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This week’s Dance First Spotlight is on Melissa Michaels, Golden Bridge, and Golden Girls Global!

The world needs us to mobilize.

Did you know that Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, is a badass dancer? Zelensky Dancing! He won Dancing with the Stars in 2006.

One never knows where the dancing path will lead you!

How is the dance supporting your emergence onto the world stage? Every one of us is needed. Each of us has the blessing and responsibility to lean into what is going on in the world and help transform what is happening. The dance is truly one of the most powerful forms of medicine we have today to help us inwardly navigate through the rugged terrain of now.

A war. A pandemic. An environmental crisis. Racial reckoning. Economic destabilization. A mental health epidemic. The commodification of truth. A state of emergency for our children.

These are some of the critical challenges facing our precious planet. Of course, each of us is being impacted differently and very personally.

Identity shifts. Stuck energy. Free-floating fear. Economic angst. Outrage. Caretaker fatigue. Groundlessness. Career pivots. Endless grief. Displacement. Health challenges. No space for self. Too much time alone.

How do we move through our own personal challenges and big teachings to become inspired role models, clear channels, and loving guides for others to do the same?

We dance.

Not only is dance freeing, it is also free! It can be done formlessly, with or without music. It can be practiced within the bounds of specific modalities, from cross-cultural folk dances to Hip Hop to free form. Dances can be made alone in the bathroom, in organized, familiar groups, in anonymous crowds. Dances can be arranged, or they can arise spontaneously out of the pulse of a group. They can have a leader, or not, organically emerging through the collective energy.

Regardless of which way one chooses to dance, by dancing, one is likely to expand and liberate patterns of movement. Exploration beyond the familiar and the “safe” encourages uncharted pathways for expression to emerge. The scope of a person’s inquiry and actualization of new capacities is limited only by her own mind and opportunities to explore.

At a physical level, dance liberates parts of one’s body, allowing one to become active team members for one’s full-bodied movements. Dance can bring fluidity to places that have hardened, mobilizing frozen patterns. Atrophied parts can awaken. When we use both sides of the body, both sides of the brain also come online. Inwardly, dance can encourage the cells to mobilize and the nervous system to recalibrate. We can find our ground despite the groundlessness of these times.

Dance can also awaken the healthy will, mobilizing the capacity to move from idea to action, from fragmentation to integration, from suffering to service. The glory is that by liberating the body to move in all kinds of fresh ways, feelings thaw, and our capacity to love expands. The mind, soul, and spirit are also moved. Over time all these parts can harmonize, allowing one’s essential nature to come online and shine.

Dance can also be a vehicle for prayer, a way to call out for guidance, help, whatever is on the lips of one’s heart. Dance is also a meditative path, a way to listen deeply to that which is vast and within and to that which is vast and beyond. In fact, dance across culture and time has always been used for communion and as a spiritual portal. Dances have been done to honor life passages: birth, puberty, marriage, death. Dances have been done to celebrate the passing of the seasons, to call in the spirit of the rain, the return of the light, the regeneration of the soil. Dances have been made for healing, for community repair, for waging peace. Dances have been made individually and in community to remember the ancient rhythms of life connecting us through all time. Dance can be seen as a form of magic, a way to transform people out of the ordinary into a direct experience of Spirit.

I’ve been dancing since my mid-twenties. I showed up hurting. I was a drug dealing, enraged, disordered eating young woman seeking solace in all the wrong places. Thirty-five years ago, on that fateful day, when I stepped onto Gabrielle Roth’s dance floor, my destiny and I found one another, and we have never stopped dancing.

My next dance step includes offering you an online course that I spent decades creating for the world. You are welcome to join me as I guide folks through the narrow passageways of these times. Whatever threshold you are navigating your way through, our work together will support your full-bodied mobilization, the creative liberation of your unique gifts for the world.

You are welcome to join me in my next season of guiding folks from the edge to center in these times. My legacy project, Moving Through Life’s THRESHOLDS: Pathways for Embodied Living and Leading is now available online.

To learn more, please enjoy this Free Movement Video and Booklet about the importance of this Thresholds work.

Above all friends, let’s keep moving! The time to mobilize is now.

Melissa Michaels, Ed.D.
Dedicated to our Collective Renewal
Through the Liberation of the Creative Spirit

www.GoldenBridge.org
www.GoldenGirlsGlobal.org
Melissa@GoldenBridge.org

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