The Power of Movement | How to Heal Part Six

I remember when I used to eat like a truck driver.

Jalapeno Cheetos and Coca Cola Classic as often as I could.

When you give birth to three babies in two years, you spend a lot more time trying to carve out pockets of sleep than you do sticking to a gym routine.

But over the years, I’ve realized that movement is much more than exercise, and is more about loving our bodies than punishing them.

The truth is, sometimes we can get stuck in feelings or behaviors or mentalities. Our bodies are linked to our feelings, and sometimes we forget that. It’s easy to see how our bodies react in response to what we feel— we jump up and down with excitement, we crumple in a ball on our beds after a hard day.

Our bodies reflect our feelings.

But it’s equally true that our feelings can reflect our bodies. We can choose physical, external movements that will change emotional, internal truths. From stretching to meditating to dancing, our physical bodies can transform our internal landscape. Feelings have a beginning, middle, and end, and our bodies can help us move through complex emotions, both physically and emotionally.

For me, movement during my morning routine usually starts with just stretching. The older I get, the more I realize the importance of stretching. The longer I go without stretching, the more I can feel my body and my soul coiling up into a tight little ball.

Usually the stretching leads to dancing. I keep my headphones on because my family is still asleep, which helps me feel like I’m totally alone in the world, totally uninhibited. Music and movement, for me, are linked. When I need to work through an emotion, I find a song that will help guide me through it, and then I let my movements match.

Whatever I’m feeling that day, there’s no shame. I move through the feeling by moving to the music. I’m not focused on impressing anyone, I’m just feeling. If I feel in love, I find some love music. If I feel hurt, I look for music that supports that. If I feel like I’m too much for the world, hard to love, angry as hell, I connect with that. If I feel like I’m the only person I can depend on… you get it.

Whatever the feeling, I find a song that matches it and I just move my body. Nobody is watching. There is something about listening to the words that support my current mood and moving my body that is so helpful.

Elizabeth Gilbert is one of my favorite writers and thinkers, and she once shared a story about movement that has stuck with me. She describes the full-bodied grief that accompanied her as her former partner died. Give it a read here:

Grief is a full-body experience.

This is what I’ve learned in the months since Rayya died: Grief is an energy field that wants to move through you (the way storms move across the summer sky) and grief can’t unless you allow it to. Otherwise it settles in your bones, and makes you sink in pain.

You can help grief to move through you with music and with dance — this is what my friends and I have learned.

Those of us who loved Rayya will sometimes come together and dance out our pain, or sing out our pain...just to MOVE, so that our grief can move through us.

This video was recorded on the day of Rayya’s funeral. The dancer is my beloved friend GiGi Madl, who was Rayya’s ex-wife, and who was there at the end of Rayya’s life to help her transition, and also to help me. (The other round-the-clock caregiver in the last month’s of Rayya’s life was Rayya’s ex-girlfriend Stacey Weinberg. The love that Gigi and Stacey had for Rayya was bottomless. The love they showed me was heroic. The loyalty of all these women to each other inspires me, and also saved me in my most difficult moments. I’ve never been more in awe of anyone’s hearts than I am of their hearts.)

This video was filmed by my friend Marc J Francis — a filmmaker who is currently working on a documentary about Rayya’s death. (This film was so important to Rayya, and she worked closely with Marc as she was dying, to make it happen. There was so much she wanted to teach people about how to embrace life while simultaneously leaving it.)

Marc was there with us through it all — even this moment of raw loss and celebration.

The writer Martin Prechtel says that all true grief has an element of rejoicing — but only if you are willing to allow ALL the love and ALL the pain to coexist. We dance because it hurts too much not to. We dance because we are so grateful to have known such deep, foundational love. We dance through our grief and WITH our grief, so that our grief will not sink us. We dance with God. We dance with Rayya. We dance with life and death.

We grieve and we rejoice.

Thank you, Gigi.

Thank you, Marc.

Onward, LG

This is why dancing means so much to me. It’s a way to move through life with both joy and grief. Whatever I’m feeling, I need to be deeply connected to it. This is what movement gives us. Connection to ourselves.

If you want to read more about the role feelings play in healing, check out my post dedicated to feelings here.

But whatever you do, try to incorporate some joyful movement into your day, and see what changes!

Find all of the How to Heal series blog posts here.