What's going through my head right now #20

Dancing

I certainly haven't suffered from a lack of exercise in recent weeks and months. Carrying boxes, up stairs, down stairs, lugging furniture from here to there, clearing out, breaking things down, tearing them apart, throwing them, pushing them, dropping them, and getting rid of them. On some days, my workload was probably two, if not three times that of my CrossFit program. So I can't complain about a lack of fitness. Especially when the elevator at my new place has been out of order for over a week and I have to conquer the 81 stairs of the five floors on foot.

But it has nothing to do with dancing. That sensual, complex, and extremely personal interaction with your own body. That immersion in space, time, and spheres, and diving into another world that is incomprehensible or even intangible for many.

So when, after weeks of dance abstinence, I stand in a studio again, prepare for a lesson, tune my instrument, and finally dive into the flow, it's like I'm floating. My pulse, my breathing, the flow of my thoughts connect, allowing me to calm down. There is a clarity and inner peace that I have hardly felt in recent weeks and months. Instead, fatigue set in, bordering on exhaustion. Mental fog. Lack of creativity and no desire for anything new, for artistic images and statements.

So the more I dance again, the more intense it feels. Rediscovering language

It's like relearning your mother tongue after a long period of silence (or like the typical saying: once you've ridden a bike, you can always do it). The body remembers movements that I have learned through thousands of repetitions, a grammar of space and time that lies deeper than any vocabulary. While hauling boxes degraded my body to a silent beast of burden, in dance it becomes once again a means of expressing an inner truth that cannot be formulated in any other way.

The back pain that had set in after days of heaving and lifting dissolves in the first few minutes of movement. Not through the pure mechanics of stretching or extending, but through something more fundamental: the muscles remember that they are more than functional levers. They are part of a complex system of sensation, expression, and communication with oneself.

Returning home

What happens in these first moments in the studio is nothing less than a homecoming. Not to a geographical home—I have just left that—but to the most original home of all: my own body. After weeks of alienation, during which it was merely a means to an end, a vehicle for transporting boxes and furniture, I am returning to a relationship with it that is characterized by respect and dialogue.

The mirror on the studio wall not only shows me my outer form, but also becomes a portal to self-encounter. I don't see myself as the one climbing stairs or carrying loads, but as someone who exists in space, who creates space and is created by it. The 81 steps I conquer every day become a mechanical act of overcoming. The movement in dance, on the other hand, is an act of connection—with the floor, with gravity, with the air around me.

The ritual of healing

Tuning the instrument—this conscious moment of preparation—becomes a ritual of return. Every stretch, every warm-up is an offer of peace to a body that I have overworked and ignored for weeks. It is an apology for the harshness of everyday life, a promise to listen again.

And the body responds. The tension is released not only physically, but also like blockages in the flow of a conversation that was interrupted for too long. The pain gives way to a presence that I had almost forgotten. Here, in movement, I am completely present—not fragmented between the demands of moving, to-do lists, and the practical constraints of life.

The price of abstinence

It was only abstinence that showed me how fundamental this dialogue with my body is. Without it, not only does my physical condition change, but my entire way of being in the world. The lack of creativity, the mental fog – these are the direct consequences of interrupted communication with myself. It's as if I had simply broken off the most important conversation of my life in the middle.

Dancing is not a luxury, not a hobby, not one activity among many. It is the way I speak to myself, how I understand myself, how I find my way home to myself. It is the language in which my body tells me who I am – beyond all the roles and tasks that life assigns me.

When I dance again, I'm not just returning to a studio. I'm returning to my own life.

Jochen, cordially