236. Growth and Healing Through Dancing with Jennifer Joy Jimenez

I believe we are always healing from something, and this episode is for you if you find yourself also on your journey to healing and personal growth.

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Jennifer Joy Jimenez has dedicated over two decades to empowering the well-being of individuals across the globe, especially with her world-renowned dance modality. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today is healing and growing with dancing. 

Jennifer’s profound impact on wellness extends far beyond the dance floor though. Her innovative programs have captured the attention of major media outlets, including Fox, NBC, South Magazine, and she has shared the stage with other thought leaders like Marianne Williamson, Wayne Dyer, and Deepak Chopra.

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Hello, hello, beautiful souls. Welcome, welcome. 

I believe we are always healing from something, and this episode is for you if you find yourself also on your journey to healing and personal growth. And for this special topic, I have my special guest, Jennifer Joy Jimenez. Jennifer has dedicated over two decades to empowering the well-being of individuals across the globe, especially with her world-renowned dance modality. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today is healing and growing with dancing. 

Jennifer’s profound impact on wellness extends far beyond the dance floor though. Her innovative programs have captured the attention of major media outlets, including Fox, NBC, South Magazine, and she has shared the stage with other thought leaders like Marianne Williamson, Wayne Dyer, and Deepak Chopra. Welcome to the show, Jennifer. 

Thank you, Lucy. It is such an honor to be here. I’m super grateful. Thanks for having me. 

You’re all about healing through dancing, right? Is dancing a form of therapy? 

There is dance therapy, actually. So dancing is a form of therapy, just like art therapy is a form of therapy. What I have done is really emerged the worlds of the science of health and wellbeing with transformational spiritual principles. So think personal development, right? Which is more of a forward movement type of work therapy. We’re working with the past coaching, transformational coaching. We’re working with a vision. We’re really being drawn by a vision into a greater expanded version of ourselves. And then my secret sauce is conscious dance. It’s been one of my greatest powerful tools for healing, personal development, selfdiscovery transformation. We can talk more about that, but that’s a little bit of the difference between the two. 

So how does dance help healing? 

Well, something that’s so important these days in our modern world is that scientists and doctors are talking about how sitting is the smoking. And the reason for that is number one, our lymph system is the system that reduces and eliminates toxicity in our body, right? And so many of us spend hours and hours sitting. So just in pure health and wellbeing science, the more we can get up and move our body in dancing is one of the easiest. You need no equipment, maybe just your favorite playlist, but you literally can stand up a few times a day, hit your favorite song and literally just dance down the hallway, dance around your desk, dance into the kitchen. And it gets the lymph moving and moving all the toxicity out of your body. Just for circulation benefits, it’s really powerful and healing. There’s also been a tremendous amount of studies that are showing that of the brain, our ability to really age well in the brain, that dance above and beyond many other types of exercise or movement increases mental acuity by 76%. 

This was a study done by the New England Journal of Medicine. It can absolutely support any Alzheimer’s or any mental health issues. There’s also been a tremendous amount of studies in universities around mental health. A dose of dance actually activates our happy hormones, dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins. So it’s a natural mood booster. Just a few minutes of dance, you feel a little more happy, you feel better. It just creates this beautiful sense of self. Now, those are all the scientific reasons. 

Emotionally as well. Now, emotionally, of course, is connected to our hormones, but on a spiritual level for me, my transcendence practice, which I’ve been, I created over 20 years ago, I’ve been using as a healing and spiritual modality for myself as a spiritual practice, as a health practice, as a mental health practice for myself. But it’s also something that I bring into my transformational coaching. 

So I’m a transformational coach that specializes in mind, body, spirit connection. And one of the tools that I use to help my clients who are primarily women, but I also work with men and women to connect to their bodies is conscious dance, mindful breathing, free form movement, working with the natural energies of our bodies. I believe we’re spiritual beings having a human experience. And so many people live completely cut off from their bodies. They kind of walk around like a talking head and their brain tells their body what to do, but what they’ve disconnected from is that the body has innate healing wisdom within it. The body’s number one job is to keep us alive. Our body’s number one job is to fight off any disease. We’re either working with the body to help the body be healthy and whole, or our lifestyle is working against our health and wellness in overall mind, body, spirit connection. 

So one of the things that I learned really early in this work is that so much of our health and wellbeing information is information coming at us, telling us that our body is something that needs it’s going wrong. And our body is something that needs to be fixed. And my message is actually your body is going right. Your body has innate healing wisdom. And if we can just invest some time, right, feeling, being disconnected from our devices, feeling, breathing, and connecting to the body, the body is giving off signals and messages for health and wellbeing. It’s either giving off a signal, Hey, you need to move your body more, or Hey, you’ve done enough work. Now it’s time to rest and recover, or I’m thirsty, right? Give me some water, or you know what? I really just need some nourishing, healthy food, but instead we’re going to, you know, low energy foods like sugar and things of that nature. So it’s about really connecting with the body and allowing the body’s innate wisdom and healing capacity to emerge, be listened to and responded to in a powerful way. 

