Let Your Yoga Dance: Grace in Motion®

by Megha–Nancy Buttenheim, M.A.
creator and founding director: Let Your Yoga Dance: Grace in Motion
April 2008

What is Let Your Yoga Dance?

Let Your Yoga Dance: Grace in Motion is a unique approach to movement, combining the time-honored traditions of yoga, movement, breath, the chakra system, and user-friendly dance. A descendent of Kripalu Yoga and DansKinetics®, it is meditation-in-motion, sometimes wild and filled with abandon, sometimes quiet and still. Let Your Yoga Dance is a beautiful way to come in contact with grace and your indwelling spirit, providing spiritual, physiological, artistic tools that allow you to reach for the deeper source of energy within. It offers techniques that take you beyond the limitations of the body and mind. Let Your Yoga Dance also uses the joy of movement to tone muscles, build flexibility, endurance and cardiovascular fitness. In Let Your Yoga Dance, you come home to the self and return to the soul; you fall in love with your body, and experience community in a safe and sacred setting. This is a movement event that literally anyone can do, even someone in a wheelchair or in a hospital bed. Modifications and variations abound in this gentle, compassionate practice. My mission is to bring this express route to joy to the whole world, one body, mind, and spirit at a time.

In Let Your Yoga Dance you discover a new way to love your body while awakening your inner rhythms that allow your spirit to revel in the celebration of life. You actually experience what it feels like to be at home within your body, recognizing your mind, spirit, heart, and body as vehicles for healing and self-expression. This is an important element in Let Your Yoga Dance, distinguishing the difference between being embodied and being a moving head that uses the body only as a vehicle to make the head portable.

The emphasis in Let Your Yoga Dance is not only on physical expression. Yoga and dance movements offer a way to cultivate self-awareness in every moment. An holistic approach to well being, Let Your Yoga Dance integrates the physical, emotional, artistic, and spiritual dimensions of your being, providing a vehicle for healing, wellness, prayer, and fun. It also provides a healing "chakra bath" to all of the energy centers in the body, which in turn enlivens the entire endocrine system. Over the years I have witnessed thousands of people receiving benefits from Let Your Yoga Dance, no matter what their illness or injury, including the rocky terrain of depression, grief, and loss. In recent years I have also watched first hand the benefits of Let Your Yoga Dance with Parkinson’s disease. My students with PD are delighted with their increased movement ability, balance and breath, as well as a tremendous mood enhancement, so necessary for people with Parkinson’s. Truly Let Your Yoga Dance has a healing benefit for everyone.

Background of Let Your Yoga Dance

When I think of Let Your Yoga Dance one phrase comes to mind: healing through joy. This lively, delightful practice was born of Kripalu DansKinetics which was created in 1978 at the Kripalu Yoga Ashram by a visiting guest from Canada, a dancer and dancercise instructor named Ken Scott. With the help of ashram residents, in particular Dan Leven, DansKinetics came to life. In the early years it resembled a form of spiritual aerobics using inspiring music. This popular event has continued to be offered daily for thirty years at Kripalu. Many people have brought it along, including myself, along with hundreds of graduates from the teacher training. Since 1985, I have been steadily sustaining, nurturing, and recreating DansKinetics at Kripalu Center, and have been directing the teacher training for more than a decade. Over these decades I have personally honed DansKinetics to reflect that which means the most to me: meditation in motion in its many forms. In 1996 founded my own practice and "spin" on DansKinetics to more appropriately fit my intention to bring moving yoga, grace, and dance prayer to the world. My spin is called Let Your Yoga Dance: Grace in Motion. The name reflects my commitment to a yoga and chakra-based movement practice. There are well over a thousand teachers of this practice, perhaps in your town! This is my spiritual practice. It heals me on a daily basis.