Hello, my friend!
I’ve been thinking about joy this week — about how moving your body can be the most radical thing you do. About how sometimes dancing is the only language that fits.
In today’s email:
* This week’s inspiration: Dance for joy and protest
* Latest blog post: Stuck Energy, Spring Body
* What I watched this week: A reel that stopped me in my tracks
This Week’s Inspiration: Dance for Joy and Protest
I was late to class, but I could hear the music booming from the third floor of an old building in Central Square, all the windows open — bodies: syncopated, flailing, and jumping. I raced up the stairs to join them. How could I not? Joy beckoned.
Sylver, the instructor, is 185 lbs of solid muscle packed into a 5’2" frame. Exuberant, sexy, gay — he commands a legion of women to gyrate and bump and throw our shoulders back. He says, "For all you nasty girls," and he gets on his knees and gyrates, commanding all of us to do the same, as we howl and laugh and smile at each other — even though, for the most part, we are strangers.
This class is pure joy. Round trip to Cambridge, it’s three hours, which sounds insane — but worth it. For days after, my body sways with a kinetic remembrance.
Dance as self-expression must be the oldest act in the world — making our inner landscape into outward expression is primal.
Dancing for joy is a lovely foil to so many things we carry. Maybe it’s also a small act of rebellion.
If a video is worth a thousand words, here’s a link to my class — and you can see Sylver in action: Froca Fitness
Latest Blog Post
Stuck Energy, Spring Body: The Ancient Science of Moving
If you’ve been feeling inexplicably irritable, restless, or tense lately — it might not be you. It might be the season. In Chinese medicine, spring’s upward-rising energy hits our internal blockages and creates what we call liver qi stagnation: tight shoulders, clenched jaw, emotional volatility, the works. The liver resonates with the wood element — think of a tree pushing upward through compacted earth. When that rising energy meets unprocessed anger or grief we’ve been carrying, things get uncomfortable.
One remedy? Movement. A 20-minute walk to regulate the nervous system. An intense sprint to clear the head. The ancient rhythms of tai chi and qi gong — 2025 research shows significant reductions in anxiety and depression. Your body was designed to move this stuck energy through. And sometimes, what surfaces when you do might surprise you — tears during a run, unexpected sadness in yoga.
What I Watched This Week
While doing my best to keep this newsletter as apolitical as possible, I had to include this — in the spirit of dance, self-expression, and in this case, protest. I was taken by this reel on Instagram: the outcries of girls through movement. Please let me know what you think.
Keep dancing, my friend. For joy, for protest, for it all.
Dr. Catherine