Thank you for sharing. That’s so much goodness. And I love what you said about dancing through the hallway and dancing. I do that. I dance to another room, right? It’s these little, little things that adds up to big movements, right? But can dancing heal something even deeper like childhood trauma or other types of trauma?

Yeah. You know, one of the things that we have found in the transformational space, is that big T’s, major traumas, as well as little T’s really exist for almost the majority of the population. We’ve all had really challenging experiences in our life. And I’m a big believer in all sorts of therapeutic approaches. And if there’s been a really major trauma, particularly a trauma that involved the body, which I guess all traumas are because we’re walking around in the body, but like physically touching the body, right? So sexual abuse or accidents, injuries that were really traumatic, that trauma lives in our cellular memories. So just talking about it alone, what some people share is that that alone didn’t get to the root energetic transformation. My doorway to a deeper study of the mind body spirit connection actually came in my transition out of being a professional modern dancer.

So my first love dream was to be a dancer. I studied it all over the world, became a professional modern dancer. And then pretty early, actually in that career, I became pregnant with my daughter. So I’d been married for a few years and as life would have it, I get pregnant. I’m 25, only 25 when I get pregnant with her. And being the daughter of a thought leader, of course, all of her friends are handing me all these books on natural birth. And I’m very feeling the fittest I’ve ever felt in my life. And I’m understanding manifestation. And I’m like, I got this. I can have a natural birth. So I trained for this natural birth. Like I’m training to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. I’m visualizing every night. I’m reading my dream birth. I’ve got the whole plan. And I actually ended up with a 50, five, zero 50 hour labor that ended in an unwanted epidural. Although it was either epidural or end up with a C-section because I stalled in my labor. 

So after my birth, I’m thinking, okay, here I am the best shape of my life. Here I am doing everything that I’ve been told to do to all the exercises and the natural birth classes and the visualization and the vision. And so clearly there was something, there was a disconnect here. What was this disconnect? And that really launched me on this quest to discover what had happened for me. But I, it was also this doorway into what I do today, right? What I do today, which is people want to have this beautiful, amazing life. And often there’s a disconnect between the head and the heart or between the mind and the body. And what it was for me was in my dance days, I had a very abusive controlling and critical relationship with my body. I told my body when to eat, what to eat, when to move. I often overworked and under rested at that period of time. Well, if you want a natural birth, you actually need to come at your relationship with your body through the lens of love, trust, and a deep surrender to the body’s wisdom. And so on this quest, I found mentors, teachers, books, all sorts of materials that helped to teach me really what innately I knew deep down that there is this divine connection between the mind, the body, and the spirit. 

And so as I began to discover all of this, I began to find conscious dance and I found some conscious dance mentors at the time. And I began to dance. Now, how does this connect to healing trauma? Well, my birth was a very traumatic experience for certain aspects of it that created trauma in my body that I honestly didn’t even know until I started dancing. And in conscious dance, the difference between regular dance is it’s choreographed movement. There’s a right way and a wrong way to do the movement. In conscious dance or in transcend dance, you’re unlocking and unleashing this inner dancer from within this inner healer. I like to call it your wise inner being, or you also have this inner doctor within you that is healing you as long as you know how to connect to and trust this inner being. Right? So I start doing this conscious dance and in the dance practice, I could feel the pain, the grief, even the physical trauma that I had endured as part of this birth begin to heal, begin to shed, begin to let go. I started to talk to other conscious dance practitioners, as well as leaders. One of my good friends, I talked to her at the time, and she talked to me all about years and years of therapy to overcome her sexual abuse. And it wasn’t until she found conscious dance and started dancing that the deepest layers of healing occurred. And now 20 years later, now that I’ve created my own conscious dance modality, taking the best of everything I had learned from my mentors and leaders and bringing in layers of personal development and transformational principles into the conscious dance practice, I have found many, many clients heal traumas and deep wounds by means of these principles. It’s pretty amazing, pretty powerful. Oh, and by the way, the successful part of the birth story is that I went on to have two more children. My son, Joel, who’s now 20, I had him in two hours and my son, Joaquin, I had him all natural dream birth in 90 minutes. Now I wasn’t going for speed. I was just simply going for a harmonious, beautiful, natural birth. And using the principles I had learned along the way, I was able to do that. 

Beautiful story. Thank you for sharing. So what are some of the top health benefits of dancing you’ve seen with your clients? 

