the powerful steps, the emotional interludes, the trips, the outbursts, and the wisdom-gaining gravity pulls toward the ground, knowing that you are the lead dancer in your life. You are the centerpiece and the hero, so dance forth with confidence and in truth, guiding the way for timid dancers who may still be stuck in the dark.