Kinghorn, Deborah A.

English

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University of New HampshireUniversity of New Hampshire Scholars' RepositoryThe University Dialogue Discovery Program2009When you walk, do you feel like you are dancing?Deborah A. KinghornUniversity of New Hampshire, deb.kinghorn@unh.eduFollow this and additional works at: https://scholars.unh.edu/discovery_udPart of the Medicine and Health Sciences Commons, and the Psychology of MovementCommonsThis Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Discovery Program at University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository. It has beenaccepted for inclusion in The University Dialogue by an authorized administrator of University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository. For moreinformation, please contact nicole.hentz@unh.edu.Recommended CitationKinghorn, Deborah A., "When you walk, do you feel like you are dancing?" (2009). The University Dialogue. 53.https://scholars.unh.edu/discovery_ud/53When You Walk, Do You Feel Like You Are Dancing?Deborah KinghornTheatre and DanceA young man studying at drama school in New York City in the early ’70s receives a free ticket to a concert given by the Atlantic City Steel Pier Band. He goes and finds himself the youngest person there. He observes his fellow concert-goers: most of them much older, arriving in taxis, being helped down the aisles, using canes and walkers—unable to walk unassisted. As the band begins to play music of the ’30s and ’40s, he sees throughout the audience heads nod-ding in time, then shoulders beginning to keep the beat as well. Pretty soon, feet are tapping, bodies swaying. By intermission, those same people who could not walk unassisted discard their walkers and canes and are up and dancing together in the aisles. It is as if they have rediscovered their youth.What caused this reversal? Was it, as many poets and philosophers have noted, the “power of music”? Or was there something else happening? How does a body that feels creaky and stiff with age and rheumatism suddenly find the springing step of youth? The answer, it turns out, can be found in the body’s natural energy sources.Arthur Lessac, renowned voice and movement spe-cialist, has been studying the body’s natural energy resources and their effects on health and wellness for the past 70 years. He pioneered new ways of improving vocal and physical performance through the study and application of the body’s natural energy qualities to ev-ery area of human endeavor.In Lessac voice and movement training in the theatre, we work with “feeling”—not the emotional meaning of the word, but feeling as a sensation. For example, close your eyes and focus inward for just a moment. Do you feel motion in your body? You can feel your heartbeat, your breathing, or the gentle, almost imperceptible, swaying of your body as it works to keep balance. These are all moving actions of the body, and as such, can be felt, or sensed.What if you could not only feel inner sensation, but you could learn to utilize it to promote better health in yourself, both physically and emotionally? If you could teach yourself to feel love, trust, and happiness rather than hate, anger, and depression, wouldn’t you do it?Consider this: you are living and functioning in two different environments. On the one hand, there is the huge outer environment, with everything and everyone else in it, with its widely varied cultures, with its unex-plored territories, with its powerful energy forces—like nuclear, electrical, solar, and water—and with its condi-tioning and patterning, which shapes the way we think and act.On the other hand, there is your vast inner environ-ment, with only you in it, with your unique personal culture, your unexplored inner wilderness, your intrinsic body energies, which promote vitality and create health and well-being, and your own genuine originality.While there are beneficial elements in the outer en-vironment, there are equally many elements that are unhealthy and even destructive to us, such as chemical additives in our foods, air pollution, or people who dis-play hatred toward us. Unfortunately, these unhealthy elements do not stay in the outer environment—they find their way into our inner environments, where they do major damage. In fact, recent research has made significant connections between emotions and disease, such as anger contributing to heart disease, anxiety causing panic attacks or heart arrhythmia, depression contributing to headaches and back pain. These feelings create more than just discomfort in the body—they cre-ate ill-health. They slowly poison us.The antidote to that poison lies within your inner en-vironment. Your inner environment includes the func-tioning of various systems of the body, such as the ner-vous, endocrine, circulatory, digestive, musculoskeletal, cellular, respiratory, urinary, and sensory systems. You don’t think about their functioning, but the processes of these systems are taking place every second of your life. You continually receive information from them, whether you are aware of it or not. And there are subtler and equally dynamic processes in the inner environ-ment, such as consciousness, imagination, creativity, rhythm, and emotion, among others. Inside this land-scape, things function healthfully—until something causes distress or disease. Poisons