Dance Me Free

When I got diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS), I was bombarded with fear mindsets, pressure to take harsh medications, and charts and graphs of statistics about what I wouldn’t be able to do over a short amount of time. The word “demyelination” kept appearing on my MRI reports, along with scans showing the legions that had formed in my brain. The general consensus was that my myelin sheathe, the protective covering around my nervous system, would inevitably wear down rapidly, and I needed to get prepared for the debilitation and downfall that would soon follow.

What none of these “specialists” of MS told me because they were so fixated on DE-myelination, was that myelin can be built. It can be rebuilt to not only strengthen the nervous system, and aid in healing, but to also help us learn or relearn anything and everything that we might have wanted to in the past. In fact, as I discovered a few years after the diagnosis (and not from these previous practitioners) , we are building myelin daily without knowing it- when we walk, talk, read, problem solve and deeply practice, well… anything!

I just needed someone to teach me this. And you know what they say? “When the student is ready, the teacher appears.” And boy, did my teachers take on the most fantastical, unexpected appearances!

Teacher 1- Dance

When I initially lost feeling in my body for months, I vowed to the Universe that if I was given the feeling back, I would go out and dance and appreciate my body. That I would stop comparing myself to other people and would move, just because I could and wanted to. Now that I understood how precious the body and being able to express with it truly was, I was going to take every opportunity to use it if given the chance again.

The Universe heard me, gave me back the feeling over a short amount of time, and of course I kept my promise. For many years that followed, I attended dance classes and workshops from international instructors I would never have dreamed of learning from before. I went out social dancing to honor my body and put into practice what I was learning in class.

To my surprise, Dance became one of my best healers and teachers. Besides all the benefits of moving my own body, and learning I could turn almost any space into a dance floor, observing the movements of others and seeing what great feats our bodies were capable of, was both life and, I was later to discover, brain altering for me.

Sure, there were many days when I felt weaker or insecure, or shaky or unsure. But the difference was that I just paused or took a break, while never forgetting what Dance had already shown me. I might have needed to step off the dance floor for large chunks of time, but Dance always called me back. It became a healthy habit that I could not ignore. It improved my confidence, got me to be more present, and it was the first activity that consciously taught me that muscle memory is a real thing that I could build, even well into adulthood.

Through practice, repetition, honing in on mistakes and correcting them, I was strengthening, becoming more flexible, free, and nuanced in my movements. Dance taught me to not be afraid of making mistakes. That it was actually the making of mistakes that would show me where I needed to improve, and propel me forward, literally, (or backward if it was a cha cha or tango) as I purposely worked through those challenges.

After awhile, the symptoms I had originally been feeling- loss of sensation, lack of coordination, loss of strength or vitality, were shifting. They didn’t last as long, or I didn’t panic when they appeared. Instead, I connected to my body to find out what it needed, and gave it exactly that. Whether it was rest, healthy boundaries, speaking up, being on my own, or just going out dancing more, I could hear what my body was asking for, and for the first time, I knew how to really listen.

I felt stronger, more focused, and grateful for the body I might have previously been taking for granted. I took care of my body more intentionally and was showing up more embodied in activities that I would normally shy away from. My body must have noticed, and I believe it was excited for my finally coming around to see and feel what was actually available for me.

Dancing got me tapped into my own artistry and put me in spaces with other artists -actors, singers, musicians. These were creatives who honored their passion and did not let fear stop them from being seen or heard. Finally being able to recognize that I could be a part of these communities, that they weren’t so out of reach for me as I once thought, gave me the courage to explore another art form that I’d always dreamed of- Singing.

Teacher 2- Singing

When I came to Singing, I was scared of it. I thought I hated my voice, but I also envied others who courageously got in front of a microphone and stepped onto stages like they owned them. I wanted to experience that confidence and freedom in using my voice as well.

How perfectly orchestrated it was that I found Singing after finding Dance, or after they found me. Initially, I worried that I was coming to vocal lessons without any prior experience. But the tools and concepts I had learned from Dance – connection, flow, balance, texture, trust, grounding and letting go- also showed up as important components in my singing lessons, just through a different medium.

