Why Do I Dance? Remembering What Dance Gives Me. Benefits
The deeper you go into your professional life, the less time sometimes remains for yourself.
Even when you genuinely love what you do.
Even when your work once started as something you simply loved doing for yourself.
Recently, I caught myself thinking:
Why do I dance?
What does dance actually give me?
Not why I teach.
Not why I create projects.
Not why I perform.
Why do I dance?
And I remembered both why I started and why, after all these years, I still continue.
I dance for my body.
For a healthy back.
For flexibility and mobility.
For that feeling of strength and control over my own body.
For keeping it active and alive.
After years of practicing Tribal Fusion Bellydance, I still love the physical side of dance. The combination of controlled movement, isolations, fluidity and coordination makes me feel connected to my body in a way that very few other things do.
But the benefits of dance for me have never been only physical.
I dance because movement gives me a language for things I can't always express in words.
Sometimes an emotion becomes a gesture.
A piece of music becomes a character.
An idea becomes a choreography.
Dance develops my creativity. It lets me experiment, play, create different worlds and discover different parts of myself.
And this is probably one of the things I love most about Tribal Fusion Bellydance.
There is always something more to explore.
A different quality of movement.
A different emotion.
A different character.
A different way of hearing the same piece of music.
I dance because it is still my hobby, even though it became my profession a long time ago.
And I think that's something I need to remind myself of sometimes.
Dance gives me time that belongs to me.
Not to my students.
Not to a performance.
Not to a festival.
Not to the next project.
To me.
And then there is everything dance has brought into my life beyond the movement itself.
An incredible community of women.
Friendships.
Festivals.
Travels.
Performances.
Stages.
Memories.
Experiences I probably would never have had otherwise.
Tribal Fusion dance started as something I wanted to learn.
Somehow, over the years, it became a profession, a community and an enormous part of my life.
But underneath all of that, there is still the same simple reason I started.
I love to dance.
Sometimes when something you love becomes your work, it's easy to start measuring it through results, projects, deadlines and responsibilities.
How many people joined.
How well the performance went.
What needs to be created next.
And somewhere inside all of that, it's surprisingly easy to forget the simplest question:
What does dance give me?
So I think it's important to remember.
I don't dance only because this is what I do.
I dance because I still love what dance gives me.
And why do you dance?
What does it give you?
Comments