How to Practice This Approach
Before we dive into the practice itself, a quick reminder: I created some tools to support you as you start exploring this approach. You can access them at bookaccess.gothrough.org - you'll find 10 guided morning practices (audio), 5 full-length conscious dance mixes, and access to the private channel where I share ongoing practices and prompts.
Now that we've explored the theory behind becoming a virtuoso of the present moment through conscious movement, let's get practical. How do you actually develop this capacity? How do you build a sustainable practice that transforms from being something you do occasionally into becoming who you are?
I've discovered through my own practice and working with others that there are three main types of sessions that, when combined, create a comprehensive practice.
The Three Session Types
- The Daily Nuggets - 10-20 minutes every day
- The Weekly Depths - 40-80 minutes once or twice a week
- The Intensives - 2-5 hours for deep exploration
Let me walk you through each one, starting with the most transformative and working down to the most accessible.
The Intensives: Deep Voyage Sessions (2-5 Hours)
These are your deep-dive experiences - the sessions where you have enough time to really traverse the full spectrum of consciousness and let profound transformation happen. Think of them as your monthly or bi-monthly journeys into the deeper territories of yourself.
The Format
An intensive follows what conscious dance calls a wave structure - a musical journey that takes you through all five elements in a specific sequence designed to support the natural arc of consciousness expansion.
The Elemental Wave: Earth → Water → Fire → Air → Ether
This sequence follows a natural rhythm that supports both nervous system regulation and consciousness expansion. You start grounded, move into flow, build creative fire, expand into space, and dissolve into pure awareness.
But why this specific sequence? The five rhythms wave structure is brilliant because it mirrors the natural cycles of energy in both individual organisms and cosmic systems.
Think about your own daily rhythm: you wake up slowly, feeling heavy and earthy. As you become more awake, you start to flow and move more fluidly. Your energy builds throughout the day, reaching peaks of intensity and creativity. Later, you become more expansive and mental, processing the day's experiences. Finally, you return to stillness and space before sleep.
The wave structure allows you to safely access the full spectrum of human consciousness and energy states:
- Starting with Earth ensures you're grounded and embodied before accessing more intense or ethereal states
- Moving through Water creates fluidity and emotional availability
- Fire builds to a sustainable peak rather than jumping into intensity without preparation
- Air provides space and integration after the fire intensity
- Ether completes the cycle by returning to source awareness
The Music Wave
Each element has its own musical qualities that support different types of movement and awareness:
Earth (20-30 minutes): Heavy, slow, grounding music. Think deep bass, minimal beats, ambient drones. This music helps you drop out of your head and into your body, feeling the weight of your bones, the pull of gravity.
Water (15-25 minutes): Flowing, undulating music that moves in circles and waves. This could be gentle electronica, world music with fluid rhythms, anything that invites continuous, seamless movement from one gesture to the next.
Fire (15-25 minutes): High-intensity, often fast-paced music with complex rhythms. This is where things get cooking - tribal drums, electronic beats, anything that ignites your creative and destructive energies.
Air (15-20 minutes): Expansive, uplifting music that feels spacious and light. Often faster than earth but less intense than fire, creating a sense of movement through open space.
Ether (10-15 minutes): Ambient, spacious music that invites stillness and transcendence. Think ambient soundscapes, gentle drones, music that feels like floating in infinite space.
The Guidelines
No matter how long your session or what type of exploration you're doing, these guidelines create the container for safe, deep exploration. I'm borrowing these from Brian Bregman, the creator of Dance Awake in South Africa, who developed this beautiful framework for conscious movement practice.
Stay Present (Awake and Aware)
Keep your attention focused on what's happening right now - the sensations in your body, your breath, the sounds around you. When your mind wanders into the past, future, or fantasy, gently bring it back to the body and breath. You're cultivating the witness awareness - the part of you that can observe thoughts, emotions, and sensations without being caught in their drama.
This isn't about stopping thoughts, but about changing your relationship to them. When you notice you're thinking, celebrate that moment of awareness! That's exactly what we're practicing.
Some practical ways to anchor in presence:
- Feel your feet on the ground as you move
- Notice the sensation of air on your skin
- Track your breath without trying to change it
- Sense the space around your body
- Listen to all the sounds simultaneously rather than focusing on one
Keep Moving
No matter what arises - whether it's self-consciousness, boredom, intense emotion, or physical discomfort - find some way to stay in movement. Even if it's just the tiniest wiggle of a finger, keep your body expressing whatever is alive. Every experience has a dance. Every thought, emotion, or sensation can be physicalized. Movement is the practice.