from the outer envi-Taking Care of Self and Communityronment can easily seep through the body’s defenses, unless you become aware of them, and learn how to deal with them. Think of your inner environment, then, as the kind of wilderness we are often trying to protect and preserve in the outer environment—one full of forests, streams, clean air, wildflowers, nature at its purest. If this envi-ronment becomes polluted, choked with the detritus of man’s daily existence, it quickly becomes uninhabitable. Your inner environment functions the same way. It is polluted by many things from the outer environment—smoke, air pollution, chemical wastes in our drinking supply, and toxic chemicals in the food we eat. It can also be polluted by anger, hate, pain, greed, jealousy, or fear. This is the detritus we find strewn about in our in-ner environment, and without care, this environment, too, becomes uninhabitable. We must remember that we are the ecologists for both the outer and the inner en-vironments. We and they are inextricably intertwined, and our lack of caring for them produces problems in our lives, like sickness, malaise, depression, and acts of hatred toward one another. While we individually exert little control over the whole of our outer environment, we have full control over our inner environment, and we have a responsibility to keep it healthy.We can do this by utilizing the body’s natural energy sources. The body naturally relieves pain and fatigue with three simple, yet effective, actions: yawning, sigh-ing, and shaking. These can be quickly demonstrated if you imagine you have been driving for a long time in a car. When you finally stop and get out, you yawn through your whole body, shake yourself a little, and breathe deeply in and out, which provides you with relief from tension and pain, and then infuses you with energy. The pain relievers evolve into natural “relaxer-energizers,” which are always healthful and sensory experiences. Some natural relaxer-energizers include yawning, humming, pleasure sighing, easy shaking, smiling, singing, laughing, and dancing. When you perform any of these actions easily, your body bal-ances, and you feel good. On a higher level, the dual-ity of breathing and posture, which is felt when we breathe easily and instinctively while standing, sitting, or moving with an elongated spine, is a potent relaxer-energizer. Likewise, the sensation of rhythm, which is fundamental to all body movement, is a sophisticated body relaxer-energizer.  It is a self-regulating device and provides an esthetic experience of body symmetry, balance, and expression. And this brings us back to those elderly concert-goers at the beginning of this article. These people responded to the relaxer-energizer of rhythm. They began to nod their heads, tap their feet, shake their shoulders, and then sway to the beat—all forms of shaking, a natural body pain reliever and a natural relaxer-energizer. Feel-ing the lessening of pain and the increase of energy, these elderly people were soon able to get up and begin dancing—another relaxer-energizer!—which then in-duced smiling and laughing, singing and humming, and better breathing—all relaxer-energizers. No wonder they feel younger!When you feel and can sustain the energy qualities in your body, you can apply them to any situation where there is tension, anxiety, stiffness, or pain and feel relief. (For example, studies now show the effects of laughter in reducing cancer.) Likewise, it is impossible to hold onto hate, or any other negative emotion, while you are enjoying the body’s natural energy qualities. And this is significant for our communities and our world at large because once you begin to take care of your inner envi-ronment, it is a natural step to want to improve the out-er environment—both as an act of self-protection and of love. Thus, our own healthfulness can open the door to humaneness. We share much with other humans: both biological humanness and cultural humanness. All cultures can belong to all of us, because everything that is in another culture can be found in our bodies in the form of natural body energies, including singing, danc-ing, and humor. Once we accept our shared human-ness, humaneness can be learned, and all humaneness is healthy. The poisons that can be dealt with through humaneness are the emotional and psychological poi-sons: hate, prejudice, jealousy, greed, wrathful-anger, lying, fear. First, we must recognize that, for the sake of healthfulness, we MUST control them. We must recog-nize and be utterly convinced that these are indeed the foulest of poisons, and that only an exceedingly selfish desire for healthfulness in ourselves and in our world will eradicate them. When you walk, do you feel like you are dancing? If so, you are tapping into the fountain of wellness: your own body’s energy.I look forward to further discussion on this and other topics throughout the year.A University Dialogue on Health  2009–2010BibliographyLessac, A.  1997. The Use and Training of the Human Voice: A Bio-Dynamic Approach to Vocal Life, 3rd edition, Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company.Lessac, A.  1990.  Body Wisdom: The Use and Training of the Human Body, 2nd Edition, San Bernardino, CA:  Lessac Institute Publishing Company. Lessac, A. and Kinghorn, D.  2009.  The Way of Feeling: Feeling the Way, unpublished book. 

