What Learning to Dance as an Adult Has Taught Me About Yoga

Two years ago I took my first dance class. I had recently left my somewhat rigid and definitely exhausting NYC life and arrived in Madrid. Due to a mix of divine intervention and attunement to my own intuition, I landed in an Airbnb/community with exactly the kind of creative people that I had been craving to be around. I was introduced to contact improvisation dance, and in the two years since, it has enriched and radically changed my view of and practice of yoga.

My trajectory is somewhat unusual. At least in NYC, dancers and creative people with performance backgrounds tend to find yoga to feed their spiritual side, heal injuries, and make more consistent income outside of performing (not that yoga is especially lucrative either :p). But I was definitely not (and still hesitate to identify as) a dancer. I was a yogi with over 10 years of practice who felt stagnant and was looking for something fresh, something fluid.

Contact Improv is very different than most forms of dance. As the name implies, there is no choreography, and the dance emerges from the physical interaction between two bodies (or a group of bodies, or a body and the floor, etc). There is play with gravity, there is play with levels of muscle tone and effort, there is movement on many different vertical levels. There are no defined gender roles; anyone can lift or be lifted. And there is a lot of rolling, a lot of falling. Timing and reflexes are key.

Here is a video of one of my teachers, who is an incredible dancer.

These elements of physical practice were all SO FOREIGN to me when I started going to class. I prided myself on my proprioception and general fitness level, but yoga had not prepared me to move in this way. It was humbling and kind of hilarious actually. I was terrified to fall and couldn't trust my body to react appropriately. Trying to roll in any direction felt impossible. I had no ability to really relax all muscle tone and surrender; release was a physical skill I hadn't yet cultivated.

Plus there was the element of interacting with another body! No longer was I only responsible for my own movement and my own safety and enjoyment; I was also aware of and somewhat responsible for that of another human. And beyond the physical, there is a whole world of emotional and relational dynamics that present themselves through the physicality of the dance. (That is a topic for another post!)

All that said, there is -- at least to me -- one especially fundamental and interesting difference between these two disciplines. The main distinction between yoga and Contact Improv dance is where we place our focus.

Ok...but what does this mean? In yoga, we work with determined shapes/postures/asanas. We sometimes adapt them to our own needs and limitations (consciously or unconsciously), but the idea is to arrange our bodies in a certain way. Then we observe the resulting flow of energy and attention.

In Contact Improv, the focus is on the sensation. Shapes and movements appear, but they are a RESULT of placing our attention on the individual and shared sensations of contact.

This shift was huge for me. I'm naturally a doer, an overachiever. I wanted my dances to look beautiful and I wanted to fly through the air. I wanted the acrobatics and to do it "right" so I tended to try and recreate the form or the lifts that I saw others doing. I was using the approach that I employed in yoga, but in Contact it just doesn't work. It makes the dance exhausting, potentially injurious, and much less fluid and enjoyable.

This isn't to say that Contact Improv is a purely somatic practice. There is also physical training and there is a lot of work around attitude and expectations regarding improvisation. But this somatic component that I've been learning, this emphasis on sensation first, and shape second, has deeply affected and positively enriched my practice and teaching of yoga.

Yoga asanas are magical and valuable. I'm not here to dispute that. But in modern postural yoga, I feel we've lost the element of true inner listening. We're so focused on doing it right, achieving the poses, "improving" our practice, that we often miss out on the subtler yet extremely powerful and healing energetic aspects of the practice.

So how can you start to incorporate more attuned sensing and less mechanical doing in your practice of yoga asana? I've put a lot of thought into this, and here are the strategies I've found that best serve that goal:

1. BREATHE

Your breath is the bridge. Tune into not only the presence of the breath, but where it moves in your body. What is its depth, its sound, its temperature? How does it affect your nervous system, your energetic state? When you are actually focused on your breathing instead of the details of a pose, you create the conditions for deeper sensitivity.

2. MOVE SLOWLY

This isn't to say that you can't be radically embodied and present and feeling when moving quickly, but it is trickier. Play with a sloooow practice. Don't just reach your arm behind your back and bind your hands underneath your thigh in parsvakonasana mindlessly. Feel the sweep of your arm as it abducts, internally rotates, and extends. How does this arm movement affect the quality of your breath? Be curious and intentional and explore the details that you usually miss.

3. EXPLORE ON THE FLOOR

Tapping into sensation and allowing feeling to guide you is an advanced practice. It is not lazy! It is deeply refined. And, it will allow you to advance in your asana practice in a more mindful way. I've found that it's easier to develop this consciousness when the body is straining less, when you're more supported. This doesn't mean restorative yoga with lots of props (which is also fantastic). It means feeling into the movements of your limbs and core canister and even how your vision travels while you move creatively on the floor. Create new shapes, experience new sensations. Allow yourself to move intuitively and connect with your physicality in a new way.

Yours in exploration and reflection,

Grace

These reflections are a labor of love and an expression of my life's study and work. I would love to hear if they resonate with you; I want this to be a conversation. Please also feel free to share with anyone else with a curiosity for movement and spirituality.