How Dancing Erotically (and Alone) Reconnected Me to Myself
For weeks, rage had been coursing through my body. I’d wake up in the night hot and swollen, frustrated and suffocated. During the day, my mind kept wandering in meetings. At times, it felt as though I wasn’t attached to the physical parts of me.
I couldn’t pinpoint the exact reason. Maybe it was the cacophony of life for women in their forties: perimenopause, work deadlines, home pressures, swells of grief. I ached for some kind of primal release—anything to help me break free and return to my body.
It was this yearning that screamed for me to reach out to Caitlin Rose Marvaso.
Marvaso is a somatic therapist. She combines psychotherapy with embodied movement and explores how our histories impact our connection to our bodies. She listens in a traditional talk therapy way but focuses more on guiding physical self-expression, anchoring her practice in music and sensual dance.
It felt risky to reach out to her. As Marvaso greeted me at her light-drenched Oakland studio, she held out her arms like a T until I walked into them. I stood there, in her embrace for a second, overwhelmed by the intuition that I was right where I was meant to be.
Connecting to My Body Through Dance
At first, Marvaso and I sat and talked. I told her how I had been feeling disconnected from myself and yearned to be grounded in my body. I couldn’t break out of this disassociated haze I had been in for weeks. There were even moments, I admitted, where I felt as if I were wearing a toddler’s clothes.
“I have a song for you,” she said after about twenty minutes of listening. “Will you join me?”
I followed her onto the studio floor; sunlight jutted through the windows. My breath quickened. Dancing has always been cathartic for me. Too often, though, when I dance with others, I get lost in the details, feeling sheepish and worrying about how I look. At home, I would dance by myself (usually to Robyn!), my hair slicing the air. But I had even lost the desire to do that.
The song Marvaso put on was moody and fierce. She and I mirrored each other. She led the way, gently twisting and bending, and I followed.
“You hold a lot in your hips,” she told me. I didn’t understand at first, but then she continued to move, her own hips flirting like butterflies, and I understood what she meant. I felt a tension down there. She told me to close my eyes, to touch myself, to listen to where my body wanted to go.
Song followed song. One bright and springy, the next dark and thick. I moved. I breathed. I made noise. I pushed my palms down my thighs. I let go. It all felt like a mix of coolness and heat. Like the inside of my body was a tie-dye tapestry of emotion. I was safe, turned on toward myself, and—surprisingly—loose. After the last song, Marvaso lowered the volume and invited me to get still on the mat. I touched my wet face and tasted a saltiness in my mouth.
Then I exhaled what felt like the longest breath I had ever released from my body.
The Profound Power of Movement
We need to move our bodies. Not performatively, but wildly and solely for ourselves, to reconnect and release.
Our nervous systems are beyond taxed. Headlines, cell phones, deadlines, expectations. This cacophony depletes the messaging system of the brain and spinal cord, causing us to be in a loop of tension and anxiety, spiking our cortisol, and pulling us away from our bodies. And for those of us women in midlife, our fluctuating hormones and added life stressors can compound, causing us to feel even more disconnected (and, in my case, rageful). An essential practice to counter this stress is to move in ways that feel good.
“Movement is very regulatory, and it’s how our brains evolved,” Nahid de Belgeonne, a somatic movement therapist, told me. “When our ancestors, who were hunter-gatherers, were being chased, they would have run away from something, and that dissipated the cortisol. Then they would get back to their community and rest.”
Known as the Nervous System Whisperer, de Belgeonne’s work is accessible and immediate. Through her book, Soothe, she teaches us to listen to our body’s bio-intelligence and to know, deep within us, that we can choose how to respond to stress, stagnancy, and emotional trauma. We can slow down, tap into our breath, and move.
The beauty in what I have learned from both de Belgeonne and Marvaso is this: Our movements needn’t be grand, rhythmic, or choreographed. We can do what our bodies are capable of. That can mean gently shifting our hips, taking a slow walk, dancing in any form our bodies can manage, or simply reaching our arms to the sky.
Shortly after our first session, I returned to Marvaso’s studio to move with her again. She told me that dance, in any form, is a way for women to tap into their divine feminine and unlock stored emotions.
“Our pelvis is like a bowl that is always collecting emotion; it’s collecting years of trauma, it’s collecting offenses, and this can make us stiff,” she told me. “It’s up to us to move our body to release all that and to tap into our desire and femininity.”
What I Learned About Myself Through Dance
My time with Marvaso brought me back to my body. I started dancing with myself again, this time really letting it rip. I’ll shut the door if my husband is home. I’ll put on a song that fits what I want to feel or release. I’ll shift my bones and muscles. I’ll touch myself and move my hips in ways that feel radical. Other times, I’ll just gently sway to the music, feeling the ground beneath me. Slowly and steadily, the rage finds its way through me and out.
This has been the most immediate practice for getting back to myself—a practice I want every woman to consider. If you are stuck or scared, overwhelmed or rageful, tired or stagnant, find a few minutes to be alone. Put on a song. Move like no one is watching. Because no one is.
Doing just that is showing courage for yourself, Marvaso told me. Too often, we convince ourselves we’re not worthy or sexy enough to dance and feel erotic. We feel we’re too old, clumsy, big, small, uncoordinated... the list goes on.
“But remember, all of that chatter is coming from the mind, and we do not move or dance from that place,” she continued. “That is why dance can be so addictive. You feel the shift. You feel it cascading down into your body. And your body is saying to you, ‘Yes. I need this. Please, please, please be here with me.’”
Sometimes, trying to make sense of why we feel the way we do can be a form of mania. We may never know the reasoning. Or the reasoning may be too much to hold at that moment. In these instances, we can release the words and let our primal wildness speak.
In Women Who Run with the Wolves, Jungian psychoanalyst and author Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes that every woman contains a wild essence that needs to be expressed. “These words, wild and woman, cause women to remember who they are and what they are about,” she writes. “They create a metaphor to describe the force which funds all females. They personify a force that women cannot live without.”
I guzzle these sentences. Estés shows us that every one of us is unique, beyond the measure of any all-encompassing definition. We are lush. We are whole.
We are wild.
Adapted and excerpted from BEING 40: The Decade of Letting Go—and Embracing Who We Are by Stacey Lindsay. Copyright © 2026 by Stacey Lindsay. Reprinted with Permission from The Open Field. All rights reserved.