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We learn to move before we leave the bodies of our mothers. Tiny arms and legs wigging, stretching, kicking, rolling. Movement is our first language. Dancers know this. To be a dancer is to know movement as language. To regard the body as an instrument. To know movement as home.
I started dancing almost as soon as I learned to walk. Nearly all my spare minutes from age six to 18 were spent at class or rehearsals or summer conservatories far away from home. Then, like so many others, I made the decision to leave dance for college and a life outside of the mirrored walls of a studio.
The absence of dance was, in some ways, my first great loss. There were things that filled the space—running, skiing, sometimes riding a bike—but all the ways I found to keep moving and build new muscles and explore different repetitions somehow had the opposite effect, making me feel like I’d become a stranger in my body.
Yoga showed up in my life on a freezing winter evening in New York City. On a whim, I wandered into the Jivamukti studio just off Union Square and into Rima Rabbath’s class. I felt as though I’d walked through a portal from the lonely city where I’d been existing into a space drenched in the glow of candles and the soft tones of a harmonium.
Jivamukti classes were guided by music. That was familiar. So were the anatomical analogies, the corrections, sense of extension, and the predictability of set sequences from start to finish of class. The practice was also familiar in that it was demanding, sweaty, and completely elating. When the room would take on that humid quality of bodies in motion, Rabbath called it “holy water.”
Those classes became an anchor point. But it was more than that. Yoga returned me to my body.
Movement as Home
What does it mean to feel at home in a body?
I don’t mean the aesthetic body but rather the subtle qualities of movement and flow that are made possible by the body. Specifically, the way that a body can feel more or less your own, the way mine has felt since I developed a consistent yoga practice.
I recently started talking to other dancers-turned-yogis about their experience. Many pointed out that you can always spot a dancer in class. There’s a quality to their hand positions, the middle finger and hand connected after years of habit. Also, the flexibility, the fluidity from pose to pose, the pointed toes. There’s a focus and precision in how they move their bodies.
Though she wasn’t a dancer herself, Maty Ezraty, the late co-founder of YogaWorks studios, was known to have loved working with dancers because of the way they knew their bodies. “We’ve been trained to be aware of the minute details of our bodies in space, even where our pinky fingers are and how our head is tilted,” explained Jenn Chiarelli, who danced professionally for more than a decade and teaches yoga in Phoenix, Arizona. “[It’s] an instrument we’ve tuned since we were seven or eight years old.”
That sense of home doesn’t resonate for everyone. Shanna Honkomp, who teaches yoga at Souk Studio in New York City, told me that during all the years she danced, she felt that she was at war with her body. This is something many dancers reckon with—the sometimes dangerous demands of perfection and performance.
For all its beauty, dance can be an environment with a lot of scrutiny, and that much scrutiny on a body is eroding. I spent way too many years not loving my body for how it looked, despite what it was capable of. Yoga dissolves some of this self-criticism.
Many former dancers have similarly discovered a sense of liberation in yoga studios. Chiarelli told me that as a dancer, she’d never relied on the muscles in her arms in quite the same way as her legs. The upper body, she explained, must remain long, lithe, ethereal. Freedom for her was practicing arm balances in yoga without judgment.
Finding the Familiar
It’s the similarities between yoga and dance that initially draw dancers to the mat. There is the same kind of ascetic space, the same familiar poses in repetition, the same sense of community, the same comfort in following music. Dance happens in groups, a shared reason for showing up. So does yoga.
Class follows a sequence which serves as the foundation for eventual choreography. One yoga teacher I spoke to compared Ashtanga yoga, in which students move in unison through a set sequence with rhythmic breathing, to dancing with a corps de ballet. Each creates a sort of suspended unity.
The similarities extend to discipline, the return to the studio, the return to the mat. To study dance is to be completely committed to physical and mental discipline. Yoga requires a similar dedication.
There are hundreds of online yoga classes with titles like “Yoga for Dancers.” Former ballerina Viviana Monolo created a series on Masterclass that focuses on flexibility and hip-opening. Ballet with Isabella offers a variety of yoga classes focused on injury prevention and mind-body connection. YouTube is full of one-offs, including one from Yoga with Adriene and another from Move with Nicole.
In a Reddit thread about dancers who do yoga, many of the commenters speak of gravitating toward yoga for the flexibility or mind-body awareness. But also the very basic need to move. One dancer appreciates the way that yoga feels more directed than a typical workout. “Honestly I don’t really know how to just work out like most people do, since the ‘working out’ has always been dance.”
Both dance and yoga ask for articulation. They are taught and refined through cueing. Dance creates a learned language internalized and oriented toward this kind of cueing. Every teacher does this differently but the goal is to guide the body into poses safely and in a way that looks like it hovers above effort. The smallest correction can change the entire line of a body. Even at a muscular level, yoga and dance are both about lengthening, in contrast to other activities, such as running, that shorten muscles.
Dancers are also accustomed to being corrected. I’ve often turned my hips to the sky in Warrior 3, a habit left over from countless arabesques, only to be adjusted back to parallel. I’ve also fought the urge to turn Dancer Pose into an attitude.
Also, there is an insistence in both dance and yoga to be completely present, completely absorbed. “It’s impossible not to be present,” says Chiarelli.
A dance class begins and ends the same way each time; so does a yoga practice. Even the closure of total submission—Savasana in place of reverence.
For all of these reasons, yoga felt familiar, like a thread of continued conversation.
Daily Acts
I danced nearly every day for years. When I left it behind, I found lots of ways to experience endorphins, but nothing that achieved the flexibility and full-body strength that I’d known until I started practicing yoga. It’s this cumulative familiarity that created a sense of at-homeness for me in yoga. Something about the sensation of the self as fluid. The ability to move almost independently of thought.
Now I practice yoga nearly every day, in studios and most often in my living room. Sometimes I think of the two forms of movement as a physical approximation of prayer. Daily acts. A way to move that feels knowable. A place I can return to.