When you walk, do you feel like you are dancing?

University of New Hampshire

University of New Hampshire
University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository
The University Dialogue Discovery Program
2009
When you walk, do you feel like you are dancing?
Deborah A. Kinghorn
University of New Hampshire, deb.kinghorn@unh.edu
Follow this and additional works at: https://scholars.unh.edu/discovery_ud
Part of the Medicine and Health Sciences Commons, and the Psychology of Movement
Commons
This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Discovery Program at University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository. It has been
accepted for inclusion in The University Dialogue by an authorized administrator of University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository. For more
information, please contact nicole.hentz@unh.edu.
Recommended Citation
Kinghorn, Deborah A., "When you walk, do you feel like you are dancing?" (2009). The University Dialogue. 53.
https://scholars.unh.edu/discovery_ud/53
When You Walk, Do You Feel Like You Are Dancing?
Deborah Kinghorn
Theatre and Dance
A young man studying at drama school in New York City in the early ’70s receives a free ticket to a concert given by the Atlantic City Steel Pier 
Band. He goes and finds himself the youngest person 
there. He observes his fellow concert-goers: most of 
them much older, arriving in taxis, being helped down 
the aisles, using canes and walkers—unable to walk 
unassisted. As the band begins to play music of the ’30s 
and ’40s, he sees throughout the audience heads nod-
ding in time, then shoulders beginning to keep the beat 
as well. Pretty soon, feet are tapping, bodies swaying. 
By intermission, those same people who could not walk 
unassisted discard their walkers and canes and are up 
and dancing together in the aisles. It is as if they have 
rediscovered their youth.
What caused this reversal? Was it, as many poets and 
philosophers have noted, the “power of music”? Or was 
there something else happening? How does a body that 
feels creaky and stiff with age and rheumatism suddenly 
find the springing step of youth? The answer, it turns 
out, can be found in the body’s natural energy sources.
Arthur Lessac, renowned voice and movement spe-
cialist, has been studying the body’s natural energy 
resources and their effects on health and wellness for 
the past 70 years. He pioneered new ways of improving 
vocal and physical performance through the study and 
application of the body’s natural energy qualities to ev-
ery area of human endeavor.
In Lessac voice and movement training in the theatre, 
we work with “feeling”—not the emotional meaning of 
the word, but feeling as a sensation. For example, close 
your eyes and focus inward for just a moment. Do you 
feel motion in your body? You can feel your heartbeat, 
your breathing, or the gentle, almost imperceptible, 
swaying of your body as it works to keep balance. These 
are all moving actions of the body, and as such, can be 
felt, or sensed.
What if you could not only feel inner sensation, but 
you could learn to utilize it to promote better health in 
yourself, both physically and emotionally? If you could 
teach yourself to feel love, trust, and happiness rather 
than hate, anger, and depression, wouldn’t you do it?
Consider this: you are living and functioning in two 
different environments. On the one hand, there is the 
huge outer environment, with everything and everyone 
else in it, with its widely varied cultures, with its unex-
plored territories, with its powerful energy forces—like 
nuclear, electrical, solar, and water—and with its condi-
tioning and patterning, which shapes the way we think 
and act.
On the other hand, there is your vast inner environ-
ment, with only you in it, with your unique personal 
culture, your unexplored inner wilderness, your 
intrinsic body energies, which promote vitality and 
create health and well-being, and your own genuine 
originality.
While there are beneficial elements in the outer en-
vironment, there are equally many elements that are 
unhealthy and even destructive to us, such as chemical 
additives in our foods, air pollution, or people who dis-
play hatred toward us. Unfortunately, these unhealthy 
elements do not stay in the outer environment—they 
find their way into our inner environments, where they 
do major damage. In fact, recent research has made 
significant connections between emotions and disease, 
such as anger contributing to heart disease, anxiety 
causing panic attacks or heart arrhythmia, depression 
contributing to headaches and back pain. These feelings 
create more than just discomfort in the body—they cre-
ate ill-health. They slowly poison us.
The antidote to that poison lies within your inner en-
vironment. Your inner environment includes the func-
tioning of various systems of the body, such as the ner-
vous, endocrine, circulatory, digestive, musculoskeletal, 
cellular, respiratory, urinary, and sensory systems. You 
don’t think about their functioning, but the processes 
of these systems are taking place every second of your 
life. You continually receive information from them, 
whether you are aware of it or not. And there are subtler 
and equally dynamic processes in the inner environ-
ment, such as consciousness, imagination, creativity, 
rhythm, and emotion, among others. Inside this land-
scape, things function healthfully—until something 
causes distress or disease. Poisons from the outer envi-
Taking Care of Self and Community
