What is this approach about?
I danced my whole life, but I didn't know why.
At the Paris Opera Ballet School, I was surrounded by dancers who knew exactly what they wanted. They loved learning ballet, dedicating themselves to becoming danseurs étoiles, finding deep satisfaction in the discipline and artistry of classical dance.
I felt completely disconnected from their path.
Later, at the London Contemporary Dance School, it was the same story. My friends were focused on mastering technique, on joining companies, on building careers in dance. They found joy and purpose in this direction.
And I... I just felt lost.
I moved between different teachers, exploring different styles, searching for something I couldn't name. I became a yoga teacher, dove into contemporary dance, spent time in meditation retreats, explored breathwork practices, had transformative experiences with psychedelics that showed me expanded states of consciousness. With each new exploration - whether through movement, meditation, or altered states - there was always this sense that I was getting closer to something important, but I could never quite articulate what.
People would ask me, "What's your goal with dance? Where do you want this to take you?" And I would struggle to answer. Because the truth was, dance felt like a vital need for me - not a career choice, not an artistic ambition, not even a hobby. It was more like breathing. Essential. But I had no idea why.
For years, I carried this feeling that something profound was happening when I moved consciously, something that went far beyond technique or performance. There was a quality of aliveness and presence that emerged in conscious movement that I couldn't find anywhere else. A way of being responsive and creative that felt like coming home to myself.
But I couldn't put words to it.
What I Mean by Conscious Dance
Before going further, let me clarify what kind of dance I'm talking about, because it's probably different from what you imagine when you hear the word "dance." Rather than trying to define conscious dance abstractly, let me drop you into an actual moment of practice—it's easier to feel what this is than to explain it.
I'm standing in a dance studio, music playing, and I'm aware of all the creative potential available to me in this moment. I can sense multiple doorways opening: there's a subtle sensation in my coccyx that wants attention, there's the rhythm of the music calling to my ribs, there's an emotion stirring in my chest, there's an image arising of moving like liquid mercury.
I choose to follow that sensation in my tailbone. As I begin to move with it, letting my coccyx initiate small spiraling movements, something interesting happens. The spiral grows, traveling up my spine, taking my whole torso into undulating waves that move me through space like a serpent finding its way.
But then, while I'm dancing these spirals, another door opens. An emotion starts arising - not sadness exactly, more like a deep longing that wants to be expressed. Without thinking, I close my eyes and let this feeling move through me. My breathing becomes intense, almost like controlled hyperventilation, and each exhale creates mouvements. My arms reach and contract, my chest opens and closes, my whole body becomes a language for this unnamed emotion.
And then, as this emotional expression reaches its peak, something shifts again. My movements become sharp, mechanical, robotic - but not in a forced way. It's as if my nervous system wants to experience precision after all that fluidity. I'm moving like a machine that's perfectly calibrated, each gesture crisp and exact, completely somatic, completely present in the mechanical intelligence of my body.
This is what I mean by conscious dance: moving with full awareness and letting my body respond authentically to whatever is alive in the moment. No choreography, no trying to look good, no predetermined steps. Just improvising - responding moment by moment to what's emerging, whether that's a physical sensation, an emotion, an image, or a rhythm.
It's meeting the instant with my full presence and allowing my body to be a medium for whatever wants to be expressed.
The Recognition
It's only now, after years of exploration, that I can finally articulate what that vital need might have been about. I wasn't seeking to become a professional dancer or to master a particular technique. I was unconsciously developing what I now call the capacity to be a virtuoso of the present moment.
What do I mean by that?
Being fully present in each moment so I can improvise and create authentically, having access to all the doors, all the creative potential available to me in any situation. It's about developing the ability to meet whatever life presents with presence, creativity, and choice rather than just reacting from habit.
It's not just about the spiritual practice of being present and working on my quality of awareness - though that's certainly part of it. It's also about developing rich faculties that can support authentic expression: good physicality that allows for clear movement, imagination that can find new possibilities, emotional connection that brings truth to my responses, energetic awareness that keeps me alive and responsive.
It's about connecting, opening, and enriching all these capacities so they're available when I need them.
What I Was Really Learning
Without fully knowing it, I think I was discovering how to go through all the beliefs, patterns, and traumas that prevent us from accessing our full aliveness. Indeed, I believe we have far more creative capacity than we access in daily life. We have more emotional range, more physical potential, more imaginative power than we typically experience.
We are not lacking these qualities - we might be blocking them.
And movement seems to have a unique power to reveal these blocks and give us a direct way to work with them. When I'm moving consciously, I can't easily hide behind my usual mental strategies. I have to show up and be present with what's actually happening.
