D Is For: Daily Practice
Learn to D.A.N.C.E. with and through your mind body experience. Healing is an ebb and flow that requires flexibility in all forms. Sometimes firmness and sometimes gentleness; sometimes water and sometimes fire; sometimes surrender and sometimes challenge. Dance is vulnerable and powerful. When blockages appear, dance remains fluid. Dance moves you toward freedom even in stuckness, even in stillness you dance to the rhythms of the breath. As long as you are breathing, you are dancing. Dance is active and restful. It is within and without. When you remember how to dance with yourself, you remember how to dance with others. When you learn how to dance with your experience, you learn how to dance with life. Dance is an act of play and of expression, it knows no bounds. It is fast and slow, wild and contained. Dance meets the moment and nothing else. Dance has no past or future. Dance happens now. It is an art not an algorithm, a practice not a pill. Dance is the process of opening up to your experience and rising to meet the truth it brings each day. That is why D is for: Daily practice.
The process of moving through pain is not a one-time fix. It is not one pill, one yoga class, one meditation, or one enlightened, healing moment. It is a daily practice and it happens by cultivating the optimal environment from which many healing moments can occur and build toward conviction. Like fertile soil, you water your practice each day. You do not wait to be inspired, you continuously create the environment for inspiration to flow. Each moment is an opportunity to be with and move through what shows up, and each moment is an opportunity for transformation.
As you learn to dance with your experience, you create new neural patterns in the brain, you change your state, you transform your emotion energy, and you expand your belief system. You break through the old stories and learned brain patterns previously dictating your experience, and you no longer live from a place of lack and limitation. You discover - through daily practice - the conviction that you can heal. This is the source from which all healing flows, but it takes practice. If you are Eckhart Tolle or Byron Katie, maybe it happens in an instant. However, you do not heal by expecting to follow their path nor do you become a great basketball player by expecting to play like Michael Jordan. You can be inspired by those who were led courageously by Spirit to chart their own healing journeys and meet the truth of their own souls’ purpose, but you must put in the practice to discover the path meant for you. To choose the path of healing, you must make a commitment to yourself and say “Yes” to the opportunities meant for you.
After years of navigating debilitating sickness in the mornings, I began to transform it. I started waking up earlier and challenging the thoughts that were pulling me down into despair and helplessness. I summoned courage - all that I could muster - to bring myself out of bed and practice the dance. To practice the dance, you do not have to know where you are going, how you will get there, or how long it will take. You only have to set the intention and make the choice to do it. It is in these intentional moments that you begin to heal. For me, those mornings often included, and still do include, a variety of meditation, affirmation, visualization, manifestation, breathwork, movement, and writing but you must find what works for you. There is not just one way and no prescribed formula. The only prescription is setting the intention to practice daily, whatever you choose. Just choose something. A morning practice is an especially fertile time because of the emotion and belief energy you stew in overnight. Changing your state first thing in the morning allows you to harness this energy and transmute it, to rewire your brain and chart your day, and your life, down a different path.
Regardless of the practice, the goal is always the same - bring safety to your nervous system, expose your brain to new experience, and create space for emotion and belief energy to show up and release. As you do this, new inner experiences will begin to emerge each and every day. As you transform and move toward the light, old energies of sadness, fear, and anger may emerge, along with beliefs tied to experiences of long ago. Whatever shows up that day becomes the fuel - for writing, for being with, for transforming. You do not have solve anything, all you have to do is tolerate the emotion energy and ride the wave knowing it is carrying you to shore. Each time you create space for the emotion energy to emerge, the pain and fatigue energy will lose power and dissipate, leaving a powerful source of joy and inspiration in its wake. But remember, this is not a linear journey and there is no time limit or expectation on these practices, only the intention to practice. Even as I write to you now, I am not “fully healed,” whatever that means, but my experience is qualitatively different than it was. My practice has grown and evolved as I continue to dance with what shows up. I commit to daily practice because of my conviction in my healing power, and I have conviction in my healing power because of my commitment to daily practice.
If my words elicit fear or negative beliefs in any form, do not despair. Just commit to the practice and I guarantee your experience will begin to change. When moments of transformation come, they come quickly, but first you must set the stage. After 10 years of suffering, it only took one healer to remind me that my doubt-filled beliefs and emotion energy is what was maintaining my sickness. In that moment, I was ready to hear it and to recognize the limitation of my beliefs. In that moment, my practice had set the stage for me to hear what I needed to hear. That healing session was not just about the power of the words, but the energy that was willing to shift inside me and allow newfound conviction to enter. From there, I began to adjust, expand, and commit more to my daily practice. Remember it is not just about force of will, but about fluidity and flexibility. I had to learn to surrender as much as to fight. Daily practice is the fertile soil that allows for curative shifts in your belief system to take place. Do not wait for one cure or one healer, begin setting the stage now and practice. As you practice, you send a message to the universe that you are ready to be supported, to be guided, and to be answered; you may then watch as the healing opportunities present themselves to the stage. Healing is not embedded in any one external source or modality, it is in the stage you set through daily practice. The external sources are guides that will show up only when you are ready to receive them, and they can facilitate the healing within you only when you are ready to hear them. You are the announcer of your stage and the master of your mind body experience - you hold the power to heal. Continue to set the stage and to channel your power within, the rest will flow.
If you are wondering how specifically to cultivate a practice and what that may look like for you, you may reach out to me directly. Tools like meditation, breathwork, affirmation, visualization, manifestation, movement, and writing are just a few of the powerful tools available to you to transform and release the emotion and belief energy you are carrying. But there are many, many modalities that exist, and many that I myself have yet to discover. I may create more content in the future around how best to utilize some of these modalities as they have worked for me, but do not get too caught up in the details of the method, just start somewhere and see what resonates for you. The intention and the commitment to daily practice is what matters most. You choose health, you choose light, and you choose love - you cannot be destroyed.