30 Days of Dancing in the Kitchen
BY LEENA LEMOS
Photo Courtesy | Leena Lemos
As a young girl, I always loved to dance.
Perhaps it was the mad beats of “Barney’s Greatest Hits” or the way my dad’s ever-evolving stereo system’s subwoofer pulsed through my entire being. For much of my childhood, I danced to the beat of my own drum and made sure that everyone was watching.
I remember vacationing in Cape Cod, dancing in the shallow end of an empty pool. I closed my eyes and let my body transport me into my own dimension, embodying movement I had soaked in from my growing awareness of the world; An infusion of Michelle Kwan’s ballerina-like triple axels and a few hip pops and shimmies I’d learned from some up-and-coming boy band called the Backstreet Boys.
Yet, somewhere along the way, dancing transitioned from joy and play to a mortifying social occurrence. As so many of us young women experience, the more I felt self-conscious about my maturing body, the more I became disconnected from dance. My body was no longer free and neither was I.
My childhood version of uninhibited movement? It was quickly replaced by formal classes where I couldn’t quite keep up and middle and high school dances, where I found myself desperately grasping the gymnasium wall anytime a song suggested I (awkwardly) move my hips for social acceptance in front of my peers.
As I struggled through my sophomore and junior years of high school due to cyber-bullying and a domestically abusive relationship, I became even more disconnected from my body after an undiagnosable back injury ended my promising soccer and mid-distance track career.
My body was stiff and unfamiliar and felt even more trapped by the weight of the world.
By the time I became an adult, my love of dance was only an act lived vicariously through others as flash mobs, movie musicals, and dance competitions television shows blossomed as pop culture staples. Countless zumba classes, late night parties, and wedding dance floors continued to solidify my belief that I couldn’t dance nor was I supposed to.
And just like that, my relationship with dance got locked away in the “things I feel shameful about” storage center within my heart.
Luckily, this year, that all changed. After four years on the self-healing path and a quest to reconnect with my soul, I finally unpacked and cleared enough emotional baggage to uncover dance, hiding in the back corner, blanketed in decades of dust.
At almost three years postpartum and suffering from depression and a plethora of mysterious infectious illnesses, my journey back to feeling safe and free in my body has been a long and strenuous road. So, I set the intention for 2022 to reconnect with physical movement and make dance fun again. What did that actually mean? Fun? I wasn’t exactly sure, but determined to find out.
As a toddler mom and entrepreneur with not enough time in the day, adding dance as another thing on my never-ending to-do list didn’t seem feasible. I needed a fluid and effortless way to fall back in love with dance. And then it dawned on me while I was cooking dinner and bouncing in between the fridge, counter and stove . . . the kitchen.
The kitchen was my safe haven. A space for nourishment and my over-growing collection of plant children. It was where I had spent the last three years learning to nurture my body through food – could it be the same for dance? “Yes!” I declared, and so I created a new house rule, the only movement allowed in the kitchen? Dance.
On the first day, it was very apparent that my body was stiff and terribly out of rhythm and I found myself deeply judgemental for every way it moved. In an age of TikTok dances and comparison culture, it’s hard to not think movement has to look a certain way and if that way isn’t post-worthy, then it’s useless.
By day two, I already wanted to give up. I felt embarrassed and frankly mortified. Even three years after birth, my hips are still figuring out their new place and I found myself overthinking every single move, wondering whether or not it was good enough.
On day three, something magical happened. As I watched my toddler fearlessly belt “What Else Can I Do?” from Encanto as she floated around the living room decorating every object with magical (invisible) flowers, I realized the key to dance had been in front of me all along.
If I wanted to reignite the childlike freedom of dance, then I needed to invite my free spirited child to dance. And the moment I did? Dance became the most powerful healing experience for us both.
The more we danced, the more I felt the wildness of my soul begin to shine through the cracks. The more we found joy in movement, the more I forgot.
I forgot about the hardships of raising a child while building a business, always struggling to find the delicate dance between motherhood and entrepreneurship.
I forgot about the two-year-long pandemic happening outside and how both of our bodies were ravaged by the virus just a month before.
I forgot about the loneliness that often kept me up at night, searching for sacred community in a state that didn’t feel like home.
As dancing in the kitchen became a potent daily ritual, I began to notice powerful shifts within, too.
Rediscovering a sense of freedom, it helped me unlearn and unbecome the social conditioning that taught me that dance was for someone else, that I should be ashamed of my body, and that disconnected me from the true power of what it meant to be to be a woman who felt liberated in her body for no one else but herself.
Dance allowed me to embody my divine feminine nature and in its gift of movement, forced me to look at the wounding around my sensuality and the ways pregnancy, postpartum and motherhood kept me from loving a body that I didn’t even recognize anymore.
It’s been two months since my kitchen became a dance-only zone and I never imagined how a seemingly simple declaration would affect my sense of self, deepen the relationship with my daughter, and rewild my soul. I have cultivated greater self-compassion, let go of an exponential amount of judgment and self-doubt, and fallen back in love with my inner child.
I feel more at home within my mind, body and soul, than I ever have before and that’s the thing about self-healing; When we are in devotion to ourselves, on a quest to fill our inner well with love for who we truly are, instead of who we think we should be, magic happens.
Oh, and the dancing? It happens everywhere now. Not just the kitchen. My body naturally moves to the rhythm of my soul, filling the lulls of my day with dance and joy. It’s become as much a part of me as my own two feet and I will dance to the grave or until they fall off.
As a leading millennial voice in spirituality, LEENA LEMOS is on a mission to help others remember the sacred light within. Leena is an intuitive healer and channel, podcast host, author of “Dear Luna Wilde…” and the Founder of House of Enlightenedhood, a global cooperative helping to make spirituality more accessible to all. Leena lives in Northern New Jersey with her husband, 3-year-old daughter Luna, and polka dotted pup. To connect with Leena or learn more about her work, visit houseofenlightenedhood.com and leenalemos.com or @IAmLeenaLemos on Instagram.