Can Dancing Actually Rewire Your Brain

You had your daughter, you had all this trauma, talk therapy wasn't getting you there. How did you find out about this conscious dance thing?

Yeah, I think that— I mean, I can tell you the exact moment, but here's what I find. When we ask a higher power, I'll call it God, for guidance and support, I believe it opens up this attraction factor where the thing that we most need that's going to lead us to to the breakthrough we're seeking can become welcome. And that's really what it was. It was like I got to this place where I was like, crap, everything I knew that I thought I was doing it all right just went out the window. So, okay, God, I surrender. I don't know how to fix this. I know it's— I can feel that I clearly missed the mark and I can also feel my potential. I feel that it's possible within me. I just have no idea what just went wrong. So I'm gonna ask for guidance and allow myself to be guided and led. I could tell you the longer story, but ultimately I feel like it was that question. So for anyone seeking answers, this very podcast could be the answer to a quote-unquote prayer or asking of the divine, or just a yikes, I need an answer. Like, I need a solution here. What might that be? I'd like to do it in a different, a slightly different way. I was, I'm, you know, JJ, you know, you're very close with my mother. For those of you that don't know, she's a well-known thought leader. Her name is Mary Morrissey. And I was blessed in that because I had moved home actually to raise my daughter and build a health and wellbeing division of her spiritual center back in the day. And at the center, she was a hub for all these kinds of outside-of-the-box teachers and modalities and, and ways of helping people transform. So within that center, there were a number of different people that, um, as I was growing this, um, well-being portion of her work, they just came out of the woodworks. And I was literally not only leading things, but I was taking the very classes that the rest of the, you know, the participants were taking. And it was just literally in those classes that I had the breakthroughs. I had spontaneous healings. I literally felt the trauma drain from my body. I mean, it was amazing things that I was like, wow, okay, this— there's some, there's some secret medicine in this that I'm feeling really, really guided to And slowly I started to feel guided to bring it to the world in my own way.

It makes so much sense. I'm— a couple things. I'm like, I don't know if you ever met Dr. Amy Apigian in our group. She really got into the biology of trauma and now is a big thought leader in that. And I feel like trauma's finally getting out into the space where we realize, hey, talk therapy is a piece, but it's probably not going to get you where you need to, to go. And these other things that you can move it through you are a great idea and probably the most powerful thing you can do. Back when I was a trainer, what I noticed at one point, I thought, gosh, I should go get my therapy license because I would get people moving and then it was like blah, blah, blah. I was like, whoa, you know, whoa, I don't know that I can help you with what you just dropped on me. But I found that movement was such a just opened people up. And what you've really done here by bringing movement and putting it together, this, this idea of conscious movement, which it makes sense now having a background in modern dance, right, with personal development, with transformational coaching. Is there anything else out there like this?

No, I mean, there are, there are, there's ecstatic dance, there's Literally, what is ecstatic dance for everybody? Ecstatic dance is a form of dance for healing and awakening and celebration. It's basically more DJ-guided, so it's music-led, and it's basically freeform dance. You just let your soul dance you, and it's a group of people that, you know, feel that dance is medicine and it's a pathway to awakened consciousness. It's a clean You know, there's no drugs and alcohol in most of these ecstatic dance circles. The difference with that and say what if modality like what I've created, which is called Transcendance, but there's—

I love the name, it's so cool.

Thank you. It really is about transcending stress, fear, doubt, pain, trauma, these lower life experiences, and utilizing the power of music and conscious movement or mindful movement, which is basically that I believe we're all innately born to move and to, AKA, dance, not following someone else's steps or some sort of like, you know, technique. This is totally just you allowing and trusting your own body wisdom to move you for the purpose of aligning with your highest self, your authentic self. You could call it your soul self. For me, it's helped unlock my purpose in life, not just to lead this to others, but all, I mean, I do lots of things, right? So some of my most powerful awarenesses and ahas and, and answers to life's greatest questions have come when I'm not just so focused on left brain activities, right? We live in our very logical left brain, two-dimensional space. And if you look at kids, why they have so much— one of the reasons science shows that they have so much access, right, to the fullness of their brain capacity— think about recess, going out, running, playing, climbing, hopping, skipping, all the things we used to do when we're younger. Or when we're in kindergarten, we're singing, we're moving to learn math. Like, there's this activation of the fullness of our brain, left left brain and right brain. Two of the ways that activates our right brain, which by the way, innovation, collaboration, Einstein ideas, infinite intelligence lives when we're, we've activated the right brain. And we live in a very left brain dominant experience in life. So unless we just happen to be a musician and play the piano or, you know, but just the simple act of turning on some music and just moving freely to it. Is in essence a form of transcendence. We're releasing tension, we're releasing stress, we're activating our happy hormones—dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins. A dose of dance is what I like to, to call it. One of my favorite studies, JJ, and I know you love this study too, is the New England Journal of Medicine did a study around what really reduces Alzheimer's and dementia and increases mental acuity, and they found that Social dance increases in mental acuity, decreases Alzheimer's by 76%. I mean, they studied everything— bike riding, you know, like chess, like all these mental activities. And so the, the health and wellness benefits of just movement in general, and then you add music, and then something like Transcend Dance just sprinkles in personal development Setting an intention, moving in alignment with your vision. If you're activating a life vision and, and recognizing that we get to choose our mood at will, life isn't happening to us. Life is happening for us and with us. So for me, when I add in some of my favorite music and then I bring to my mind whatever it is that I'm seeking to bring forth, magnify or manifest in my life, right? And I add movement to that that amplifies the emotional— now we're kind of getting esoteric here, but amplifies the emotional frequency that is in alignment with me being my best self, right? So I'm, I have clarity of mind. I'm in a happy, joyful, grateful, loving mood. And my actions are in alignment with the future version of me that I wanna experience 3 years from now where things are going well, I'm successful, I have loving relationships, I'm living on purpose, and my body is moving connected to that kind of energy. It's like putting Miracle-Gro on a garden or just, it's just a magnification of whether it's journaling practices, affirmations, looking at my vision board, you know, reading my vision in a two-dimensional on a piece of paper, but adding this in. Now, could be also I'm a kinesthetic learner, right? I'm a visionary at heart. So it's super aligned. Obviously it's super helpful, but it's just, it's another power tool.