Dance out the grief

Everyone who has been touched by a serious loss knows this state: as if someone’s cold hand is squeezing the heart, not letting them breathe. We nod in response to the comforting words of loved ones, but we understand: it is worth being alone with ourselves, and the pain will return with renewed vigor. But you still need to live, work, take care of others, trying to do anything, just not to plunge into this hell again.

Is it possible to deal with your feelings in a different way, without denying, but also without plunging into them with your head? Jungian psychologists have an approach.

The body is trying to say something

“As soon as she entered the room, I immediately felt her tension. His facial expressions, gestures, tone of voice betrayed him, although there was a polite smile on his face. Abby, a client of dance therapist Laura Wilson, struggled to cope with the stress of the recent death of her father. In the family, she was always “for the strong” – she listened, supported, did not grumble. She did not give herself the opportunity to express her grief because she had to remain firm for others.

The first thing the therapist asked her was to make any movement or gesture. On a whim, without thinking. Abby began to slowly and silently stretch her arms out in front of her, forcefully, as if she were pushing something. As she later admitted, at that moment one phrase was spinning in her head: “Let go.” “She realized that this is exactly what she has been doing for the last week and a half: pushing away emotions, holding them at arm’s length,” explains Laura Wilson. “She put all her strength into this action, so her body seemed to be in spasm.”

Abby realized that she was only using her arms, not her torso. When the therapist asked her to move again, but this time with her whole body, Abby found herself rocking back and forth, side to side. And something in her resonated. She had seen something similar on TV before. They were women from the Middle East, mourners, dressed in black. In the frame, they swayed in the same way, shaking with sobs.

Abby’s movements made sense. If at first she pushed away feelings, her second gesture was to create space for grief. She realized that she had to give herself the opportunity to mourn the loss, let the pain into her body, and allow herself to mourn her father. “Perhaps she could become aware of this in the process of“ talking ”therapy, but most likely this awareness would remain at the level of the head, but she would still keep feelings in the body,” explains Laura Wilson.

Shape for feelings

“The body says what words can’t,” this phrase is attributed to American modern dance pioneer Martha Graham. Carl Jung would agree with this. He believed that the body and mind are inextricably linked. Suppressed emotions, fears and desires leave traces in the body: metabolism changes, nervous tics occur, diseases develop. But this connection is not one-way – the body can also send “commands” to the unconscious. And if the experiences are so difficult that it is unbearable to talk about them, plastic comes to the rescue.

Long before the advent of psychotherapy, our ancestors used dance as a medicine. “Dance was one of the most powerful healing methods in antiquity. We forgot about it,” writes dance therapist Lisa Fladager. – But the healing effect is achieved not by the repetition of memorized figures, but by free creativity. The dance should grow out of your experience, be relevant to your life.” This is the essence of dance therapy – through the body to influence the mind.

Marion Woodman, a Jungian analyst and leader of the women’s movement, has experimented a lot with spiritual practices. She survived an eating disorder, a serious car accident, kidney disease, dysentery and finally cancer. And she developed her somatic (body-based) approach based on her own experience of illness and healing.

“Grief can be danced out of yourself,” she writes. – Dance gives form to feelings, expresses what cannot be expressed in words. In the dance, the conscious and the unconscious begin to interact, freely flowing into each other. I translate every movement from the outside inward and try to connect it with the breath. The internal sources of power gather in the exact center and lead to an explosion of energy. The pain that I felt before the dance disappears, as if life is passing through me. That’s why the pain goes away when I dance, when I create. I become part of the life force again. The dance is dancing with me.”

Way to yourself

In The Owl Was Once a Baker’s Daughter, Marion Woodman describes the story of a woman who struggled to have a baby. When she finally became pregnant, her joy knew no bounds. But happiness turned out to be short: shortly before birth, she had a miscarriage. “Her grief was inconsolable, it was impossible to put into words,” Woodman recalls. At first she didn’t even cry. Then she began analysis and at the same time signed up for a modern dance group.” In her diary, a woman wrote: “I need to dance, because when I dance, I am.”

But dance does not just allow you to pour out frozen experiences. It awakens the most important thing in us – selfhood, an inner voice that we often do not hear. Woodman believed that words were ill-suited to express the feelings of women. “Words can confuse, but the body will never lie, because the unconscious speaks through it. This leap into the unconscious… is the very link that can connect them to the life force,” explains Woodman.

Eventually, Woodman’s client was able to feel gratitude for what had happened: “She felt no anger because months of seclusion and mourning had led her to realize that her child had to be sacrificed so that her own self could be born.” And only after that she managed to get pregnant again.

Dance comes to the rescue when it is not possible to unravel the complex tangle of feelings. It is a way to finally let the body speak, to let it speak through us and guide us. And along the way, unexpected discoveries can await us.