ronment can easily seep through the body’s defenses, 
unless you become aware of them, and learn how to deal 
with them. 
Think of your inner environment, then, as the kind of 
wilderness we are often trying to protect and preserve 
in the outer environment—one full of forests, streams, 
clean air, wildflowers, nature at its purest. If this envi-
ronment becomes polluted, choked with the detritus of 
man’s daily existence, it quickly becomes uninhabitable. 
Your inner environment functions the same way. It is 
polluted by many things from the outer environment—
smoke, air pollution, chemical wastes in our drinking 
supply, and toxic chemicals in the food we eat. It can 
also be polluted by anger, hate, pain, greed, jealousy, or 
fear. This is the detritus we find strewn about in our in-
ner environment, and without care, this environment, 
too, becomes uninhabitable. We must remember that we 
are the ecologists for both the outer and the inner en-
vironments. We and they are inextricably intertwined, 
and our lack of caring for them produces problems in 
our lives, like sickness, malaise, depression, and acts of 
hatred toward one another. While we individually exert 
little control over the whole of our outer environment, 
we have full control over our inner environment, and 
we have a responsibility to keep it healthy.
We can do this by utilizing the body’s natural energy 
sources. The body naturally relieves pain and fatigue 
with three simple, yet effective, actions: yawning, sigh-
ing, and shaking. These can be quickly demonstrated 
if you imagine you have been driving for a long time 
in a car. When you finally stop and get out, you yawn 
through your whole body, shake yourself a little, and 
breathe deeply in and out, which provides you with 
relief from tension and pain, and then infuses you with 
energy. The pain relievers evolve into natural “relaxer-
energizers,” which are always healthful and sensory 
experiences. Some natural relaxer-energizers include 
yawning, humming, pleasure sighing, easy shaking, 
smiling, singing, laughing, and dancing. When you 
perform any of these actions easily, your body bal-
ances, and you feel good. On a higher level, the dual-
ity of breathing and posture, which is felt when we 
breathe easily and instinctively while standing, sitting, 
or moving with an elongated spine, is a potent relaxer-
energizer. Likewise, the sensation of rhythm, which is 
fundamental to all body movement, is a sophisticated 
body relaxer-energizer.  It is a self-regulating device 
and provides an esthetic experience of body symmetry, 
balance, and expression. 
And this brings us back to those elderly concert-goers 
at the beginning of this article. These people responded 
to the relaxer-energizer of rhythm. They began to nod 
their heads, tap their feet, shake their shoulders, and 
then sway to the beat—all forms of shaking, a natural 
body pain reliever and a natural relaxer-energizer. Feel-
ing the lessening of pain and the increase of energy, 
these elderly people were soon able to get up and begin 
dancing—another relaxer-energizer!—which then in-
duced smiling and laughing, singing and humming, 
and better breathing—all relaxer-energizers. No wonder 
they feel younger!
When you feel and can sustain the energy qualities in 
your body, you can apply them to any situation where 
there is tension, anxiety, stiffness, or pain and feel relief. 
(For example, studies now show the effects of laughter 
in reducing cancer.) Likewise, it is impossible to hold 
onto hate, or any other negative emotion, while you are 
enjoying the body’s natural energy qualities. And this is 
significant for our communities and our world at large 
because once you begin to take care of your inner envi-
ronment, it is a natural step to want to improve the out-
er environment—both as an act of self-protection and 
of love. Thus, our own healthfulness can open the door 
to humaneness. We share much with other humans: 
both biological humanness and cultural humanness. All 
cultures can belong to all of us, because everything that 
is in another culture can be found in our bodies in the 
form of natural body energies, including singing, danc-
ing, and humor. Once we accept our shared human-
ness, humaneness can be learned, and all humaneness 
is healthy. The poisons that can be dealt with through 
humaneness are the emotional and psychological poi-
sons: hate, prejudice, jealousy, greed, wrathful-anger, 
lying, fear. First, we must recognize that, for the sake of 
healthfulness, we MUST control them. We must recog-
nize and be utterly convinced that these are indeed the 
foulest of poisons, and that only an exceedingly selfish 
desire for healthfulness in ourselves and in our world 
will eradicate them. 
When you walk, do you feel like you are dancing? If 
so, you are tapping into the fountain of wellness: your 
own body’s energy.
I look forward to further discussion on this and other 
topics throughout the year.
A University Dialogue on Health  2009–2010
Bibliography
Lessac, A.  1997. The Use and Training of the Human Voice: A 
Bio-Dynamic Approach to Vocal Life, 3rd edition, Mountain 
View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company.
Lessac, A.  1990.  Body Wisdom: The Use and Training of 
the Human Body, 2nd Edition, San Bernardino, CA:  Lessac 
Institute Publishing Company.
 Lessac, A. and Kinghorn, D.  2009.  The Way of Feeling: 
Feeling the Way, unpublished book. 


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When you walk, do you feel like you are dancing?

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