The short version:

Dancing Your Depths is hosted by Jennifer Brown, who started dancing at age 3 and hasn’t stopped moving for 40 years, with experience in performance, choreography, facilitating movement skills for children, and leading movement classes for adults. A certified Kripalu yoga teacher, ZENgevity® teacher, and dedicated student of various conscious dance practices for more than a decade, Jennifer is eager to share her personal practice and passion with others and have fun with what unfolds, especially as a way to shake out the stress of her full-time career in public policy editing.

The in-DEPTH version:

My first encounter with dancing my deepest self was in my early years: My father has video proof of me, age 3, twirling around our New Jersey living room to his Moody Blues albums, toddler Jennifer deeply immersed in a world of music and movement. These were the days long before the internet, before TikTok and Instagram projected to the world what was cool and hip. Heck, my family didn’t even have cable TV! Without any external images to influence my sense of self, I danced unabashedly and passionately—an intense soul working its way through the small limbs of a preschooler.

A year after those home videos were recorded, I was on stage in an orange tutu, performing “Me and My Teddy Bear” at my dance school’s annual recital. Many years of sequins, tights, ballet slippers, and tap shoes followed: I took studio classes through high school, was in the dance ensemble of musical theatre productions, and minored in dance in college. The focus of my movement life had shifted away from exploring the internal to literally shining the spotlight on the external.

The journey back to finding my inner dance after years of performing for an audience’s entertainment or a teacher’s approval was a long process that planted its first steps after college, when I started incorporating yoga into my life more intentionally and began to find a deep connection between breath, body, mind, and movement.

The more I practiced yoga, the more I found myself longing to dance. It was a very deep desire to move and explore, but not in the performing sense I had held for so many years. I wanted to just move, no restrictions, no rubber rectangle serving as a boundary for my feet. Sometimes after yoga class at the gym, after the teacher powered off the stereo, turned off the lights, and left the room, I’d stay behind and experiment what it felt like to hold a steady tree pose and then let the tree get swept in a gentle breeze. Where would these imaginative winds take me?

I was curious about these callings. The urge to move in this exploratory way always felt more profound after a yoga class. I didn’t realize it fully at the time, but by immersing myself in the world of Om, I was calling myself back home.

The turning point occurred during my yoga teacher training at the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in 2006, when, after 28 days of nonstop inner reflection and contemplation at a former Jesuit monastery in the Berkshires of Massachusetts, I realized my yoga was dance.

I danced whenever I could—before class, after class, and after hours. My classmates would be asleep in the dorm, and I’d sneak into the program room at 11 p.m. and dance in the dark, an unlit Shiva statue (appropriately in the form of Nataraja, Lord of the Cosmic Dance) watching over me. My favorite moments of that training were not the daily yoga classes led by a rotation of talented teachers who graced Kripalu’s halls but rather the Saturday yoga dance classes with live drumming—an hour of pure ecstasy, sweat, and stirring of the soul.

I tried to find ways to incorporate this meaningful movement into my life post-training, but most of it took place where it started as a 3-year-old: in my living room. In private.

When I craved connection with others, I dropped into a nightclub called the Coastline in South Jersey on Friday evenings. I loved having the energy of others around me as inspiration, the DJ pumping out upbeat music, a public forum to let my Leo self shine. But the Coastline was by no means sacred, safe space: It was loud, boozy, and a dark, dizzying room of questionable boundaries. A young woman stepping on the elevated dance floor and moving in ways beyond the typical hip-bopping drew attention, sometimes appreciated, sometimes uncomfortable. There was also the overpowering scent of perfume and aftershave, the ringing in my ears from the blasting speakers, the realization that this was fun, but it wasn’t deep. This movement only represented my external persona. I wanted a space to be fully authentic.

An injury in my early 30s led me to my first 5Rhythms class, a meditative movement practice, in a basement yoga studio not far from the Coastline. I was quite vulnerable at the time, limping from a yet-to-be-diagnosed labral tear in my hip, desperately seeking any kind of activity where I could elevate my mood and get my heartbeat up in the most self-compassionate way possible. I had tried a few popular high-powered aerobic dance classes, but the ultra-fast choreography only exacerbated the pain, and I was not in the right headspace for the level of peppiness that kind of class required.

But the 5Rhythms class that night was different. First off, no steps. There was light guidance, a loose framework to respect, but we had permission to move as we wished and practice self-modulation. What a relief! I could tend to my ailing hip and move in ways that felt comfortable and safe. I could sit in a chair. Lie on the floor. Lean against the wall. I started slowly and picked up the pace when my body said it was time. I was smiling, finding new ways to groove while being mindful of my body, receiving inspiration from my fellow dancers, who all had different expressions of self. I could dance in ways beyond what I was confined to at the Coastline: I could dance my happy dance, my confused dance, my sad dance, my light and my shadow. I could be authentic; I could be me.

It is not hyperbole to say that that class changed my life. Not all at once, of course. It started with those monthly classes in the basement yoga studio, then larger classes in Philadelphia and Princeton every other week, then weekly, enrolling in weekend workshops, traveling to other cities to work with gifted teachers, experimenting with a variety of modalities like 5Rhythms, Open Floor, JourneyDance, Gaga, Let Your Yoga Dance, Soul Motion. The gradual integration of a conscious movement practice into my life—starting with those urges on the yoga mat and developing into the daily practice I uphold now—has kept me paradoxically grounded and fluid through so many big life events—the hip injury, divorce, a second marriage, prolonged illness, the pandemic. My movement practice is an integral part to healing, learning, growing … and reuniting with that 3-year-old in the living room who danced her depths and said yes to joy.

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Who Is This Guy?

This is my husband, Phil, who will likely be a regular participant and will occasionally co-host with me. We were a conscious-dance romance, crossing paths on a wooden floor and learning about each other initially through rhythms rather than words. It’s no secret there’s a big age difference between us, but Phil is young at heart and I’m an old soul, so we balance out. Phil is a serious meditator and mover and enjoys finding creative ways to blend those practices.

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Why I Am Offering Dancing Your Depths

The movement practices that have supported me over the past decade are hard to find in this corner of South-Central Colorado. My husband and I will sometimes travel for workshops and participate in Zoom classes, but we miss the social connections that were fostered with our home hub in the Philadelphia area. I have lamented this loss since we landed in Colorado Springs in 2019, and even more so during the darkest moments of the pandemic. I am compelled to transform this grief into action and hold space for people in my community who are called to dance their depths, to serve as kind of tour guide into the explorations of meditative movement.

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