We Are So Much More Than We Think We Are

Photo by Laura Vinck

What Dance, Coaching, and Grief Taught Me About Love

At the end of 2019, I walked away from everything that had defined me.

After professional heartbreak left me feeling I had no choice, I stepped away from years of mastery, commitment, and devotion to dance and interdisciplinary performance — not because I was finished, but because I could no longer stay.

Without the grants, collaborators, structures, spaces — without the ecosystem that had shaped my identity for decades — I felt devastated, scared, and unexpectedly elated.

Everything familiar had fallen away. And in that sudden absence, something else began to speak.

I began listening to my intuition in a way I had never done before. I started making choices from a different place — not based on expectations, others’ or my own, but from a deep and insistent curiosity.

I was searching for clarity.

I was searching for clarity: about how I had arrived here, where personal and professional relationships felt untenable and the way forward seemed lost; about how to restore this hurt, betrayed, abandoned, unsupported, exhausted heart without abandoning myself again in the process.

Eventually, I found Claire Zammit and the Feminine Power programs (later retitled Women-Centred Coaching and Leadership Programs). Through that work, I found something I deeply needed: safety. Mirroring was central to the process.

Her programs emphasized support, educational models, coaching, and questions that help women sense their own possibilities — and break through the cultural barriers that obscure them. The tendency toward shame-based meaning-making. Toward self-abandonment. Toward disconnecting from our true potential.

It was a revelation.

Claire’s integration of these feminine power principles — embodied through her intellect, discernment, and compassionate modelling — not only felt safe, but was also inspiring. It showed me what I wanted to learn: how to speak with clarity and authority about profound subjects while still holding space for the wider human story.

So I dove in.

I found money I didn’t really have. I didn’t ask. I finally just gave it to myself.

And with that, I stepped outside the familiar cycle of arts funding — where permission is requested for every small move, where gatekeepers subtly shape your sense of freedom and possibility.

This was what I was unlearning.

And instead, I was learning a deeper way of being — intelligent and relational, anchored in connection and reciprocal care. That shift opened into a new kind of listening.

Listening Without an Agenda

While completing my coaching certification, I followed the suggestion to 'activate my network' by simply reaching out—by being available. I began having deep conversations with people. Letting people tell me, in their own words, what they were experiencing. Listening for the stories beneath the surface.

These weren’t coaching sessions. They were simple meet-ups. No objectives. Just listening.

And something began to take root in me.

Inside nearly every conversation — across yoga, dance, family, and friendships — I heard the same thing.

Every person was carrying a deeper, expansive sense of love.

Yet... it was almost as if they felt burdened by it.

As if it were too much. Too tender. Too exposed.

Some named it directly. Most spoke in visions — wanting to offer something meaningful, to support others, to heal, uplift, and contribute.

And yet, something restrained them.

As if love itself had become a source of wounding. As if giving it — or even fully feeling it — had once cost too much. And it was as if the yearning they felt for a greater love was an impossibility; they were learning to accept.

Learning to Let Love Move

As the years went on, I became certified as a coach. I integrated more of my yoga teaching, the energetics of movement, and embodied presence.

I began to understand how to call forth that love.

Not manufacture it. Not fix it.

But allow people to rest in what is already true.

They didn’t need to suppress it.

They didn’t need to accept that it was impossible.

They could lean into it.

Love themselves through difficult conditions.

Open to a deeper understanding of who they are — and who we are together on this planet.

This had ripple effects in my own life. I felt braver. I felt greater hope. The work was changing how I moved through the world.

I learned how to show up vulnerably and powerfully at the same time.

I began translating who I was as a dance artist into words — into speech, into embodied practices, into coaching.

And I thought — I’m really getting it. And I was. And still, there was more,

Because there is no bottom to love.

What Dance Had Always Taught Me

Through decades of dancing — including my years with EDAM Dance — I learned something essential: if I surrender.

If I release, relax, yield, drop in

— There's a response.

A depth.

A resonance.

A spring.

A life force that expands in all directions.

I don’t need to force the next movement.

I only need to drop the grasp of what came before and arrive fully in what is here.

This is what dance taught me.

And eventually, I began to understand it in my heart. In the heart, there is a space — physiological and energetic — that is deeper and greater than our personal narratives.

It wants to care for you. Embrace you. Nurture you. Dissolve you beyond your conditioned ways of loving and hurting.

To be loved, to love and to be the love simultaneously requires surrendering the small self.

And in that surrender, a deeper truth becomes available — one beyond logic,

yet one that mysteriously makes sense of everything we have lived, are living, or will ever live.

Grief, Teaching, and What I Finally Received

A few months ago, my lifelong teacher, Peter Bingham, passed away.

I had trained and performed for many decades under his direction.

In the days surrounding his passing, I experienced something I still don’t fully have language for. It came as contractions around my heart. It felt like love squeezing fear out of my body.

A vision of him as his younger self, ascending in spirals of colour, returning to source.

Later, a sense of cosmic love so profound that there was no difference between correction and truth, between misperception dissolving and awareness arriving.

What became clear was the magnitude of what I had received through having a teacher at all — and the understanding of what a teacher truly is.

Not information.

Not technique.

But transmission. Guidance. Orientation of the soul.

More than thirty years of being witnessed, shaped, challenged, and oriented toward something larger than myself.

All the frustrations, flaws, unresolved tensions — they held no power over that truth.

I saw how much I had fought for his acknowledgement, for his accountability, for honesty — and how that fight had limited my ability to receive it.

Love is not asking to be validated.

It is not asking for vindication.

It is asking us to let go.

And in his passing, I finally did. What remains is this:

What Remains

Love is so much more than personal healing. It is not only soothing or celebratory.

It is the ocean being ocean.

The sky being sky.

Planets orbiting the sun.

It passes through us — through eyes, bodies, voices, movement.

Into dances.

Into classrooms.

Into children.

It is tangible. It is real.

It is us.

The love we believed was impossible is simply what we are.

It is not a feeling to chase, but a truth to recognize.