My vocal coaches presented information in a way that helped me be able to relate singing to dancing. I was able to pick up the concepts quicker because of this more personalized learning. And just as Dance influenced my understanding of Singing, Singing also further shaped my view of Dancing.

Having exercises already laid out for me to follow made it easy to build a regular habit of vocal training. I also didn’t need equipment other than my own voice and a room in which to make a little noise. I was surprised how much I grew to love the “noise” that was my own voice, my own instrument that came from within me, and was less afraid to have it be heard. My voice teachers helped me appreciate the uniqueness of my own resonance rather than trying to make me sound like someone else.

I remember the day when my first singing teacher asked me, “Who is that person, that voice inside you?” in one of our sessions. It later became a question I could ask myself not just while singing, but to reflect on in my daily life. Both Singing and Dance helped fine tune my sense of self and get me in touch with how I sounded and moved from the inside out.

This gave me so much incentive to not only keep going, but also to catch up for all the singing I didn’t do prior, when I thought I couldn’t sing or didn’t have the talent for it. I still wasn’t sure I did, but now that I had tried it, I loved it too much to stop, so I practiced and practiced and practiced!

The Talent Code

My voice instructor noticed my hunger to learn more, and the way I appreciated singing not just as an art, but as therapy. When she introduced me to the book The Talent Code, by Daniel Coyle, my journey through Dance and Singing, and even being diagnosed with MS, suddenly began making a lot more sense. Coyle’s findings opened up a new perspective for me on the purpose of practice- HOW to practice, as well as where learning and talent actually come from.

The Talent Code is built on the premise that talent is not born but learned and earned, through what Coyle calls deep practice. He goes to great lengths to prove this not just abstractly but scientifically. After spending months visiting what he called “talent hot beds”, places in different pockets of the world that seemed to magically produce “Everest-sized talent” in the form of musicians, athletes, pilots, vocalists and more, Coyle discovered what the real magic was behind their seemingly natural talent- myelin!

Coyle explains that “Every human skill, whether it’s playing baseball or playing Bach, is created by chains of nerve fibers carrying a tiny electrical impulse- basically a signal traveling through a circuit.” But that learning has to be held together, protected, contained. Myelin does just that. It’s a “neural insulator that wraps like electrical tape around a nerve fiber, preventing the electrical impulses from leaking out.”

And it’s that wrapping that allows us to build more and more skill, and retain that skill to continually build on top of it. Each wrap means the further building of myelin, which means faster and more accurate movements. In other words, more improvements in my dancing and singing!

Of course, Coyle acknowledges that “multiple sclerosis and other myelin- destroying autoimmune diseases” do exist. But he and the researchers he went to visit focused more on the power of myelin and its ability to grow. “Your brain has so many connections and possibilities that your genes can’t code the neurons to time things precisely,” Dr. Fields, one of the specialists said. “But you can build myelin to do it.” You CAN build myelin! Why didn’t anyone tell me this?

Coyle and his colleagues talked about myelin as “magic”, as the “holy grail of acquiring skill.” That the building of myelin comes from deep practice, through slowing a skill down when learning so that you can focus in on mistakes, and correct them. And that new, more accurate signals can be fired up into the neural pathways until they get engrained as if they were always there, as if they always existed, as if they were a “natural talent”.

I wasn’t aware of Daniel Coyle’s book when I first got diagnosed with MS. However, when I look back on how uncoordinated and lacking of sporty skills I first showed up with in dance, to how I built the muscle memory that I never had before to the point of it being habit, even with, and especially with, the MS diagnosis, I realize that I was living proof of Daniel Coyle’s findings. I believe that Dance allowed me to override the apparent demyelination in my body with myelination during the time I was heavily focused on dance, and practising it deeply.

Practise Makes Myelin…

Through each dance class, each practice, each social dance outing, I was honing in on details, fixing mistakes, repeating the subtlest movement several times to get it right, and coding the new learning into my muscle memory. Without knowing it, I was using the principles of the talent code several times a week, for many years. And it was adding up. I was firing circuits, making a difference to not just how I showed up on the dance floor, but what was being lit up and strengthened in my brain and neurological system for other areas of my life.

