Once a ballerina, now free expression!
ARTICLE by Helena Igel
My mom loves to tell the story...
…of how I stood at the glassdoor with my face pushed flat against the door and watched my sister dance in the studio. I was 3, my sister was 6, and I mirrored the movements they did with the tiny body I must have had. The teacher told my mom that I could start with the classes early …oh my, I remember how proud I was of having my own white tricot and was allowed to run through the space! It fills me up with joy just thinking about the studio and the freedom it gave to my enthusiastic soul to express full-body!
The years passed...
and I became good, real good, to the point that I had 5 classes a week: Ballet, Modern dance, and Jazz dance, and worked towards a career as stage dancer. They said my body was the ‘ballet type’ (thin & long legs), so I was advised to not take Hip Hop classes but continue the Ballet career. So I – without checking in with my heart really – followed the advice and took more ballet and pointe classes. The classes became stricter, the pressure more intense, my self-image tighter… I eventually forgot about the intrinsic, joyful spark that brought me into dancing. It felt like a cage had formed around me and in my head. And in my personal life, things were often challenging, I felt like I got smaller and more frozen, and my perfectionism just rose.
When I finished school I decided that there is more to life than what I was living.
I made the liberating decision to not study ballet, and (to the big surprise of the teacher) I soon let go and said goodbye to my dance shoes.
Years passed and I didn’t regret the decision, yet I craved expanding through dance and often I dreamt of being on stage and performing (with making weird steps because I didn’t attend the choreography practice classes 😀. Stage has never frightened me, rather it worked like an invitation to get the beast out of me. On stage, I felt like I was finally ‘seen’. Obviously a compensation for the experience of my everyday life where I usually felt like I was holding back a lot of myself.
Through a devastating heartbreak in my early 20s I found my way to meditation and yoga to learn to give myself more holding and self love. I carefully gained more awareness in my body and when I moved to Groningen, NL, I finally got to meet the Ecstatic Dance community. My first Ecstatic Dance has been a total eye-and-soul-opening experience. I was back!! I owned my body, I surrendered to movement, I was connecting to the wider field of expression… I just let myself express everything that moved through me. I finally felt seen again! Not so much by others around me, but by my own awareness totally being there to experience right here, right now!
And the blessings rained down...
I got into Tantra, to be like researchers in contact and letting ourselves appear more authentically. And I learned more deeply to express the inner world, my feelings of joy, of anger, of sensuality, fear… I am totally still on this spiritual (but oh so human) journey, it will unfold all my life I can feel. I am deeply grateful for the spaces that allow us to appear in our Truth, like Ecstatic Dance and Tantric spaces. They literally gave me a space to heal from the ideas of how I should move through life. And we can bring our allowance to express into everyday life, it doesn’t have to be on stage, on the mat, or on the dancefloor… We can choose now. I choose radical allowance: to move with and feel everything instead of freezing and finally mentalizing everything. I choose to keep on moving with anything that comes up. Yes I am open to greatness, yes I am also open to move through pain and freezing once more when it arrives. Let it be human, let it be colorful, let it be real! 🙂 …like this we naturally remember our wholeness.
Let your expression ripple out into the world!
This is my story about movement, but I believe that everyone knows the systems that we learned to be a certain way and repress other parts of ourselves. So, the dance classes function like an analogy of how we create a system around what we believe who we should be.
What is your story, what are you breaking free from? What do you want to express into the world?
My work
My creations, including these sessions, are anchored in the values of Truth, natural Transformation, Care & Support, and Empowerment. You are invited to come as you are!
Healing Breathwork – to let go of emotional tension and energetical blockages
Integrated Tantra – Conscious practices in contact!
Tantra course coming up in October: INTO THE DARK
1on1 Healing sessions: (combining all tools of Psychology, Tantra, Energywork, and Breathwork)
Warm hugs, Helena Igel
Welcome, Sister!
Let's dive deep 🙂
ANY QUESTIONS?
Let me know – I am looking forward to our contact!
