Blog #83. Why Walking Thinks and Dancing Feels

Have you ever looked up from your desk, your table, or your screen and realized you’ve been intellectualizing the world to keep emotions at bay?

Sometimes I spend hours — okay, if I’m honest, days — living entirely in my head. I’ll chase an idea for a new blog until it frays at the edges. I’ll wrestle with an IT gremlin until I make it work. I’ll run a mental marathon around a resource I haven’t yet found. From the outside, it looks productive. Inside? It’s like the lights are on, but no one’s dancing.

Listen to Maya Angelou, and dance furiously!

That’s usually the cue. Time to stop thinking about movement and actually move. Not the step-count, close-the-ring kind of movement. I mean the kind that lets emotions flow and breathe. Because our bodies know how to process what our minds try to solve, but they need a little invitation.

Did you know that different movements spark different kinds of emotional flow? Walking tends to open a contemplative current — steady, meditative, like unwinding tangled yarn. It’s the “long-walk-sort-your-life-out” vibe that makes space for intuition to surface and ideas to bubble up.

Dancing, by contrast, is pure catharsis — embodied, expressive, sometimes ecstatic. It’s the physical equivalent of throwing the windows open and letting a strong wind blow back the curtains. Even the smallest sway, even the goofiest private shimmy, can unlock emotions that walking leaves untouched. One type of movement is the poet; the other, the thunderclap.

The magic isn’t in choosing one over the other. It’s in knowing what you need. When the thoughts feel tangled and tight, I walk. When the feelings are big and stuck, I dance. Sometimes I begin with a walk and finish with a dance. The quiet stroll loosens the knots, followed by a wild kitchen groove that unties them completely.

The point isn’t choreography; it’s release. It’s giving myself permission to be more than a brain in a chair — to be a whole, breathing, moving creature capable of transforming what weighs me down into something that moves me forward.

In the end, that’s what this is all about: letting our emotions up and out and letting our bodies lead the way from headspace to heartspace. So if you, too, find yourself stuck in the labyrinth of your own thoughts, try this: put one foot in front of the other. Or put on a song that makes your hips forget they’re supposed to be serious. Movement, in whatever form, is our body’s language for “I’m ready to feel this.” And when we do, we often discover that what seemed immovable wasn’t so heavy after all.

And perhaps that’s why, as Maya Angelou reminded us, “Hard times require furious dancing.” Because sometimes the most radical thing we can do — for ourselves and for the world — is to dance our way through the storm and come out stronger on the other side.

Come join me at WonderCrone.com, where the highest praise we can hope for is this: We laughed. We sang. We danced in the aisles.