What first felt awkward or even sometimes impossible to learn when it came to Singing and Dancing transformed into habits that became familiar over time. I thought it was just because I was putting in so much effort, enjoying these activities, and so grateful that I could finally take part in them.

But now I see it was more than that. My body was wrapping the neural circuits that would protect and build these habits into not just my muscle memory, but my neural memory. And actually, The Talent Code clarifies that, “When a coach uses the phrase muscle memory, he is actually talking about circuits…”, because “…by themselves, our muscles are useless as a puppet without strings,” says Dr. Fields, “our skills are all in our wires.”

Through Coyle’s findings, I learned that myelin is living tissue, infrastructure, just like us. That it can shift and change and build and strengthen. That’s why we have to keep firing those circuits, and that’s what I was doing when I was showing up to dance class, week after week, month after month, and year after year.

Seeing myelin described, in Daniel Coyle’s book, as having “magical-seeming effects”, being an “epiphany”, and that it can “cause sober minded neurologists to smile and stammer…” lit up my whole body and made me smile. “It’s wow,” “It’s big! Revolutionary,” said Coyle and his colleagues. “It’s the key to talking, reading, learning skills, and being human,” Dr. Fields said. “Myelination- it’s one of the most intricate and exquisite cell to cell processes there is.”

This was a totally different picture of myelin than what I was given from the neurologists I had seen. This new, exciting perspective got encoded into my system the more I read about it. And I kept seeing more and more proof of it the more I opened my mind, eyes, and brain to it. I started associating myelin with building, not destroying, with fun and freedom, not fear and rigidity.

Coyle said that “knowing about myelin changes the way they (the neurologists he went to visit) see the world.” Well, it has changed my whole world as well because Coyle reintroduced myelin to me in an empowering, hopeful, enlivening way. I started worrying less about being perfect as a singer, dancer, or writer after learning about myelin’s power. And instead, I started celebrating that every time I practised, I was getting in another myelin workout, which is live giving and strengthening. I would mess something up and then get frustrated, but then catch myself smiling saying, “It’s okay. I’m just building myelin!”

Every day, I continue to intentionally do at least one myelin-building practice every day. Though there is weakness in my legs and dancing has been less accessible to me these days, I now understand that I learned to walk and dance because of myelin. It allowed those skills to get “stashed in my unconscious mind,”… so they became like second nature. And that means that I can use myelin to rebuild those skills.

So I practice singing, or writing, or pushups or squats, building more myelin. And myelin doesn’t discriminate, “Our myelin doesn’t ‘know’ whether it’s being used for playing short-stop or playing Schubert: regardless of its use, it grows according to the same rules. Myelin is meritocratic…myelin doesn’t care who you are- it cares what you do.”

It gets built no matter what the skill or exercise is that we deeply practise. “We’re forever building vast, intricate circuits, and we’re simultaneously forgetting that we built them. Which is where myelin comes in.” And guess what? It works. My coordination has become so much more solidified and familiar in my singing, that I’ve made it my new dance. And I can’t even imagine not having it in my life now.

One of my vocal coaches commented on how impressed she was that even with a diagnosis of an illness that was expected to break down and unravel the coding that would help me build skill and improve my vocal coordination, I was able to not only build the correct connections, but also greatly expand my vocal range. This is because I was practising in a deep, consistent, and purposeful way. I put time and focus in the practising, no longer worrying if I was good or bad at singing, or that I might not be getting it perfect from the start. but excited by the awareness that in that practice, I am building myelin.

And the irony is that it’s the myelin that leads us to perfecting a skill. “…it’s time to rewrite the maxim that practice makes perfect. The truth is, practice makes myelin, and myelin makes perfect” Coyle poignantly shares.

Thanks to Dance and Singing, and Daniel Coyle, it’s the magic of what myelin can help us learn and develop and grow that I associate with this amazing mechanism, not debilitation or weakness.

And I will not stop building myelin purposely now that I have this awareness. “The story of skill and talent is the story of myelin”- Coyle

Please note: The image at the top of the post is not an image of myelin. However, it gives a sense of the magical quality of myelin that I wanted to capture here. According to the specialists in Coyle’s book, myelin is microscopic and rather dull looking in appearance, but powerful in what it can do and help us do.