Movement As A Means To Liberation

At the peak of Covid times, I was offered an incredible opportunity. A teacher trainer of the conscious movement form called Nia, invited me to the Nia White Belt Training - the training that enables you to teach upon completion.

It was one of those serendipitous moments that was totally unexpected and completely caught me off guard.

Nia is a conscious, somatic dance movement that invites its participants to come back into sensation in their bodies. It invites the dancer to move in a way that is pleasurable, joyful and encourages you to move in your own body’s way.

Although Nia will get your physical body into fantastic shape (you will sweat, condition, tone and build strength) it offers so much more and this is the part that I wasn’t expecting.

The past few years for me had been difficult as I had been experiencing a flare-up with a decades-long autoimmune disease; Crohn’s Disease. As a long-time energy healer and holistic nutritionist, I have a lot of tricks up my sleeve. And the past few years, I had tried everything I could think of to ‘get at’ this flare-up.

Of course, nothing was working.

Until I started moving…

Of course, I did not begin this conscious movement journey with any intent to heal my body. I was excited to do something fun and freeing (cue the healing codes implicit in the ‘fun’ and ‘freeing’ part of this sentiment) but with no notion that it would heal anything.

It wasn’t until this past summer that I really began to dedicate my time to learning this conscious movement called Nia and gearing up to teach it that I began to notice a distinct shift in my physical, mental and emotional wellbeing.

Slowly but surely, I noticed that my joints were no longer sore; that I could eat things that I hadn’t been able to digest properly in years; that I was sleeping better; that my mood shifted dramatically; that my body was healing.

How was this so? How is it that dancing to soul stirring music has been able to radically move the dial on a serious health issue that has plagued me most of my life?

Well, when we look to what somatic experts like Dr. Peter Levine, who studied animals in the wild to see how they managed to live in unburdened ways, despite encountering trauma on a regular basis, we see a very particular pattern.

When the body is given permission to move, shake, bounce, jump, shimmy, and simultaneously we use our breath and our voice to sigh, yip, hoot and holler, something primal gets stirred up and moooooves.

And here’s the best part…we don’t need to mentally understand this process. We don’t need to know what gets broken up inside of us and released. In fact, the not knowing, not categorizing, not naming, allows for the intelligence of the body to do what it does best when we move out of its way.

Bodies do not want to hold onto past grievance or old, stuck energy. They want to release this tension. They want to be free to take in and release and take in and release.

In every Nia class, we will move, shake, yell, laugh, sweat, sigh, breath, sink, rise, tighten and release. It’s all done playfully and when we really get out of our heads, the body will lead the way.

And even deeper, once we surrender our poor attempts at controlling the flow of energy (whether that energy feels good or challenging) something even deeper then the flesh, blood and bones of our physical bodies can begin to move, unimpeded.

This is our life force. Or as I like to call it, our Soul’s Blueprint.

It is not that we ‘have’ a blueprint, it is a truer statement that we ARE our blueprint. We ARE the essence that yearns to move freely; without impediment or blocks.

This, right there, is how we liberate ourselves.

It is fine to mentally understand our inner grievances. Yet after coming to an intellectual understanding, something deeper will need to be activated in order to set these grievances free.

This, for me, is the gift of Nia.

My classes are a little different in that the perennial focus of our time together in the studio is to set free what has always wanted to be free.

To travel deeply and intuitively into the soma of our bodies is to touch an original energy…an innocent energy…that has been patiently awaiting your return.

If you would like to try another way…a different avenue to liberation…give this incredible movement style a try. At the very least, you will have more fun then you’ve ever had in a ‘fitness’ class; you will tone and condition your body and you can enjoy dancing in community with other souls.

Yet, if you allow for the possibility, Nia can fling the door open to liberation; profound liberation.

This is what you and I have come here at this pivotal time to do…to move towards ease, joy and freedom.

It is who and what we are at our core and so far in my own search, nothing has brought me closer than Nia.