The magic happens when you realize that everything can be danced. Boredom has a particular quality of movement. Confusion moves differently than clarity. Joy has its rhythm, and so does grief. When you're willing to let everything move, you discover that emotions are not solid states but flowing energies that naturally want to transform.
Non-verbal Space
Let your body do the talking. Instead of using words, allow your movements to express whatever needs to be communicated. Words often take us out of the body and into the mind. When we're explaining, analyzing, or commenting on our experience, we're not fully in it.
Respect Others
Allow others to have their own experience. Stay aware of your own dance and its impact on others. Connections will happen naturally when they're meant to. When someone wants to leave a partnership or group dance, let them go. Serve the space by being authentic rather than performing.
The goal is to create a space where everyone feels safe to be vulnerable, authentic, and fully expressive without fear of judgment, unwanted advances, or having their process interrupted.
Eyes Closed or Open
Use your eyes consciously. Closing them can help redirect energy usually spent on visual processing toward internal somatic awareness. Opening them connects you to the environment and other dancers. Play with both states.
Experiment with:
- Dancing an entire song with eyes closed
- Opening your eyes only when you feel drawn to connect
- Soft-focused vision that takes in the whole space
- Looking up, down, and around to change your energy
- Using peripheral vision while moving
How to End Every Session
This is crucial: Always end by lying down for 7 minutes to integrate what just happened and connect with your etheric and subtle body.
After the music stops, find a comfortable position lying down. Close your eyes and simply witness what's moving through your system. Don't try to make sense of it or analyze it - just observe the sensations, emotions, images, or insights that arise. This integration time is when the real transformation often happens.
During this integration, you might experience:
- Waves of sensation moving through your body
- Emotional releases or shifts in mood
- Visual imagery or symbolic content
- Insights about your life or relationships
- A sense of spaciousness or peace
- Physical sensations like tingling or warmth
The intensive sessions are where the most profound breakthroughs happen. Do these at least once a month if possible.
Equanimity: The Art of Dancing with Everything
Before we continue with the other practice types, I want to introduce a concept that's essential for navigating the intensities that arise in deep practice: equanimity.
Equanimity is the ability to hold expanded awareness without being thrown off balance by whatever experiences arise. It's the capacity to remain open, receptive, and present whether you're feeling ecstatic bliss or profound grief. In Buddhism, equanimity is considered one of the four sublime attitudes.
Here's what equanimity is NOT: It's not detachment, numbness, or indifference. Those are actually forms of shutting down. True equanimity is the opposite - it's remaining completely open while staying centered in your own stability.
Think of equanimity like being the sky. Clouds move through the sky - sometimes storm clouds, sometimes beautiful white puffy clouds, sometimes no clouds at all. But the sky itself is unperturbed by what moves through it. It simply provides the space for all weather to occur.
Cultivating Equanimity in Practice
Start with small challenges: If you have a strong preference against a particular type of music, use that as training ground. Instead of thinking "I hate this song," ask "How can I dance with this?" Let your resistance become part of the dance.
Welcome difficulty: When something uncomfortable arises - physical pain, emotional intensity, mental confusion - see if you can get curious about it rather than immediately trying to make it go away.
Use the breath: When you notice yourself contracting around an experience, return to your breath. Let your exhale be a release, your inhale an opening to what's present.
Remember impermanence: Everything that arises will pass. The most intense emotion will shift if you stay present with it. The most wonderful feeling will also change. This isn't tragic - it's the nature of aliveness itself.
The Daily Nuggets: Micro-Practices for Every Day (10-20 Minutes)
The daily practice isn't about doing a lot. It's about doing a little with complete presence and consistency. These short sessions are designed to maintain what you discover in the longer practices and slowly, gradually shift your baseline state of consciousness.
The Four Core Objectives
Every daily session has the same four goals:
- Feel gravity flowing through your skeleton and connect with yourself so energy flows freely
- Maintain an unlocked, fluid spine
- Ensure all the "doors" in your body are unlocked so energy can flow all the way to the ground, ensuring engaged presence
- Seek a state of calm through adequate meditation, achieving qualitative presence
Yes, all of this in just 10-20 minutes! It's possible because you're not trying to achieve these states through force - you're simply creating the conditions for them to emerge naturally.
How to Structure Your Daily Practice
5 minutes in silence: Move with your breath, feel the elements in your body, sense your physical form. Every day, give yourself one constraint or use one body part as protagonist. Maybe today your spine leads everything. Maybe tomorrow it's your hands. Maybe you explore moving as if you're underwater. This keeps the practice fresh.
