Stepping Outside: Dance or Movement Therapy

 Stepping Outside: Dance or Movement Therapy 

by Fazeel Chauhan posted Feb 3, 2021  

Many years ago, in one of my Yoga classes at CSULA, I heard about and went to a movement therapy group session, which I found to be mysterious, and difficult to get into. For years before that, and years after that, I did not explore it, though by chance I had a few good experiences when certain trance music spontaneously made me dance. I had seen my brother dance at a Sufi shrine, where he went almost every Thursday night for the drumming and dancing spiritual gatherings, in Pakistan. There I saw a very raw and primitive form of the Whirling (darwesh) dance, which some people in the West may have seen, done in the tradition of Rumi, the poet from Turkey. I saw a famous singer try to join that dance at the Sufi shrine in Pakistan, but after a couple of minutes he came out with injured, bleeding feet. We could say that was the layperson's dance therapy, but I thought it was too difficult for me to do.

I have been close to music since childhood, and love playing music, and have enjoyed music from most parts of the world. But dance was something I found difficult. I have always been intrigued by primal dance of African and Native American peoples, but I never got a chance to participate in it. Yet, I have taken part in some other Native American rituals like sweat lodge. Since I have seen that people doing dance therapy or movement therapy benefited from it a lot. So I want to explore it. 

Also, last week in the Embodied Social Justice summit, one of the sessions was about dance therapy. In part of the session, the teacher took a long time to prepare the students for the movement therapy. In another session, a teacher said, "The issues are in the tissues". In my brain, I understand that we carry trauma in the body, or specially in the Western approach, there is a separation between body, heart, mind and soul. That is similar to compartmentalizing the personal life from the professional life, which doesn't seem natural to me. In Psychology I learned that integrity also means to integrate all our roles and identities. Something different would be a split personality or multiple personality. So I am reminded that being more in touch with the body, through dance or movement therapy, a person can better connect their body, mind, and soul. But I haven't looked into it so far.

I was raised practicing Islam in two predominantly Muslim countries; Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Music and specially dance, are greatly discouraged among the conservative sects of Islam, for example in Saudi Arabia. In the culture, modesty is also emphasized, so dancing is considered showing off or flaunting it, or in some cases even the dances in Bollywood movies are considered vulgar. 

So those have been some of the reasons why I didn't explore dance or movement therapy in the past. But now I'm ready to look more into it and learn more about it.