Dance seems to force me to confront whatever might be keeping me stuck - my self-consciousness, my habitual patterns, my protective mechanisms. But instead of fighting these limitations, conscious movement has taught me to dance through them rather than around them.
This is why I eventually called this approach "Go Through." Because to find myself in my full potential, I don't need to add more on the surface - I need to go through what is holding me back from accessing my creative connection.
The Vital Need
That vital need I felt but couldn't name for so many years - maybe you feel it too. Maybe you've sensed that there's more aliveness available to you than you're currently accessing. Maybe you've felt drawn to something you can't fully explain, some possibility of being more present and creative than your current circumstances allow.
If so, this book is my attempt to share what I've been exploring, so you can find your own path through. Not to become like me, but to become more fully yourself. To remove whatever layers might be covering up who you've always been.
Because in the end, that's what this work seems to be about for me: not becoming someone else, but learning to go through whatever has been blocking my natural aliveness. Using conscious movement as a laboratory for developing the capacity to meet life with my full creative and authentic presence.
The goal feels both simple and profound: to be fully present and available to life, to go through all my beliefs, blockages, and patterns that keep me stuck, and to discover what becomes possible when I stop hiding from my own aliveness.
Who Is This Book For?
Maybe you've never danced before but something keeps pulling you toward it. You watch people move freely and think "I want that" but don't know where to start. You're not interested in learning choreography or performing - you just sense there's something here for you, some way of being in your body that you've been missing.
Or maybe you're already dancing. You go to conscious dance classes, you know the 5 Rhythms or Ecstatic Dance, but lately you've noticed you're repeating yourself. The same movements come out week after week. You have moments of freedom, sure, but you can't seem to go deeper. There's a plateau you keep bumping up against, and you suspect there's more available but don't know how to access it.
Or perhaps you're a trained dancer who's technically skilled but feels blocked creatively. You know how to execute movements but struggle with true improvisation. When you try to dance freely, you either freeze up or cycle through the same patterns you've developed over years of training. You want to break through to something more authentic, more spontaneous, but your training sometimes feels like it's in the way rather than helping.
This book shares everything I've discovered about becoming what I call a virtuoso of the present moment in dance improvisation. Not virtuoso in the sense of technical perfection - I mean someone who can access their full creative range in any given moment, who can respond authentically to whatever arises rather than defaulting to familiar patterns.
What You'll Find Here
I'm not writing this as someone who has it all figured out. I'm still very much in the middle of this exploration. But I've spent the last several years obsessively investigating this question: how do we actually access authentic movement in improvisation? What's the mechanism? And more importantly, what blocks it and how do we work with those blocks?
So here's what's in the book:
The framework for how improvisation actually works - the retroactive loop between awareness, stimulus, doors/pathways, physicality, and flow. This isn't theoretical - it's describing the actual process that happens moment to moment when you're dancing.
How to deepen your awareness - because everything starts here. If you can't perceive what's available in each moment, you can't access it. This section draws on meditation practices, consciousness studies, and what I've learned from vipassana and various somatic teachers.
Maps of different pathways and doors - the 5 Rhythms, the five main doors (somatic, emotional, imaginary, ecstatic, shamanic), the five sheaths of awareness. These aren't rules but tools for recognizing what's available and how to work with it.
How to develop better physicality - including anatomy insights from teachers like Odile Rouquet, William Forsythe's improvisation technologies, floorwork basics, and practical explorations I've developed in my own practice. Because consciousness without physical capacity is limiting.
How to work with the blocks - this is maybe the most important part. Understanding the egotic structure (all those protective voices in your head), how trauma gets stored in the body and activated during movement, and practical approaches for going through blocks rather than around them. This draws heavily on Luc Nicon's TIPI work and research from people like Bessel van der Kolk.
How to actually practice - what a session looks like, how to set up your space, how to work with music, how to deal with setbacks and plateaus.
And maybe most importantly: why we do this - because if you're spending time dancing alone in a room, people will ask what the point is. I have some thoughts on this that go beyond "it feels good" or "it's therapeutic," though those are both true.
I'm sharing all of this because it's genuinely helped me, and because I keep meeting people who are searching for exactly these tools but can't find them in one place. You'll see references to many teachers throughout - I'm standing on the shoulders of people who've been doing this work far longer than I have.
The approach here combines consciousness practices with technical development, healing work with artistic skill, spiritual exploration with concrete physicality. I'm trying to bridge what I see as a false divide between "hippie conscious dance" and "serious technical dance." Both matter. Both inform each other.
If you're curious about becoming more available to whatever wants to move through you in each moment - more creative, more authentic, more alive - then maybe what's here will be useful to you. If not, that's fine too. This is just what I've discovered so far.
Let's begin.