What is a Dance Break?
A dance break is exactly that… a break in your day when you dance. It could be in the morning, at lunch, a break in your intense work day or at night before bed. It can happen anytime.
I first learned of them during long seminar weekends, yeah those… the personal growth kind where you sit and process your emotions for 12 hours a day until you breakdown and then breakthrough. I loved the work, the intensity and then entered a dance break. Ugh. I hated dance breaks. I felt like they were inauthentic and well, just plain silly. If I wasn’t feeling like dancing why should I fake it? I didn’t appreciate the sudden switch of my process to suddenly being forced to swirl my hips with Beyonce. No, no, no…
And then I started to think of them differently…
It’s just movement, why was I being so judgmental? It’s like in coaching when your client is stuck in a certain perspective and you want to help them see or help them experience something from a different viewpoint, you might have them change their physical location in the room, simple. Movement changes the way we feel, it can change our perspective, it releases happy hormones, stretches the body after a long night of sleeping, wakes up the muscles and bones after we’ve been sitting in a chair for 5 hours staring at a screen and most importantly it allows us to feel our body from head to toe. Dance breeds aliveness and self expression and has done nothing but thrive through the centuries and all over the world. From the gypsy caves of Sevilla, Spain to Irish Step dancing in the pubs of Dublin to belly dancing in the Middle East to dancing the African diaspora to my bedroom this morning, shaking and moving for 6 minutes and 21 seconds of Drunk In Love by Beyonce and Jay-Z. Boom.
I especially find it useful after I’ve gotten off the phone with a patient’s health insurance company when I literally want to crawl through the phone and strangle someone, now I dance instead… So, STOP what you’re doing and take a dance break. What’s your favorite song?
In dance and movement with my sister goddesses,
Christina Martin
Tao to Wellness