Yeah, I would say several things. The difference between transcend dance and other types of dance fitness or fitness classes in general is oftentimes if you’re feeling like you have a headache or an stomach or an injury or something like that, typically you’ll opt out and be like, I’m not going to do that class today. In transcendance, I actually invite clients to bring their ailments to class because we’re actually re-energizing the body. We’re releasing tension and stagnant energy, low vibration energy, and we’re connecting to this effervescent flow of energy that we all have access to. So by the end of class, they’re saying things like, I came with a headache. My headache is gone. I had a tight foot that is completely released. I was feeling a little low energy or not as my best self. Now I’m feeling rejuvenated and full of joy and aliveness. 

The other thing that I often hear, particularly from those that would consider themselves non-dancers, people that say they’re clumsy, they have two left feet, they’ve been told they can’t dance, or they’re super self-conscious. This modality unlocks that uninhibited, confident, free being without alcohol, without drugs, without having to be at a wedding. You know what I mean? All of a sudden they come alive and they feel seen, acknowledged. They feel safe in this environment and they find this ability to really move and become more embodied. If you’re that self-conscious and you’ve been told all your life, oh, don’t dance, don’t dance, you actually kind of rise above your body. What I often hear from those clients is they feel clumsy. They bump into things. They trip over things. It’s because they’re not actually grounded in their body. 

One of the benefits of being more embodied through a modality like this is you actually inhabit the world in a more graceful way. You move fluidly and you have spatial awareness is what I would call it. I could go on and on. There’s new science actually about bone density health, as well as the ability to retain muscle. You would think weight training would score the highest. They’re actually finding that dance, because there’s different movements going on in the body at all times, the twitch muscles, there’s fast twitch and slow twitch muscles actually help retain and sustain muscle mass above and beyond resistance training in some of these studies in the UK. It’s balance, cardiovascular health, mental health, physical health. The list is incredibly long in terms of the health benefits of dance. It’s amazing. 

I love how you put it in a scientific way. For me, it’s just very simple. Dancing is a good brain break. Therefore, it should be in our life, even if it’s for a couple seconds, like you talked about earlier, just to dance across the living room and dancing through your house to the kitchen. That’s going to add up that compound effect to your everyday life. 

Exactly. Yeah. The benefits don’t require hours and hours of dance. Literally just a few minutes of dance they have found creates that dose of happy hormones that activates dopamine and oxytocin, serotonin, endorphins are all released. If you choose a song that makes you happy is part of it. Music is part of the health benefits of dance because we’re usually dancing. You don’t have to use music. Sometimes I’m just dancing around and my kids are like, why are you dancing? I’m like, because it feels good, but infusing music into it is also part of the health benefits of dance as well. 

For someone new to the concept of conscious dance and holistic wellbeing, would you say dancing is accessible to people of all ages and backgrounds? 

 Yes. Yes. The beautiful thing about a conscious dance modality like transcend dance is that it absolutely crosses the age barrier. So you can do this with your children. We have transcend dance facilitators that I’ve trained who work with senior citizens. You can do this in a chair. I actually have clients who are healing from surgery, who are in bed that do very minimal movement. They’re able to do an entire transcend dance session while recovering from surgery. And that’s also because we’re activating the mind. If you’ve ever seen a, an Olympic athlete getting ready for their competition, you will often see them wearing headphones. You’ll often see them with their eyes closed. And sometimes if you think about a skier, you’ll see them imagining you can actually see in their brains that they’re visualizing themselves going down there and doing their routine. You’ll see this with gymnasts as well. So it is not new information that the power of the mind is massive. 

They did a scientific study with basketball players with free throws. That’s where you stand way back and you throw the ball and it goes through the hoop, right? So they took and split the group in half, half of the group, they just had visualizing the free throws. The other half of the group actually physically did the physical action. And they found that the group that just visualized it didn’t actually physically do the action improved equally to the ones that were physically doing. That’s because there is a brain body connection. So in transcendence, we’re activating the power of the mind and visualization, which activates our creative brain. We spend so much of our day in our left logical intellect, which is fine. But part of, we know that we don’t access nearly the capacity of the brain. And we do when we’re younger, we activate and access. Part of that is we’re more mobile and moving. We have recess or we’re running around, we’re playing, we’re using our imagination. We’re creating things when we’re young. So in transcendence, we’re actually activating that part of our brain and we’re using the muscle of visualization. And for me, even when I was healing from my own knee surgery, I would do certain movements, but then I would actually visualize and imagine the movements that I was not yet able to do physically, but I would see myself do them. And I absolutely know a hundred percent that my full healing and my ability to walk and hop and skip and hike and run and, and leap and do all of the things that I now am able to do post surgery had a lot to do with, of course, regular science and following my, my doctor’s orders and doing physical therapy and all those things. Yes. And bringing in the power of the visualization, working with energy and the components found in transcendance. So, yeah. I love it. 

