Feeling Stuck? How Dance and Shaking Help Release Emotional Blocks | James Ainsworth

On New Year’s Eve 2021, I made a different choice. Instead of repeating the usual pattern of drinking, distraction, and waking up hungover on January 1st, I walked into a sober ecstatic dance event alone. I was anxious. I was nervous. And it changed my life.

In this episode, I explore how movement became medicine — not just as a way to have fun, but as a powerful tool for emotional release, confidence, and self-connection. I share how learning to “dance with the emotion” helped me move through fear, anxiety, guilt, and resistance rather than suppressing them.

We talk about embodiment, projection, and why the qualities you admire in others — confidence, charisma, energy — already exist within you. The key is learning how to reclaim them.

This conversation is about more than dance. It’s about using movement to process emotions, build resilience, and take aligned action in your life. Whether through ecstatic dance, shaking, yoga, running, or any form of embodied practice, your body holds the wisdom.

If you’ve been feeling stuck, disconnected, or held back by fear, this episode is an invitation to move — and see what shifts.

Transcript

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What if the emotion you're trying to get rid of is actually asking to be moved? On New Year's Eve 2021, I walked into an ecstatic dance event, terrified and walked out, changed, not because I became a better dancer, but because I stopped resisting what I was feeling and started moving with it. In this episode, I'm talking about embodiment, projection, reclaiming your power, and why. Action. Real physical action is what transforms insight into change. Welcome to You Matter. I matter, a transformational podcast about reconnecting with what truly matters. I'm your host James, and each week is an opportunity to explore a little bit deeper who you really are with amazing guests. We explore topics such as purpose, connection, commitment, and what it really means to live more consciously. If you've been feeling disconnected from yourself, from others, or from life, you are in the right place. Join us on new matter. I matter. Now. Let's begin. It is New Year's Eve 2021, and I decided to. Go and do something a little bit different. I was a little bit sick and tired of doing the same old stuff of going out, drinking, getting drunk, having a hangover next day, and that's it. You start, that's how you start the new year. So I looked for an event where I could go by myself, I could dance and. I could be sober without being judged. And I was searching the internet and I found this event a static dance, Nottingham, and it was an ecstatic dance New Year's Eve party. And I decided to go, yes, I was terrified, I was nervous, I had anxiety, I was shaken, but I had the most amazing experience I've ever had. And yeah, when I first went and we started dancing, there was a little bit of stiffness with regards to how I, Mel, how I moved. There was a little bit of anxiety as holding myself back a little bit. But then as the evening went on, I relaxed more and more, and ever since that evening, back in December. 31st. I have never looked back with regards to dancing since then. I went fortnightly to Nottingham to go and do a ecstatic dance. I've been to countless festivals and retreat say dance retreats down in dor. I've also go to different places around the country to do the same sober raven, and I absolutely love it. I don't mind going by myself because I meet people there anyway, and a lot of people go by themselves as well, and it is just an really and really enjoyable experience. Now, the reason I talked about this experience is because movement is such. An important part of my life and I wanna talk about how it can help you, not just with having fun, but it can be used to release anxiety, to release fear, to release to, yeah, to release any emotion that you may have stuck. And and also why I'm there to, I'm talking about dance. I wanna talk about shaking as well. I've started to do some shaking, which is great for release. So dance. What I've come to realize over the last four years, four or five years, is that quite often you can dance to the emotion that you are feeling. So if you are feeling anxiety. Then you can dance with that anxiety. You can dance with the fear, you can dance with happiness. You can dance with fun, and it's a way of actually being able to release the emotion. What do I mean when I say IDI can dance with the emotion. For me personally, I say for example, I'm going to a new place where I can do dance sober, a sober rave, and I know nobody, I'm going to feel some anxiety and I might even feel some fear. So for, for me. Feeling anxiety or fear, I might feel the sensation in my body. For example, fear At this moment, I feel in my, I feel a little bit of fear in my chest base, and I feel some anxiety around my navel area, in my belly button. So when I go and dance, I will focus on being in that area. For example, if I'm feeling fear in my chest, I'll allow myself to drop it from my head into my chest, and I will surrender how I move. So I'll allow my body to move how it wants to move while being focusing on that fear. I remember going to a dance festival and. The DJ said that if you are struggling to dance to the music, then dance to the resistance to the music. So ever since then I started to. Whatever I'm feeling, wherever I'm feeling happy, joyful, fearful, sadness, whatever it is, grief, then I allow myself to dance to that emotion because not only do you allow yourself to release some of that emotion, you also allow that emotion to be seen. Now, I've talked about it several times, how important it is for for us to acknowledge and to accept our emotions. It doesn't mean you have to live there, but when you acknowledge and surrender to, to kind of acknowledge and accept those emotions, you actually allow them emotions to be seen. And once those emotions are allowed to be seen, quite often they actually have a message for us to acknowledge. For example, the other day I was feeling, I was feeling guilty. And so the guilt told me