From Performance to Presence: Learning & Unlearning from Dance

What if life—like dance—wasn’t about getting it right, but about feeling it fully?

For years, I lived for the dance studio mirror.

I was a competitive dancer, choreographer, and teacher: trained to focus on form, outcome, and blending in (though as a full-blown Leo, I always found that last one pretty hard).

I was conditioned to focus on precision, placement, uniformity, doing it right, faking it ‘til you make it.

Success was defined by how well you executed, how closely you matched those around you, how perfectly you performed.

And for a long time, I loved it. I loved the efficiency, the applause, the way it felt to move in sync or on my own as an athlete and artist. I especially loved “nailing” it.

But something inside me was unraveling. It started as anxiety around teaching and choreographing — a quiet inner knowing that the gap between what I was doing and what I believed in was growing.

I began noticing how I was feeding a cycle of performativity, comparison, perfectionism, and toxic productivity. And how deeply it was impacting me — not just as a dancer, but as a human.

As I grew — in life, in self-awareness, in emotional depth — the dance studio mirror started to feel more like a cage. I found myself craving something more honest. Less perfect.

Something that didn’t require me (or anyone else) to look the part or “nail the routine,” but to be in the experience.

That’s when I began shifting into freeform dance and intuitive movement — not just as a practice, but as a way of life.

In these spaces, there’s no right way to move. No final product to perfect. It’s not about how it looks. It’s about how it feels.Process over polish. Presence over performance.Internal rhythm over external approval.

This has been a journey of deconstruction and reclamation. And here’s what I’ve learned:

• So many of us are still performing.

• We perform strength. We perform success. We perform “fine.”

• We shrink to fit, smooth the edges, hold it all together.

• And we wonder why we feel stuck, numb, or disconnected from our lives.

But what if you didn’t have to perform anymore?

What if life—like dance—wasn’t about getting it right, but about feeling it fully?

This is the foundation of my work now.

It’s not about becoming someone new.It’s about releasing everything that’s not you.And it starts in the body.

Because the job isn’t perfection. The job is enjoyment (thank you for this one, Organic Intelligence). And you don’t have to do it alone.