Why Dance + Mental Health Advocacy Go Together
Mental health is difficult to talk about. It’s heavy and hard. People feel that revealing mental vulnerabilities paints them in a negative light. Receiving negative perceptions, judgments, can threaten our sense of acceptance. People just don’t want to share. It seems smarter to cover these things up. Issues in mental health go unseen. So much of the problem is invisible. This isn’t the problem of any one individual, its a challenge shared by billions across societies.
Dancing is something fun. It’s something light that most anyone can do. People feel more comfortable and confident in themselves when, or after, dancing. It allows people to step into a positive light, embracing and expressing individuality. It seems like a good idea to share dancing beauty, because people like seeing it. Dancing is very easy to see. It’s fun and something that can spread. Dancing also makes people feel good rather quickly: many people understand its power.
Mixing these two ideas: mental health & dancing creates an incredible opportunity zone for mental health advocacy, and calling it “dork dancing” makes it even better. The dork name helps tremendously, changing dance from something that many find simply impossible to something that is suddenly relatable & accessible.
Yes, even for people who “can’t dance,” they can certainly at least “dork dance.” Dork dancing gives permission to people to let down their guards some; it creates an atmosphere of self-acceptance.
Stepping into that acceptance puts mental health into a new perspective. Its strength, not weakness.
Adding play to hardship lightens the burden. That’s what we are trying to do within mental health: lighten the load. Life doesn’t need to be as difficult as we experience it. We can. Evolve from pain to transformation. We can. Step out of fear and into love. We can. Redesign wounds into stamps of strength.
Mental health challenges the mind. How is that brain doing? What thoughts are going through there and how do those thoughts influence your reality? How do those lens alter your life experience? It’s something we are all working on, learning to be kinder to ourselves and others.
When the mind delivers unhelpful thoughts, it’s sometimes helpful to release that stuck-ness. Rather than thinking your way out of it, try dancing your way out of it. Lead with your feet and your mind might follow. Dork Dancing is a new class of dance that allows you to move however you want, freely, without concern. If you look like a Dork, that’s something good. We love that and we think you might too.
It’s helpful to get out of your head and into your heart. We’re all connected. We aspire to start treating each other like that.
Dancing and mental health advocacy go together, and the idea behind dork dancing makes that marriage of ideas much easier to communicate. By #dorkdancing, you are making a stand for mental health. You are helping not only yourself but others too: first with your steps and later with your story.
Those steps matter. Your story matters. You matter because you’re human and that’s enough. We desperately need these reminders from each other, rooted in action.