How Your Dance and Fantasy Enables You to Be Free

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How does fantasy dance in and out of your life? Dancing with a character can bring your fantasies to flesh and empower you to accept the parts of yourself you have forgotten or just “don’t have time” for. There are emotions in your fantasies that once expressed can enable you to accept yourself, without feeling you have to “act out” any part of the fantasy in real life. The safety of fantasy is that it can become physically real without our ego having to judge how we are presenting ourselves.

The more comfortable you are with the unconscious parts of yourself, the more you can release your hang-ups of the past about having to please everyone else and not being enough just the way you are. As you get ready for Halloween you may notice how dress-ups and costuming can allow people to step into a part of themselves they don’t normally take outside! But even without putting on a costume, we can dance with the idea of these characters and allow them to breathe, give them a way of moving and feeling in our body.

The inner parts of ourselves are only revealed when we don’t judge ourselves and when we take a break from what we do “normally”. Dancing with different characters allows the imagination to reach out its arms and legs and fully feel its breadth. By stretching the imagination, you allow parts of yourself to come into play that create the richness of your emotional world – and deepen your capacity to empathize and experience other’s feelings and their fantasies of what is possible too!

Here’s an exercise to try right now to see how you can use your imagination with your body:

1. Keeping the arms by the side of the body, notice the space between your elbows and ribs.

2. Breathe in and out and let the ribs expand, and open the space between the ribs and elbows.

3. Let the hands be soft. Now bring into your mind a character that you admire. It can be one from a fantasy of your own, a film, television, book or computer game.

4. Imagine how they would animate that space between the elbows and ribs, and let that feeling be communicated all the way to the hands and all the way to the upper back, back of the heart and shoulders.

5. As you breath in and out of the ribs, notice any feelings in the belly, stomach and that space between the elbows and ribs.

When you animate your body with any “character”, you will find that space between the elbows and ribs will be energized, because it is close to the core of your body, and your belly button, that acts like a pivotal center for the way you experience your body and personality.

Giving a physical body to a fantasy, is a way to feel what is pushed aside by mental ideas of ourselves, political correctness and social pressures. The problem with holding back parts of ourselves – or not allowing them to breathe – is that we adopt emotional beliefs that make us judge what is acceptable and unacceptable. Perhaps worse, by forgetting our fantastical nature and the characters that inspire us, we suppress the creative, playful, free and loving parts that can give so much to other people. Fantasy is much more than waking up sexual transgressions with your body. Since fantasy calls in the imagination, we are playing with a vast field of emotional and pre-language learnings, experiences and feelings – some that pre-date your memory.

The opening of your subconscious and emotions calls in many roles such as the romantic, the naïve, the controlling, the dominant, the submissive, the calculating, the aggressive, the emotionally vulnerable, the inquisitive, the boundary breaker, and the comedian, plus many more ways we test people and society who tell us how we “should” be.

These are all ways to explore your individual identity and also explore the emotions that inspire you and motivate you to grow and share yourself with others. Some of your emotions aren’t pretty, but they still need to have emotional outlets for you to feel and allow them to change your life. At some point we want to be accepted for who we are. But the sense of who we are, becomes “boring” or limiting until you challenge what you think you are and open to the unlimited potential characters that are hidden within your own skin and imagination. Fantasy is a huge part of allowing hidden parts of ourselves to seep into our mainstream lives.

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