to accept the truth to what I'm actually guilty about. And in that moment I accepted that that guilt and took action, whatever that action might be. So that might be gonna tell that person, or it might be going and, making amends, or it might be that I just allow myself to acknowledge that and to release that emotion. So it's so important to be able to acknowledge these emotions and dance allows us to do this. So dance allows us to move and acknowledge these emotions, that these emotions can feel acknowledged, accepted, and can be heard. And it doesn't have to just be dancing. You could do other things. You could do things like yoga, running. I ought to do CrossFit, which is a great way for movement. There's also things such as, obviously said, shaking. There's lots of different ways you can move your body around to release whatever needs to be released. One thing I've noticed. That people get awestruck by rock stars and pop stars and footballers, and quite often, this is my own belief, that when you look up to somebody so much and say, for example, you look up to a rock star and he has a great charisma, he has a great energy, and you see this rock star or this pop star as a God or a goddess, and you your energy, you almost worship them. And I think from my own perspective, I feel like people sometimes give their power away to these people. And really there's this charisma or this energy or this elegance of these pe, these people they look up to that actually belong to themselves. But they see it in other people rather than see it inside themselves. And so it's bringing yourself back to, okay, I see elegance or charisma or energy in that person. Maybe I can start to accept that in myself. And so I noticed. In when I was dance dancing, quite often what I will notice is I will notice beautiful girls around me, and what I do is if I become conscious that I'm seeing these beautiful girls, suddenly, then okay, now I can allow myself to see the beauty in myself, and then I can dance with that beauty and then see that beauty inside my own body. What I'm trying to say is that sometimes we look up to people, we worship them, and we almost allow ourselves to give our power away. So rather than always giving our power away, we bring our power back. We see these aspects of the, these people that we look up to in ourselves. So then we're able to, we're able to worship ourselves. We're able to love ourselves in a whole new level. So it could be seeing a beautiful woman and then you see the beauty in yourself. Or it could be that you see this guy as footballer has amazing energy, and so you can see that energy in yourself and you can start to express that energy. You can start to see it in yourself when you're doing like running or see yourself when you are out and about around town or. Going and chatting to people. It could be charisma, could be confidence. You might see a professional speaker on stage and think he is such a confident man. So then you look at yourself and say, okay, where do I see confidence in myself? And where can I start to build that confidence so that I can start to really hone in my own abilities. The key point I wanna make from this is that we have every ability, attribute, whatever you wanna call it inside us. And so it's not about telling ourselves that we're not confident or we're not worthy or. I don't have charisma energy because we have those things. Some things come easier to us than other things, but then some things require a lot more work in order to progress. And obviously I was just mentioning that using pop stars, rock stars, footballers, professional speakers as an example, that in order for us to see parts of ourselves that. We might not acknowledge is by looking at others and how we see them, and then bringing that back to ourselves and asking ourselves, how can I hone in this skill? To say, for example, again, let's use confidence, you know, if somebody's really confident, but then you kind of acknowledge that you see that in yourself. What steps can you take? In order to start, to start to build that confidence, how can you start to create a little bit more charisma? How can you start to create that idea of more energy, whether that's healthy eating, or it could be that you start to fitness classes or you just start to acknowledge that you have more energy and you start going for a run. And these things, some things come easily. As I said, other things don't, and the things that perhaps don't come easily to us that we have to work on, it's not gonna be a straight line. We're gonna have times where we have massive breakthroughs, baked breakthroughs, and we're gonna have times when things quite don't, don't quite go to plan, but actually. The times that don't go to plan are where we can learn the most going through. If I bring my relationships into this, when I went into my first proper relationship, I didn't know how to be that perfect partner or that, and no, I wouldn't say use the word perfect. I would, I didn't know how to be a great partner partner. But with time and energy, I was able to build on that. And then each relationship I have built and built and built upon that until I am here right this moment. And it's taken me 10 years and I've had breakthroughs and I've had times where I've kind of, that they failed, but a failure didn't stop me. The a failure allowed me to hone in what I needed to work on. So that I can strength it. And so it's understanding that some of these attributes might not come straight away. They might require work, they might require failures. They might require, and when I say failures, I don't mean as in it's, I failed. That's it. I mean, as in I failed. Okay, so now how can I step up and move it to the next level? And it's in those moments where we can learn the most. If we know what we want to build on or strengthen or kind of expand, then it requires our ability to take action. We can have this idea in our head, but unless we put physical action steps in place and take the action, we very rarely get to the end goal. So it's about. Knowing what we want, what we wanna strengthen, what we wanna build, and then taking the action, the necessary