Taking the Leap: Embodied Practices for Healing and Transformation

Stepping into a new space and/or a new activity is scary, stepping into a new life—a new version of you—is seemingly impossible. Until it’s not.
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We are each on our own healing journey, and to heal—and thrive—we need to be with ourselves. But lasting, transformative healing is bolstered, supported, and sustained by, and in, community.

On my own journey, as an introvert, and from amidst a sea of shame and fear, the need to ask for help and the need to connect to a community felt impossible. It was difficult to face the truth that connections with other people are key to healing, let alone embrace this fact.

What I have learned about trauma and healing is that we have to move our bodies and learn practical tools for emotional regulation. And we need to participate in mind/body, somatic, embodied practices consistently—yoga and dance are the most impactful practices for me.

There is no magical pill or one and done miracles; there is only hard work. And it’s worth it.

While there are many approaches to healing, to movement, to embodiment—the practices that we offer at The Spiral Goddess Collective are thoughtfully designed and curated toward sustaining healing and transformation. Our community—and the classes and workshops that we offer—welcome each individual just as they are, providing tools and resources and a brave space for exploration.

​But you have to be willing to take that leap...

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I survived for decades using yoga and dance as a way to mitigate my trauma and attempt to stay sane, but it wasn’t until I started to better understand trauma and embodiment that I was able to actually start to heal and transform—to stop using these practices as a way to avoid myself and to use them as a way to connect to myself.

The way I practiced and taught dance and yoga transformed as well.

Talk therapy helped and daily yoga and dance practices helped, but JourneyDance was a game changer in so many ways. Training to be a JourneyDance facilitator was something that I did for myself, but now it is something that I am driven to share with others, especially those who don’t know that they need this kind of medicine or those who fear what embodiment might bring.

We need practices designed to help us ground, center, explore, and release.

We need a brave container and a supportive community—space and support.

And we need consistency. We need to return to the dance floor or the yoga mat (or, ideally, both!) over and over again. We return to ourselves again and again, finding love and compassion for ourselves.

And each time we do, we not only experience the benefits of these somatic, embodied practices, we also build resilience, access joy, flex our muscle memory, and create new pathways in our brains. We become mentally and physically stronger, more embodied, more self-regulated, and more able to respond rather than react to the stress in our lives and the chaos in our world.

The path toward healing and transformation is long and winding. There is no magical destination, but there is comfort and ease and a better quality of life.

So, if you are standing at the edge of the precipice—frozen and frazzled and fearful and insecure, numbing your senses (with alcohol or drugs or social media scrolling or shopping or whatever) because you don’t know what else to do (and because this is the norm of our culture)—maybe it’s time to take that leap. It feels impossible, but once we do, we find that it’s just what we didn’t know we were looking for.