Why Women Must Move Their Bodies

I like to say that women’s bodies have taught me my work. And 15 years in, they continue to. 

But if anyone had told me 15 years ago that I would come even close to working with body intelligence and movement as transformative tools, I’d have thought them insane! To tell you the truth, I didn’t know the word embodiment when I started my career in the field of embodiment!

It all began when I started going to my neighborhood park in San Francisco every day to move my body. I needed it badly: At the time, I was a documentary film producer and journalist, just laid off from my gig, with thousands of dollars in student loans, and also with a deep clarity that I’d lost my passion for my profession. But I was already in my mid 30s and did not have or see any alternative path forward. My mind was going crazy and I was heavy with stress, so I’d grab my hula-hoop (a new toy I didn't really know how to use but it gave me an excuse to move in public), and go to the park.

I’d close my eyes and feel my body, and move with all my unspoken feelings and fears, until I felt that release in my psyche that only movement could bring me. I never followed any learned steps or movements, I just dropped into my inner rhythm and moved however it felt good to move)

When I opened my eyes, a few women would have gathered around me, and would shyly approach to thank me for what MY movement was doing in THEIR bodies and minds.

They’d ask me if they could move with me, and how I could move like THIS, and I was always shocked that I’d had that impact. All I could tell them was that when I moved my body, my stuck thoughts and emotions began to flow, and some old, timeless feminine rivers unlocked in my psyche that I never knew existed! And that it was how my ambitious mind, my wired nervous system, and my years of feminine suppression had finally began unwinding and releasing and healing.  

But it was sensing those women’s HUNGER to feel the same freedom and sensuality and flow in their bodies that made me risk renting a small studio and try teaching an expressive movement class that I had no idea how to teach…

 But the classes were sold out for the next two years…Why? 

This is all I knew at the start: That we simply needed spaces where we could move uninhibited,  free, hidden from the patriarchal eye- both our own and that of the public, protected from the risk of feeling sexualized or predated upon. But perhaps even more importantly, a space where our many judgments and  critiques of our own bodies could be laid down, even if for a few hours, so that the corsets of the social body which we wore like our own could be stripped off one by one,  and we could become reacquainted with the precious, long-abandoned, and often overwhelmingly powerful intelligence of our  deeper bodies!!  

And in all the years since, whether I am opening a class in San Francisco, Oakland, Copenhagen, Oaxaca, or Berlin, it’s been enough to make a simple invitation: “Let your body be the most intelligent part of you now. Sense its impulses, its aches, its laboratories of sensation and feeling. Let it slowly begin telling the truth about how you have been–on the inside… through your movement.”

And as we felt our bodies, they showed us the way... We moved in the shapes of our hopes and longings, in the grief-stricken gestures of what we’d lost,  the body-motions of our shames and fears, our sexual hungers, and our childlike joys, a powerful intelligence came awake inside us, and it made us understand that our deeper bodies were both a refuge and a well of wisdom, a dearly missed home that was waiting for us to come through the door again. 

And this is how I learned from my body and the bodies of women, long before I got any formal education in somatics or counseling:

Women MUST move. 

I don’t know how to say this enough: We cannot know ourselves, our powers, our capacities, and our legacy well enough as women, unless we move.

When we move- freely, emotionally, sensually- we break through the old mold of who we hold ourselves to be– and who our culture has told us to become, and we tap our own rhythm, and the rhythm of the earth in our bodies. A vaster, wilder psyche breaks free in us, and some old and powerful part of our legacy wakes up us. Moving and expressing our bodies is how our bodies remember our power, our healing abilities, and our shared history, and our way back to ourselves. 

I've seen this time and again:

When we stop thinking about our bodies and about fixing them and we let ourselves feel and sense our bodies instead, a bigger, kind of mythic Woman descends into us.

I have seen her in countless faces and dances and feet drumming the floors.

And whether She shows up fierce and furious, outraged, struck with old grief, full of sex, or gentle like rain, what she taught me over the years in the bodies of women and in my own, is that she is here to restore us––and to become restored in us. She is here to put the loose ends together and repair the broken tapestry of a world that had forgotten her but had gone mad without her.

And that her heirloom––the wild, the instinctual, the intuitive, the poetic, the earthly and cyclical, the mysterious, the erotic–– could indeed only be evidenced in our bodies and in their freedom. 

And that only in our bodies we can reclaim her.