When Words Escape Us, Dance Says It All
Lately, I’ve been revisiting an idea I started exploring two years ago — and the more I return to it, the more I feel something stirring around it. It’s as though the moment I begin to manifest it again, small signs start to appear — reminders, conversations, even questions from people asking if I’m still running my BIOFORM movement sessions. Then I came across a post titled “Why dancing can be more powerful than an antidepressant,” and it felt like a quiet nudge from the universe.
As a former dancer, I know how profoundly movement can shape and save a person. There was a time in my life when things were heavy, and dance became the one place where I could still breathe, still feel. It anchored me. It gave me a place to belong. Within that community, I found a kind of language that required no translation — a way of communicating through shapes, breath, energy, and rhythm. There’s a particular feeling that comes after a movement — a pulse that lingers long after the body stills — and an even deeper joy in seeing your creation embodied by others, spoken through their movement.
When life feels hard these days, dance is still what I return to. It’s the most tangible way I know to reconnect with myself — a felt sense that lives deep in the body. The moment I begin to move, something stirs that’s both grounding and liberating. It’s vivid, immediate, alive. Even the memory of movement — not necessarily the act itself, but the trace it leaves behind — can bring me back to that feeling. It’s as though my body carries its own archive of freedom and spaciousness, waiting to be remembered. I can call on it when I need to breathe again, to soften, to remember that movement doesn’t always need to be seen to be felt.
“Dance is the hidden language of the soul,” wrote Martha Graham, one of the greatest dancers and choreographers to have ever lived. I’ve always loved that line because it captures exactly what I’ve come to understand through my own experience — that dance speaks in ways words never can. It moves through us, quietly revealing what we feel, what we long for, and what we might not even know how to say.
What I’ve always loved about dance is its inclusivity. It’s for everyone. I don’t just mean the trained or the technically skilled, but all forms of movement — the small gestures, the inner shifts that happen when we hear music, or when emotion rises before words can catch it. That internal dance — the quiet sway of thought, memory, or emotion — is as powerful as any performance. Dance exists in the subtle as much as in the spectacular.
Everyone can move. Everyone has rhythm, whether it’s visible or buried deep within. I remember a powerful moment during my training in massage for dementia care, when we were shown a video demonstrating how music and rhythm could awaken something in people who appeared completely closed off to the world. Even when the body seemed still, something within responded. That inner rhythm — that pulse of being — can’t be erased. It reminded me that movement begins before the body even acts; it begins in the spirit.
That’s what draws me back now — this understanding that dance and touch both reach places words can’t. They are ways of remembering who we are beneath language, beyond roles and labels. This inner rhythm has been calling me again, quietly but insistently, urging me to bring BIOFORM back to life — to create spaces where people can reconnect with movement, with each other, and with themselves.
Because when words escape us, movement — like touch — says everything that needs to be said.
If you’re curious to see what inspired me, I invite you to watch this short but deeply moving video: Music and Memory – Henry’s Story. It’s a beautiful reminder of how rhythm and movement can awaken something deeply human — something that never truly fades.
