The music is jungley, sweaty, and dense. My gaze is down, where it is safe, but in my peripheral I see gyrating thrashing pulsing bodies. They are adorned in flowing poofy pants and other silly thing. I note a passing whiff of judgment in me. I continue to breathe, which is my practice here.

I am standing on the edge of the dance floor, near the wall. I feel my body tense when I sense someone walk behind me (my peripheral vision, tremors in the floor, a whiff of stranger sweat).

I am swaying with the music, my offering to the dance. My arms are folded over my front, my heart, my abdomen, guarding. When someone walks in front of me I hold my breath.  A reflex, I don’t even want to smell them.

A man whirls toward me and I tense and step back. A beautiful woman sashays by and I catch my eyes following her, then a roiling in my body, then the warm wash of shame.

An acid sharp painful feeling tones like a car alarm in my belly—mild food poisoning from three days ago. My gut sending downward signals toward my butt; A poop? Or a false alarm. Regardless, alarming to me.

I’ve stopped breathing. I begin breathing again.

An older woman twirls by with youthful grace, a hand outstretched to me almost beckoning. My eyes flicker to her face but she twirls off, in her own dance.

But I take a step, and another in rhythm, leaving the safety of the wall. And then I commence to dance. A voice in me screams EVERYONE IS LOOKING AT YOU but I breathe and extend a hand, then another. My style is deliberate, slow, and flowing. I envy the leaps and bounds of others, but my knees forbid it.

A guide recently told me, while I was deep in the heart medicine: “You don’t have to be afraid to be beautiful anymore.” So I throw my arms high, hands just so, echoes of the ballerinas I used to admire at the dance company I worked at. I paint with my hands. I slowly turn, my weight shifting from leg to leg as my feet pattern the floor.

I will myself to the very center of the room and simply breathe and move. And my body, this finely attuned organ takes in everyone in my proximity. Alarm bells sound faintly but I dance on. Yes, they run into me, inadvertent caresses, sometimes followed by a smile or an arm squeeze.  Yes there are male bodies and female bodies and I-don’t-know-why-does-it-matter-bodies around me, sometimes very close, and I dance on.

The music transitions to an electronic floor shaker and around me the bodies ignite. Hooting, stomping, thrashing. A very young part of me quails, my body thrums. I cannot match this rhythm so I don’t even try, but my flow gets bigger, I reach toward the rafters of the warehouse, I spiral down near the polished wood of the floor. I assert my height, a heron among ducks. I throw my arms out wide. I become very big. I am in the center of the dance floor now, my inhibitions fall away, I look to the ceiling, and tears stream down my face. Without fear, without aversion I merge with the music, I become the dance.

And I am beautiful.