Dominique Domingo

Dominique Domingo Instagram – Monday night, I went to an in person dance class for the first time in two years expecting to feel joy, and instead drove home unpacking & sitting with some big feelings. Through my personal journey as a dancer, somewhere along the way I stopped approaching dance from the love of it. I stopped listening to my body. I stopped moving from a place of honesty. Not all of the time but a lot of it. I became conditioned to performing for the audience, performing to look good, to book the job, to deliver no matter what I was going through or physically feeling. Pushing past pain, injuries and my body’s limits because I was being paid to, or performing harder to overcompensate when choreographers treated me less than while on the job. All of these things were slowly changing my relationship with dance. I’ve subconsciously been pulling away from the dance industry for a while so I’ve been aware of these feelings to a degree but couldn’t quite make sense of them. It finally clicked that constantly feeling the need to perform over the years has inadvertently affected my connection to my body. And I know this because of how it feels when I dance from my awareness now. What used to be joy, over time, morphed into temporary highs from being chosen, validated and rewarded in one way or another. It’s why I felt so conflicted in class. That type of “joy” no longer resonates with my mind and spirit anymore but I didn’t understand that my physical body is actually still conditioned to move from that place. That disconnect is where the big feelings came from. I’ve been pulling away from dance because most of the time I can feel all of the ways my body still thinks it has to push, prove, pretend or shrink. And it feels really uncomfortable now. The next day, my body felt extremely heavy. Didn’t move much. A lot of sadness and anger were present. But that night I felt a gentle nudge to move.
Continued ⬇️⬇️(in comments) | Posted on 26/Sep/2021 02:20:03