As many little girls do, I started putting on a pink tutu and ballet slippers at a very young age. As I grew older and many of my friends starting drifting from dance, I kept adding more classes to my schedule. I grew up at the dance studio in my town; eventually becoming a teaching assistant when I was a young teen. I got to a point when I realized that I wasn't getting any taller than 5'1'' and thought there was no future in dance for me, so I should just really focus on my piano-playing skills.
During my years in college, I always wanted to continue to take dance classes, but there was nowhere for my age group. So, I continued to dance in my room, hallway, down the street, on the PATH train. Something in me is always moving whenever a song plays.
Once I entered graduate school at The Actors Studio Drama School, I was introduced to this thing called "free form movement." Huh? Combing many movement modalities, we would spend an hour just exploring how movements in our shoulders could inform the rest of our body. We would see how a certain song would influence the movement in our knees. This experience brought joy back into my life; it brought dancing back into my daily routine.
On my first visit to Kripalu in MA, I looked on the schedule and saw a "yoga dance" at noon. Much to my surprise it was just like the work I had been doing in my graduate program. It was a place that I felt safe expressing myself and moving my body in any way that felt right - no matter what it looked like.
My body needs to move in an uninhibited way. My yoga practice grounds me, but my dancing invigorates me by working through an blocked emotions that are stuck inside of me. So often I hear people say, "I don't know how to dance." What!? Everybody can dance! It is just that we have an idea in my head about what the dancing needs to look like. Dancing has helped me deal with a few fears, such as the idea that everyone in the world is looking at me and judging; as I've gotten older I have realized that nobody is actually looking at me.
I invite you to come dance with me at Devotion Yoga. We join together on Wednesdays at 5:30 for a time to unleash our inner movers and free our souls!
Sarah Anfora teachers:
Wednesday - Flow 1 - 9:30am
Wednesday - Journey Dance - 5:30pm
Friday - Kripalu Yoga - 12:30pm
Sunday - Bhakti Basic - 10:00am
