How dance can increase self love

There’s a lot of talk about self love these days. It’s now understood that self love is not about vanity or appearance, but something that runs much deeper. Cultivating self love is one of the most generous things that you can do for those around you. Why? Think about it, whenever people have offended or hurt you, it’s likely that their words or actions were a reflection about how they felt about themselves. When you truly love yourself, you are being kind, loving and generous to those around you.

My dance journey was, in many ways, a self love journey. Little did I expect that learning how to dance was going to teach me how to cultivate self love in so many different ways that I can then apply in my day-to-day life. Here are the biggest takeaways:

1. Accept your body

Dance teaches you to accept your body how it is. There’s something powerful about seeing your reflection dancing in the mirror of a dance studio, or in the window at home. I used to think that mirrors were bad, that they showed the reflection of our own judgement. But actually, once you pass that uncomfortable feeling, you start to like and accept the reflection that you see of yourself. Allowing your body to move, and discovering how it can interpret sound, helps you to accept how your body feels, and explore the physical limits it can reach. Both seeing and feeling your body’s movement in dance leads to more positive body image and self-acceptance.

2. Tune into your emotions and intuition 

Dancing helps you tune into your emotions and how they feel in your body, becoming a secret language that communicates your inner feelings to you. In a world where we are constantly in our minds, it allows you to truly enter your body, creating the silence and space for you to listen to your emotions to first identify them, before then validating them and sitting (I mean dancing) with them. Dancing then allows you to let go of negative emotions that no longer serve you as you release them through your body in music and movement.

3. Nurture your mental and physical health 

Dance has multiple benefits for our mental and physical health. To put things simply – you are getting up from your desk, and away your phone, and taking the time to give yourself love through freedom of movement and expression. After all, how we feel in our bodies impacts how we feel about ourselves. Many scientific research studies already prove that dance has huge benefits for mental health as it helps to boost endorphins, releases stress and anxiety, and reduces the risk of developing Dementia and Alzheimers. Dancing also gives our physical body love by reducing the risk of diseases such as osteoporosis, heart disease, and diabetes.

4. Self-expression through movement

Dancing allows you to be yourself, because nobody will ever dance exactly like you. It’s a form of creative expression that is unique to you. Even if you follow a choreography with ten other people, nobody dances the same, because each of us is unique. This freedom to be yourself can feel quite scary sometimes – because it means you need to be vulnerable. But overcoming the fear will make you feel more comfortable expressing yourself in your own unique way. For introverts, self-expression through dance can be an interesting challenge as a medium to channel your thoughts, feelings and your physical presence without relying on words.

5. Increased confidence and self-esteem

Dancing helps us overcome our initial resistance to “be” with ourselves or to “be seen” by others. One of people’s greatest fears is to dance alone in front of others, but with effort dancing teaches us to overcome shyness and learn to be comfortable with showing who we are to others through movement. It’s about taking up space and asserting yourself through your physical presence. But learning a new dance is also overcoming the fear and resistance of learning something new, and it brings a sense of achievement and pride to discover and master a new skill. In a pre-COVID world, going out social dancing means meeting strangers and new people all the time – another huge confidence booster that comes from practice.

6. Learning how to set boundaries with partners

Partner dancing is a shared activity that requires physical proximity and intimacy. It is an opportunity to practice feeling comfortable with ourselves when close to others, but also in learning how to set boundaries. Sharing a dance with another can bring out our vulnerability, and when dancing with a partner in a follower-leader dynamic, there are a number of boundaries that need to be respected. Dancing teaches you to communicate with a partner in a silent language, to set certain boundaries in terms of arm placement, speed, distance or if a movement is too rough or too soft. Dancing with a partner has taught me so much about setting my own physical boundaries to dance in a setting that made me feel safe.

7. Letting go of perfection

I had to learn this one the hard way. Many of us start off in dance imagining ourselves on a sparkling stage with an ability to twirl en pointe or do acrobatics. The truth is, learning to dance is messy, and you will do everything wrong and make constant mistakes, until one day – you get it right. Learning to dance forces you to question your inner-critic, and to accept that failure and mistakes are part of the process and any achievement. There is no success without effort and practice. Dancing taught me to let go of perfection and forgive myself for the mistakes I make. In fact, it even taught me to view these mistakes with kindness, compassion, and even pride for allowing myself to learn and grow.

8. Waking up and being in the moment

When you dance, you can’t think about the past, or the future. Only about the present moment. This means getting out of your head and enjoying the here and now. You are fully awake and living. We spend 95% of our time in an unconscious state running on autopilot, dance allows you to increase that 5% of the time when we tend to be conscious. Dance is consciousness.  

If you would like to discover more about dance as self love, I’ll be hosting a special Self Love workshop with dancer Mayra Cutiva on Sunday 14 February at 19:00 CET (13:00 EST | 10:00 PST). We’ll be combining science, storytelling and dance steps to help you cultivate more self love in your day-to-day life.