action in order to build it. Say for example, you want to build, you wanna become more confident. So then you think to yourself, okay, how can I start to become more confident? What you wanna become more confident in. Do you wanna become more confident as a professional speaker or speaking in public? And in that case, your action step might be to research where you can go and practice speaking in front of other people. Or it might be you wanna become more confident at running. So in that case, you've gotta go out and start running, or at least start walking. It could be that you want to become more confident at marketing, so then you might do some research on the marketing you wanna become more confident in, whether that's social media or email marketing. It might be as another example. It might be you wanna become better at singing. In that case, you might get yourself a coach. Wh whatever it is there requires, it requires taking the necessary action, creating a plan, and then executing the plan with, with physical action. And it's so important to understand that with our action, we get nowhere. So if we bring it full circle to to dancing. I knew that I didn't want to go and go to go out for a night, get drunk, and then come back and have a hangover next day. So I researched where I can find dance events, where I can stay sober, I can meet new people, and I'm not gonna be judged. And I found a static dance, which then required me to take the action, to book the ticket, and then go. And then obviously after I went for the first time, I'd go again and again and again. And that's where my strength of being able to dance sober, but also being able to get more into the body, acknowledge emotions, dance allowed me to really hone in feeling into the body. Becoming embodied. Dance is for me, dance is that embodiment. Whereas other people might see other things as yoga shaking, that kind of thing. With regards to public speaking, that's the reason I mentioned public speaking is because again, for me to be able to speak in front of an audience, I had to go and do it. So I joined Toastmasters. I researched where I can do it. Found Toastmasters, went to Toastmasters. Another example podcast, if I might have this. In fact, I had this idea of ruling a podcast for many, many years, and eventually I took the action of doing, taking the steps, and it was only when I took the action of actually be researching what I needed to do, finding guests, interviewing guests, and then uploading it that I started to create the podcast. And so, yeah, it, it requires action. Whatever you are looking at doing, and what you'll find is though, that the more that you take action, the easier it gets. And then you might find, okay, it's become, it's become easy. How can I move a to the next level? How can I move the next to the next level so I can get another breakthrough? And through that next level expansion, you are able to start to build upon what you are doing. And quite often what we love doing the most is what becomes our career or our job. I wanted to finish off this episode with some action steps that you can take with regards to the things we've talked about. So the first thing we mentioned about was movement and. How important movement was. So this could be anything from shaking first thing in the morning as part of your morning routine. It could be yoga, it could be Pilates, it could be CrossFit, running, dancing, anywhere you can move your body. And so yeah, it's allowing yourself to be able to really express. How your body wants to feel or is currently feeling. And so taking action, so this might be mean, researching. Where can I find a yoga class? How long do I wanna shake for? How can I find a CrossFit class? What can I add in a morning routine for movement? How can I stretch first thing in the morning? These are the questions you need to ask yourself in regards to how you want to, how movement can be part of your everyday life, everyday routine. Another thing we mentioned was about seeing parts of ourselves in others. So say for example, we're talking about rock stars, top ballers, speakers. So it's about becoming conscious when you go out. How do you see other people? Do you see other people as a light? And can you allow that light inside yourself to shine? And so once we are able to identify different aspects of ourselves and others, how can then we, how, what can we do to start to take action? So that we can start to improve these attributes or qualities in ourselves. This might mean if you say, for example, you want to build some more confidence in yourself. What kind of things do you be confident in? Where do you wanna be confident? And then it's about creating a plan. So if you wanted to be confident playing football, where can you start to practice football more often? Can you go to a a with friends and play football at a park? Can you go and play for a team and or can you find somewhere you can go and find some coaching? And so I just wanted to hone in on this and how things like movement, in fact, we talked about movement all the way through, and so how movement is so important, how knowing qualities in others is so important in ourselves, how we can, uh, move through these qualities. How we can start to express these qualities so that others can see this in, in ourselves, so that we can become a light for others to see. And so I wanna end it there, and thank you for listening. If it's anything that you feel other people should hear, spread the word because the more that gets this episode or this podcast gets out, the more people listen to it, the more that people can, I can help people to be their best. Thank you for listening. If something in today's conversation resonated, take a moment to sit with it. And if you feel called, share this episode with someone who might need it to you matter. I matter is a growing space, and if you would like to stay connected. You're welcome to follow or subscribe wherever you are listening. It really helps us work to reach people. It's meant for. These conversations matter. You matter. I matter. Until next time, take care of yourself and the relationships in your life.