🌚 It was an honor to create an altar for a dancefloor that’s held me thru so much transformation 🔥
Having been raised in an intellectual but disembodied religious community carrying immense trauma, the first place I truly felt the presence of a higher power wasn’t in synagogue or scripture, but in a sweaty east London basement
Starting age 17…depressed, dissociated, and drowning in queer pain, religious doubt and reckless choices…come the weekend, u could find me front left by the speakers where I would dance like my life depended on it—and pretty soon,something started dancing back ✨
Words will forever fail to do it justice, but for me, dance was, and still is, healing and holy
Since then I’ve always revered these kinds of dancefloors- messy, underground, ecstatic, free and a lil bit naughty 😈
The ones pieced together in clubs, warehouses, fields and forests or a rave on some no man’s land back around the M25. The ones that gave birth to wave after wave of dance music as necessity. Where people come to transmute their pain, shake off the shame and return to their true selves
💧Sweating as a devotional act in a house of healing where movement is the medicine
A few years ago
@_emmalwarren_ put words to this in her beautiful bible of a book ‘Dance Your Way Home’
🙏🏼Thank you for naming what so many of us have lived and known
As I’ve softened, healed + started being unable to function without at least 8 hours of sleep most nights, I’ve found home in the 5 Rhythms- a conscious dance practice that holds me weekly in a beautiful church with big sounds, bare feet, deep presence and no substances —just breath. 🌀 We move through flowing, staccato, chaos, lyrical, and stillness. Each rhythm a mirror and a map.
It helps me regulate, release, and return to myself, reminding me that the body knows, even when the mind forgets. Sometimes it’s cringey, uncomfortable and with questionable music selections, but most often it’s shamanically potent, powerful and deeply sacred ❤️🔥
Thank you to
@jasonrowe5r and
@flowvulk5rhythms for holding such deep, tender, powerful space and for showing me how the practice of dance can be both discipline and liberation.
➡️
