Dance Our Way Home

Dance Our Way Home™ (DOWH) is a holistic dance practice offering you:

• a safe & non-judgmental space to be yourself, just as you are.
• themes to inspire your courageous, compassionate and creative self.
• guided visualizations to ground and relax you open to a more embodied awareness.
• a perfect balance of facilitated and non-facilitated dance.
• personal dances to invoke curiosity in self, to fall in love with your own knowing and impulses.
• partner and group dances to connect, play, and feel part of a precious circle of women.
• a wide range of music to carry you through various states of being, from tender to wild.
• tools and woman-centered teachings to support the realization of your magnificence.
• unconditional love and support from like-minded women as you travel your own life path.

DOWH was co-created in 2001 by Erica Ross and Nan Keyser for Sheena’s Place, a support organization for people with disordered eating and body image issues in Toronto, Canada. It continues to this day as one of Sheena’s Place’s core ‘body image’ groups.

Over the years Erica has honed and deepened the DOWH practice with new and fresh insight, music, themes and exercises. In the fall of 2007, Erica, recognizing the great success at Sheena’s and the potential of this practice, brought DOWH into the community-at-large, offering it to any woman wishing to dance, and to be more deeply connected to herself and to others.

DOWH has become Erica’s soul work and unique gift, the gathering of a lifetime of experience as a daughter, sister, friend, woman, mother, traveller, artist and dancer. Erica’s personal relationship to life and the lens through which she sees it has been influenced by many cultures, viewpoints and teachings. With her love for, and relationship with, the Divine Feminine and Earth-based spirituality, and the wisdom teachings of Buddhism and Shamanism, Erica offers all that she knows to be true.

Erica brings to DOWH life-affirming ideas, writings, concepts and teachings to support the dance, making it a complete experience that touches body, heart, mind and soul. She shares inspirational quotes and stories from some of her favourite writers and mentors such as Clarisa Pinkola Estes, Rumi, Anais Nin, Joseph Campbell, Marion Woodman and Maria Gimbutas.

Choosing from a diverse range of music that includes sacred voices, global funk, ambient and tribal grooves, Erica skilfully selects music that she trusts will carry others in their dance, to induce a journey of relaxation, healing, release, freedom, joy and peace. Erica’s brightness and warmth, along with her creative weaving of dance, guided imagery and relaxation, offers you a remarkable journey of self-discovery, expression and connection.

The roots, heart & wings of DOWH are found in these 10 principles:

1. Body is our teacher: We live in and through our bodies. It is here where we contain and reveal our entire life experience. This is where we must listen, learn and heal.
2. Dance heals and ‘wholes’ us: Our body's primary language is movement. Through the dance we find all parts of ourselves so we can be whole.
3. Loving kindness creates safe space: Through loving kindness we soften our body, heart and mind to find a meeting place of non-judgment, acceptance and peace. There we can feel safe to just be.
4. Self expression and self worth are birth rights: We are all precious and unique. It is our right to find and love who we are, and express our personal truth authentically.
5. Acceptance of self is the way to joy and freedom: When we accept all that we were, are and will be, in a place of no judgment, no right or wrong, good or bad, this is liberation and joy.
6. Embracing the Divine Feminine Within creates balance and deeper knowing: It is time for us to remember and reclaim our original power and instincts as women. We have our own unique way. We just need to listen and respond with dignity and love.
7. Radiance is our original state of being: We all were born with a spark of spirit, of life. This spark is called radiance, light, love, beauty. It is our task to shine!
8. Letting go and relaxing are keys to magic-making: When we are in a state of peace and relaxation, a shift of consciousness happens that is called magic!
9. We are all sacred and interconnected with the great whole: We are part of this great community called humanity, life, universe. We all contain that seed of divine energy that unites us all.
10. Possibilities are limitless, miracles do happen: Anything is possible under the sun. Why not open ourselves to endless possibilities?

Click here for more information or to enrol in a DOWH session or workshop.