5-15 minutes with music: Choose 1-3 songs that match your mood and energy level today. The goal is simple: enter one of the doors we've explored and see how quickly you can access flow.
Always end on the earth: Spend the last minute or two feeling your connection to the ground and identifying something you want to feel gratitude for today.
The Secret Weapon: Breath Awareness
The key to making all of this happen in such a short time is working with your breath as the primary tool. Your breath is always available, it's already happening, and it's directly connected to your nervous system and state of consciousness.
Start every daily practice by simply noticing how you're breathing right now. Don't change it - just observe. Then begin to move with your breath rather than despite it. Let your inhale lift something, let your exhale release something.
Daily Practice Variations
The Elemental Check-In (10 minutes): Spend 2 minutes with each element, asking: "How is Earth in my body today? How is Water flowing? Where is my Fire? How spacious is my Air? What quality of Ether is available?"
The Door Practice (15 minutes): Choose one door to explore each day. Monday might be somatic door day. Tuesday could be emotional door day. This creates a weekly cycle that ensures you stay connected to all aspects of yourself.
The Constraint Practice (10 minutes): Give yourself a simple physical constraint and see how creatively you can work within it. Today, only your arms can initiate movement. Tomorrow, stay as close to the floor as possible.
The daily nuggets are what create the real transformation over time. They're like tending a garden - each individual session might not look like much, but over weeks and months, they completely change the landscape of your inner world.
The Weekly Depths: Guided Explorations (40-80 Minutes)
These are your medium-length sessions - long enough to go somewhere significant, but not so long that they require a whole day's commitment. Think of them as your weekly tune-up sessions.
The Format
Opening (5-10 minutes): Use focused attention to widen awareness. This might be a moving meditation where you systematically scan through your body, or a breathing practice that helps you drop out of your daily concerns and into present-moment awareness.
Guided Exploration (20-40 minutes): Work with a specific constraint, guideline, or prompt that guides you toward a particular type of exploration. This could be:
- Exploring one of the five doors (somatic, emotional, imaginative, ecstatic, shamanic)
- Working with a specific physical constraint (staying close to the floor, moving only your spine, dancing with your eyes closed)
- Following a themed exploration (dancing your relationship to power, exploring your inner child, working with a specific emotion)
Free Flow (15-30 minutes): Let go of the prompt when you feel you can flow by yourself and continue your practice from whatever authentic impulse is arising.
Integration (7 minutes): Always end by lying down for 7 minutes to integrate the practice and connect with your etheric and subtle body.
Dancing with People: The Same Process, Multiplied
Everything we've explored about individual practice applies when dancing with others, but with an additional layer of beauty and complexity. From my understanding, it's the same retroactive loop we mapped out earlier, except now you have two or more dancers in the flow together.
The Core Insight
You can go through any of the doors with two or more people if you're both willing to meet in vulnerability. Two people can explore the emotional door together, moving through grief or joy as a shared experience. Multiple people can enter the imaginative door together, perhaps all becoming animals in the same fantasy ecosystem.
The more your awareness is expanded rather than contracted, the less you're identified with your egotic structure, and the more it becomes the same consciousness dancing through multiple bodies.
Protocol for Connection
In group settings where people don't know each other well, having a clear protocol for initiating partner dances creates safety and prevents misunderstandings:
The Invitation Process:
- Approach from the front: Always approach someone from where they can see you coming
- Make eye contact: If the person's eyes are closed or they won't meet your gaze, this is a "no"
- Extend the invitation: If eye contact is established, extend your hand in a clear invitation gesture
- Read the response: If they mirror your gesture by extending their hand back, that's a "yes." Any other response is a polite "no thanks"
- Honor the dance: Either person can end the connection at any time by simply moving away or giving a gentle wave goodbye
Witnessing Dance
One of the most powerful partner practices is witness dance, where one person moves while the other holds them in loving awareness.
The Witness Role: Sit comfortably and hold the dancer with open, non-judgmental attention. Your job is simply to see them - not to rescue, fix, or change anything.
The Dancer Role: Move with whatever is alive in you, knowing you're being held in loving awareness. Being witnessed often brings up different movement than dancing alone - sometimes more vulnerable, sometimes more expressive, sometimes more authentic.
Safety in Contact
If your dancing includes physical contact, there's one essential safety rule: never grab the limbs. Hands, feet, arms, and legs can be injured easily if someone pulls or twists them unexpectedly. Instead, make contact with the core of the body - the torso, back, shoulders.
