ON MOVEMENT
This blog post is an excerpt from an essay I wrote in 2019 about my love for movement.
It started when I discovered Paula Abdul’s record, Forever Your Girl. It was this urge to move - unabashedly, without care. I would flail my arms around freely, shake my head side to side, wiggle, jump and pound my feet into our fuzzy brown carpeted basement floor. I would dance my way through my parents’ records and cassette tapes, like Madonna, Janet Jackson, Diana Ross. I would watch music videos and mimic dance routines, lip sync and choreograph my own versions to “perform” in front of an audience of stuffed animals. I created an imaginary world where I felt free.
To the outside world, I was a painfully shy and quiet child - a result of ancestral and childhood traumas that would keep me from feeling safe enough to freely speak and voice my opinions. In school, I was bullied for being the awkwardly tall and chubby kid, so I felt discouraged from playing sports or taking part in group activities. I dabbled in a few dance classes here and there (jazz and hip hop were my styles of choice), but I would often drop out as soon as I felt the stares or rude remarks from classmates. One of the few recitals that I stuck through was for a rendition of Thumbelina. Though I savoured the rush of performing on stage, I remember feeling out of place there as I was different. I was the only person of colour. By next term, I was out the door.
I would often retreat behind books and wait until I returned to the safety of my own bedroom to practice dance. The urge to move would return in waves, in moments of vulnerability, when I felt I needed to release energy or forget about my troubles.
As I got older, my parents slowly discouraged me from taking part in extracurriculars that didn’t support sciences, math or any of those subjects that get you a real job. As a first generation Canadian (my parents immigrated from the Philippines in the 80s) I naturally felt the need to rebel against my culture’s expectations. I used earnings from my first job to take a hip hop dance class. Still, I felt ostracized for not looking a certain way. One of my instructors once told me I was too tall and that I needed to “drop down lower” to match the height of my tiny dancer counterparts.
It seemed that dance was not meant to be my calling, so eventually I gave up on the idea of dancing competitively and performing - but I still found myself itching to move. So one day, I decided to try yoga.
When I first stepped on my mat, I expected to improve my flexibility and I wanted to achieve a fit body. I quickly discovered that my yoga practice was beyond what the eye could see. By connecting my breath to movement, I was able to find emotional release and alleviate my anxiety. It felt like my yoga studio was the one place where I wasn’t being judged. I could freely experiment with shapes and challenge myself in ways I never thought possible. Sometimes, I would cry in class. All of my pent up emotions would be released in a fury of sweat and tears. My teachers would set intention and would encourage us to move at our pace. I knew that others in the room were doing the same thing, focusing on their own practice, so I felt safe. Importantly, I felt held.
So I kept going to yoga, and then eventually I started to dabble in other modalities of movement: Pilates, weight training, boxing. I started gaining more confidence in movement as I learned to listen to the intuition of my own body. Movement allowed me to heal, and I felt compelled to share this knowledge with others. So in 2018, I completed my first yoga teacher training. It was an intensive month-long program, followed by a year of distance learning projects - and it cracked my heart wide open.
I had experienced a rebirth. Something had shifted and changed inside of me. For the first time, I felt truly connected to my body. I realized that my body isn’t just this superficial thing that I’m supposed to decorate and make up, or this thing that I unconsciously stuff with junk and alcohol and then abuse at the gym the next day.
My body is a vessel that contains my life’s story. My Mother’s story, my Grandmother’s, and her Mother’s. My body carries generations of trauma, all of my pain, and sorrow. It also carries all my joys, warmth and love. Moving my body gives me the power to express freely and provide cathartic release. Movement is like medicine, it is my cure.