You kind of went straight into my next question, which is talking more about the interplay between movement and mindset, right? Cause we talk about mindset transformation, how that’s important in achieving your optimal health and joy. So what is your take on the interplay between the movement and the mindset?

] It’s so important. And I’ll just sum it up this way as a professional dancer and in the professional dance world in my early twenties, right? All the information coming at me from society, as well as even close people around me, I was told that you had to be very, very thin and you had to look a certain way to be a successful professional dancer. I received that information. I didn’t argue with it. I went ahead with it. And that led to some very abusive behaviors with my body, starving myself, overtraining, under eating, really trying to shrink my body. And it created this very adversarial body abuse mentality and results, right? 

With my actions through my birth process, which I shared. And then my finding of conscious dance, all of a sudden now I’m in classes where instead of looking at myself in the mirror and being told you need to have six pack abs and buns of steel, right? Which is very much the generation that I, that I was in at the time. And a lot of fitness classes, you’re taught to look at your flaws and try to fix those flaws with this fitness or dance or movement technique that you’re being taught, right? In conscious dance, there’s no mirrors. So number one, you’re not staring at this, just the flesh and tearing it apart in your mind, right? You’re taught to go within and to actually learn how to feel connected to your body. Let’s do this now, actually, let’s do this together. 

And I’m going to invite the listeners to do this with us. So we’re not just talking about it, but we’re also having a mini experience of it. So if you just close your eyes and just take a nice deep breath, breathing in through the nose, exhale out with a nice sigh, place one hand on your heart, one hand just below your belly button and just feel your body for a moment. 

So you notice the tips of your toes, notice your fingertips, bring your awareness to your ears, to your nose, and bring your awareness to your heart beating and your lungs breathing. Now, for some people who are very mindful and practicing meditation or yoga, maybe they did today send a wave of gratitude to their heart beating and their lungs breathing. But most people take for granted that their heart is beating 24 seven without rest from the day they are conceived. 

And that heartbeat is the first dance of life in the mother’s womb before their bodies even formed is the heartbeat to the last day that they take their last breath. The heart is beating. And even if we tried, we can’t breathe our own bodies or make our heart beat. It’s an involuntary thing that occurs right inside of our body. And yet for me, it’s a sign and signal that we are being breathed, that there is a power greater than us that has gifted us with this life. 

And for a moment, we can just send a wave of gratitude to our whole body for working so hard day in and day out, to be the vehicle through which we live and breathe and express and love and bring forth our dreams. And to look beyond the flesh, beyond the form to all of the many gifts that this body gives us. Gift of loving the gift of eyesight, smell, hearing, taste, touch, the ways your body is working. We’re grateful for that, right? 

We’re grateful for all the ways our body is working. And then we allow our eyes to gently open. 

So just a few minutes, right, of going within. That’s one of the biggest differences in conscious dance is it’s an inner world, right? You’re moving from the inside out. There’s this body wisdom that when I let go of the left brain and all of the ways I’ve been taught to move, and I learned to really come into this inner world where there’s a part of me that isn’t, it’s the higher self versus the human self, right? 

So when I activate conscious dance, I’m allowing my higher self to move the human self and to quote Gabrielle Roth, when you put the body in motion, the psyche heals. It’s such a powerful, powerful practice. So through this, I was able to heal my body abuser, so to speak, right? That inner, overactive inner critic. And I was able to install like an operating system. When you think about kind of rebooting your computer’s operating system, I literally had to pull the weeds of all of the limiting beliefs and disempowering messages that I received for many, many years about my body. I’m more of a curvy woman and embrace that this is how God made me. And there’s nothing wrong with me. And that actually, as I just eat healthy, find beautiful, fun ways to move my body and love my body, my body’s loving me. My body’s meeting me with this love. I am so much happier. I have so much more energy. I have more energy today and I’m almost 50. I just turned 49 than I did when I was in my mid twenties. You know, I am living a life of my dreams and really helping other people heal the disconnect, heal those disempowering messages that they received as well and find a different way of moving their body that is loving and supportive. 

I love that. And I completely resonate with what you just said, because I’m in my forties too. And I feel so much better than in my twenties and thirties. Oh my goodness. It’s because we are replacing our disempowering beliefs with high vibrational thoughts. And for you, it was being a curvy women. For me, it was something different, but everyone has disempowering beliefs. Just it’s possible, right? Beautiful. Jennifer, what is your favorite quote that you go by in life?

Oh, I love it. So my favorite quote is by Martha Graham and it is, there is a vitality, a life force and energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action. And because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost. 

Beautifully said. Thank you so much for sharing everyone. If you’ve enjoyed this powerful exercise and wisdom from Jennifer, check out Brave Thinking Institute, and it will be linked in the show notes. 

Thank you. Beautiful. Thank you so much for having me.