Activate Your Fullest Potential Through Movement: Awakening Through the Chakras
Would you like to know how to align with your fullest potential? Do you want to feel a sense of freedom in every cell of your body? Would you like to have the flexibility and control to access whatever skills you need in any moment?
Me too! Actually those are the gifts that I have tapped into through my journey with movement and spirituality.
Starting before the age of five my parents put me in gymnastics programs. I liked it more than anything else and used to practice it in my backyard and create swingset circuses for the neighbors. Since the dance-like moves in the floor routines were my favorite, as a teen I completely switched to dance.
I was in my first dance company in high school and got to choreograph for a couple of our school musicals. I majored in dance in college (alongside of Mechanical Engineering) and started teaching kids dance classes. Later I taught adult fitness dance classes and even had my own dance company briefly.
Everywhere I traveled, I danced. In Mexico I met a man who thought we could win a salsa competition even though I had never danced salsa before. He started training me one-on-one. Even though the competition was canceled, he introduced me to my new love affair; not him, to salsa. ;) Two weeks into my trip in India I found myself performing as the entertainment for the nationally televised Miss South India pageant in front of an audience of more than a thousand people. It was even funnier when I saw myself doing that performance on TV later in that trip. I wanted to travel the world and learn all of the dances until I brought them to me in a program I created at the YMCA where I was the Fitness Director.
Since high school I have been in an out of dance companies around the world. They would all seem fun at first, and then I would get bored. What I realized was that none of them were touching the depth of what I wanted to feel inside myself and offer to audiences.
When I moved into a spiritual community in 2009, I gave up dance. They recommended giving up anything from your past life so you could get really clear on who you were and start afresh in your connection with God. Anyways it also was not practical to dance because I barely made any money and lived a thirty minute drive from town through windy hills on cliff edges. But I felt fulfilled without it because I had such a strong belief in my spiritual practices and was kept busy.
After a couple years my spiritual advisor started hinting about dance to me. She even gave me part of a dance costume as a gift. So I started taking ballet classes in town. Then in 2013 all of a sudden people started asking me to perform at various community events; Shakespeare Festival, Indian Banquet, concerts, fundraisers, weddings, and so on.
Next I was asked to start leading weekend retreats combining movement and spirituality. People enjoyed my performances and workshops so much that I was invited to perform and teach all over the U.S., in Europe, and in India. And I have not been bored with dance since!
Before creating anything I meditated on how the movements of the body relate to the spiritual concepts I was learning and how to feel that deeply inside. There are three main elements that I pulled from to contribute to how to tap into our fullest potential through movement: the science of yoga and meditation, my training in dance/movement therapy in college, and my experiences with energy healing.
Before mentioning yogic science, let’s look at the understandings in more mainstream science. Quantum physics states that our bodies are completely made of energy. Energy can be transmuted into different forms. When I mention chakras, or energy centers in the spine, you can think of them each as having their own qualities of energy.
I also like to think of this in terms of vibrational frequencies. When you look at a shirt and see the color blue it is because the pigmentation of that dye matches the frequencies of all other colors to absorb them and reflect the blue light back to you.
You can think of every thought, feeling, and action having its own vibrational wave, or movement of energy. Maybe you saw the movie What the Bleep Do We Know? where they showed the impact our words have on the crystalline form of water. If energy can be transformed and redirected, couldn’t we change our thoughts, feelings, and actions?
Now we can get into how yoga describes energy in the body. The first part of the body that forms as a fetus is the medulla oblongata. In yogic principles we call the medulla oblongata the mouth of God as if that is where God first enters the body to create our physical form. It is also known as the seat of ego, meaning when the soul gets identified with a body.
From there the spine develops downward. All of the chakras along the spine below the throat are related to the main elements of this physical realm; earth, water, fire, air, and ether. After that the chakras above the medulla oblongata develop, which we consider to be related to consciousness.
If you think about it logically, the root chakra at the bottom of the spine would be related to the earth element because it supports the rest of the spine above it. The second chakra is where the sexual organs are and where many of the fluids of our body pass through representing the element of water. Fire is needed to digest everything in our stomach where we have the third chakra. Also the seat of our will power where the alignment of our spine changes the direction our belly button points shifting if our will is really moving directly forward towards our goals. And we can continue up the chakras.
