When Dancing Together Feels Like Coming Home

Last week I attended a symposium at Yale called "Healing with More-than-Humans"—an exploration of healing, sacredness, and our relationships with more-than-human beings: land, water, ancestors, unseen presences. As I listened, my body kept saying yes.

It felt like someone was finally naming what dance has been whispering to me my whole life:

Healing isn't only about fixing what's broken.
It's about remembering that we belong.

I was a painfully shy kid. At the bus stop, I'd stare at the ground, terrified of being seen. I didn't know how to be in a room with other people without wanting to disappear.

Except when I danced.

In a circle of moving bodies, something loosened. The first time I felt everyone's weight shifting together, everyone's breath rising at the same moment, something in me whispered:

"Oh. I'm not alone in here."

There's a word for this. Anthropologist Victor Turner called it communitas—not just "community," but a felt field of shared presence. That moment when roles blur, walls soften, and something larger moves through the group.

I've been turning this word over all week.

Because I think this is what so many of us are aching for. Not more networking. Not more small talk. But that feeling of being with—truly with—other humans. Breathing together. Moving together. Belonging together.

Research confirms what I've always felt in my bones: when people move together in synchrony, they feel more trust, more bonding, more aliveness. The World Health Organization reviewed over 900 studies and found that the arts—especially dance—support mental health and connection in profound ways.

But I didn't need a study to tell me that.

I knew it at the bus stop. I knew it in every dance circle that ever held me. I know it every time I watch someone's shoulders drop and their breath deepen as the music starts and they realize: I don't have to perform here. I just get to be.

Thank you for being in my orbit—whether you danced with me years ago or have only ever read quietly from afar.

My intention with these Artist's Letters is to invite you into the studio of my life: the questions I'm sitting with, the experiments I'm running, the messy, luminous practice of remembering Wholeness together.

I'd love to hear from you: When have you felt even a flicker of "coming home" in your own body?

Hit reply and tell me. Or if you simply write "COMMUNITAS", I'll know this resonated—and I'll make sure you hear about the next small Dance Alchemy gathering.