Other contact guidelines:
- Start with minimal contact and let intimacy develop gradually
- Pay attention to your partner's responses and adjust accordingly
- Use the flat of your hand rather than fingertips for initial contact
- Avoid grabbing or holding on - let contact be fluid and consensual
- If someone pulls away, let them go immediately
Common Obstacles and How to Navigate Them
"I Don't Have Time"
This is the most common obstacle, and it's usually not really about time - it's about prioritization. The daily nugget practice can be done in 10 minutes. That's less time than most people spend checking social media before breakfast.
The question isn't whether you have time; it's whether you recognize this practice as important enough to prioritize. And here's the thing: the practice actually gives you time back. When you're more present and centered, you make better decisions, waste less energy on internal conflict, and move through your day with more efficiency and flow.
Start with just 5 minutes a day.
"I Feel Silly/Self-Conscious"
Self-consciousness is not a problem to be solved - it's an experience to be danced. When you feel silly, that's information. That's material. Let yourself move in a way that feels silly. Exaggerate it. Dance the silliness until it transforms into something else.
Try this: Next time you feel self-conscious, make it bigger. Really embody the awkward, uncertain, "I don't know what I'm doing" energy. Often when you fully embrace what you're resisting, it transforms naturally.
"Nothing Is Happening"
This usually means you're expecting dramatic experiences rather than noticing subtle shifts. Transformation often happens in increments so small that you don't notice them day by day, but over weeks and months, you realize everything has changed.
Pay attention to small shifts: Are you breathing differently after a session? Do you feel more in your body? Are you less reactive to stress? Do you feel more connected to yourself?
"I Keep Falling Back into Old Patterns"
This isn't a problem - it's the natural rhythm of growth. We spiral back to familiar territory, but each time we return, we have more awareness, more tools, more capacity to meet our patterns consciously.
The goal isn't to transcend your patterns permanently but to have a more creative, conscious relationship with them.
Setbacks and Plateaus
Expect them. They're not signs that the practice isn't working - they're integral parts of the process. The practice isn't linear. It's spiral.
Maintaining This in Daily Life: Becoming a Virtuoso of the Present
The real question isn't how to have profound experiences in your movement sessions - it's how to carry the awareness and presence you develop into your regular life.
The ultimate goal of this practice is to be present and available to life with all your doors accessible. Instead of being caught in reactive, inauthentic patterns most of the time, you want to have access to your full range of capacities - your creativity, your emotional intelligence, your intuitive wisdom, your ability to play and find joy in simple moments.
Micro-Moments of Practice
The bridge between formal practice and daily life can be thought of as "micro-moments" - tiny pockets of conscious movement throughout your day:
Transition practices: When you move from one room to another, do it consciously. Feel your feet on the ground, notice your posture, breathe intentionally.
Bathroom breaks: Use these natural pauses to do 30 seconds of spinal movement or breathwork.
Waiting periods: Instead of immediately reaching for your phone, spend a minute feeling your body, noticing your breath, or doing subtle movement.
Before sleep: Rather than passing out unconsciously, take 2-3 minutes to scan through your body and release the day.
Emotional Micro-Processing
When difficult emotions arise during the day, you can use micro-versions of the movement practices:
- Feel where the emotion lives in your body
- Let it express through small movements (even if you're in a meeting, you can breathe with it or subtly shift your posture)
- Remember that emotions are energy in motion - they want to flow, not get stuck
- Use your breath to help the emotion move through rather than getting trapped
Bringing Simplicity, Creativity, and Joy
As you develop this practice, you'll notice that you naturally bring more simplicity, creativity, and joy to everyday situations:
Simplicity: Instead of overcomplicating things, you trust what's most direct and authentic. You say what needs to be said. You do what actually needs to be done.
Creativity: You approach problems with curiosity rather than fear. You're willing to try new approaches. You see possibilities where others see only obstacles.
Joy: You find delight in ordinary moments. You're not waiting for perfect circumstances to be happy. You can access joy as a choice rather than just a response to external events.
The Long Game
It's not about perfect consistency. It's about returning. You'll have periods where you practice every day, and periods where you barely practice at all. Both are part of the rhythm.
What matters is that you keep coming back. That you remember this approach exists when you need it. That you have tools available when life asks more of you than your usual coping strategies can handle.
The practices gradually become so integrated into who you are that you don't think of them as separate from your life. You become someone who naturally moves through challenges with more grace, someone who has access to their full range of capacities in any situation, someone who can meet life with presence rather than just reacting from habit.
This is what I mean by becoming a virtuoso of the present moment. Not someone who has transcended the human condition, but someone who can dance with whatever the human condition offers - with skill, with awareness, with authenticity, and ultimately, with love.