What we can also pay attention to is if the energy in the chakra is repeatedly moving in circles like a whirlpool, or moves up, down, or scattered in all directions. If the first chakra’s energy were trying to move downward you could imagine someone getting too rooted in the earth so that they are stubborn and inflexible in times of change. If our energy were only going up or out of the chakra, we may not be able to maintain a healthy body or understand our material needs in this world. If it were stuck in a whirlpool we would have no control to shift that energy as we need it. If the energy movement was scattered, our attempts to utilize that energy would be weak as the full force would not be aligned to move together.
Thus what we have is a system filled with all of our different behavioral possibilities. Each energy center has a range of how that energy manifests. Having control over that energy opens the doors to accessing what we need in any moment.
The theory behind dance/movement therapy is that if you change your movement, you change your behaviors. The entire construct of our body is the physical manifestation of our energy blueprint in any moment. As we reconstruct our body and movements, we can also reconstruct the non-visual elements of our being. What I do in my programs is simply guide people through those movement possibilities so we can see our potential and learn how to manage it.
The last piece which added another layer of depth to my movement was getting trained in energy healing. When one is performing energy healing the focus is on allowing the pure energy that already exists in this world to flow through our hands to the person we are working on to help them return to the purity within. There is a lot more to the science, but we can save that for another time.
Right after I started offering energy healing I was amazed people could feel sensations in their body where I was consciously directing energy. Even people who were at a distance without seeing what I was doing, described tingling, cooling, or heating in the body part I was working on. They were healing, pain was disappearing, bliss was entering, and they were feeling both energized and relaxed.
After performing a few sessions I started to notice white light coming out of my hands onto the person I was sending energy to. At first that only happened while I was offering energy healing. Then one day when I had a dance performance of five dances back to back in front of a large audience I started to see the light shine out of my hands. It is actually a little distracting because I never expect it and sometimes forget where my body ends. Then I started to see it coming out of my hands and feet in dance class!
You might think I am just imagining this and that could be true. However, it mostly just happens when doing energy healing and dancing, thus when I am connecting to energy through movement. Since that performance, I always have a number of people who approach me afterwards and tell me they felt a healing affect not just for themselves but for the entire room. (You can read their comments here.) I realized because of the intentions I set to my dancing, those movements could help heal people. If I can offer that to others, I figured my students could offer that to themselves through movement by conscious intention, visualizations, affirmations, and vibrationally uplifting music.
Utilizing the knowledge I have gained from my spiritual path, dance/movement therapy, and energy healing, I have put together a variety of programs enabling people to understand themselves more deeply, discover a greater potential that exists within them, learn how to overcome life’s challenges through shifting our movement, and transcend our health and healing challenges.
Most of the exercises involve free movement so we can authentically travel on our own individual journey. Some involve simple movement patterns so we can restructure our psychology and flow of energy.
What you can do right now is think of an area of life where you notice a repeating pattern in yourself or feel stuck. See if you can identify what way of holding your body or type of movement is associated with that mindset.
For example, if you find yourself not speaking up for what you want or believe in, are you almost tip toeing as you walk, keeping your arms close to your body, or scrunching down? If you want to express more then spend a few minutes a day walking with a firmer step or even practice stomping, spread your arms out wide to the side, and open your heart. Breathe deeply.
The next level to that exercise is to request all of your actions channel from the highest possibility. In yoga we consider, the point between the eyes the seat of our highest consciousness. Modern research reveals the pre-frontal lobe has more activity when intuition is activated. Now as you move imagine all of your energy moving up the center of your spine towards your spiritual eye. Keep your spine long and body uplifted. You can even visualize a light at the point between the eyebrows that you are trying to dance into. Just by doing that alone you will feel a surge of joy and peace.
What I realize now, and why I took you on a journey through my past dance history, was that I did feel pure joy dancing all that time. I was very excited, enlivened, and awakened to dance. I felt unbound-less. What I was also doing was seeking that same intention and response from those around me when I needed to remember it is only me who creates my reality. Enjoy and have fun!
If you would like to find out more about my movement programs, please visit www.avitalmiller.com/dance. I would love to share this gift with you.
A sampling of one of the visualizations and affirmations I use along with more guidance on how to move:
And a sampling of some of my dance performances!
