Photo Chiara Amadori 2025
Chronicles of the Dancing Yogi’s Body
Essay by Gabriela Zuarez.
December 23rd, 2025. Amsterdam
Halfway through my dance career, I discovered yoga for the first time. Back then, my days were packed with dance training, creative work, rehearsals, physiotherapy, and performances. My husband, his family, and I managed all of this together while living in the Dutch countryside.
At first, the prospect of incorporating yoga into my running regimen while maintaining my dance career seemed to offer no tangible benefits for dancers’ physical conditioning. At the same time, integrating yoga into the dance practice seemed somewhat incongruent. It appeared not entirely compatible with the overarching principles of Eastern yogic philosophy, which extend beyond the confines of yoga practice itself.
Nonetheless, during those formative years, my strong intuition geared me to the daily yoga practices at the yoga centre in Amsterdam’s De Pijp neighbourhood. At that time, I was driven by an intrinsic, motivational, and inexorable force. I could neither resist nor stop it. That intimate, deep force led me to daily yoga practice, a fact that those around me, including my partner, could not fully grasp.
Now, when I look back on that period of my life, I wonder if that intrinsic motivational force behind my profound dedication to the yoga practice was the inner simplicity of the yoga practice itself. Or perhaps that force was the effects of Pranayama manifested in my physical and mental bodies. Or it was the result of my pursuit of inner silence and introspective tranquillity while being engaged in a demanding and incessant hardworking lifestyle. Perhaps it was the result of my insatiable curiosity that, regarding the most elementary body poses, the Asanas, which rendered it paradoxically challenging for my over-trained and flexible dancing body.
Or, most probably, that intrinsic force was only ME experiencing a profound need for a sense of purpose in life that might transcend my physical dance existence and extend beyond the professional roles as a dancer I was in those early times.
The above underlying reasons for adhering to the yoga practice have remained shrouded in secrecy. Yet, they have steadily guided me wisely in maintaining a consistent routine. Gradually, step by step, the practice has evolved into an integral part of my daily life, becoming a personal prayer like the early music chanted by monks. That obstinate prayer has subtly penetrated the interstices of my personal and professional life, creating an intangible yet profound layer beneath the skin of my soul.
Only then could the yogic aspect of my being begin to advance over my physical anatomy, which was once that of a dance artist. The process of change had begun slowly, moving from within to without. It had surpassed and mutated my own corporeality from a dancing body to a yogic body.
As a consequence, my understanding of body alignment, physicality and theatricality, which I cultivated over the years through structured dance and theatre training, underwent an internal revision. My perspective on the concept of the dancing body or moving body experienced a gradual fluctuation, redirecting my mental focus in a nuanced manner.
After going through those transformational experiences far beyond the physical, indescribable inner spaces started to open up within myself. And I unveiled that, contrary to the common belief, seeing the dancing and yogic bodies as incompatible is a weak misconception. In fact, there are many commonalities between these two corporealities. With this, I suggest that they are not as different as previously thought, and these two corporealities share common issues, such as…to be named:
-the life-giving power of breath.
-the inherent limits of the flesh, and the need to transcend those limits,
-the issue of presence, which pertains to the visible and invisible aspects of matter,
-the quality of vulnerability,
-the dynamics of the ethereal, referred to the heart centre, which enables one to bridge the inner side to the outside, and also to bridge ‘ the other’.
The yogic process of awakening was initiated within myself, unveiling the ten bodies, or ten layers, that constitute the being. Those ten bodies, which all human beings in this world possess, though those ten bodies remain latent unless one undertakes the spiritual art of the yoga discipline.
Thereupon, I came to the realization that my dancing body—the one to which I have been meticulously tending over the years—is so confined and constrained by its own physical condition, its material production and its exposure… and I fell into a kind of sadness.
But…I have encountered that in the process of attaining a state of true unification of body and mind, the so-called ‘embodiment’ of the body, in the Western perspective, merely marks one very initial phase in the overall path of personal and spiritual growth.
While in the yogic praxis, the physical being surpasses and transcends the constraints imposed by the dancer’s physical embodiment. Thereby, the practice will enable one to overstep the confines of mere projection, attaining a more profound level of physical expansion and intrinsic emotional connection. All that will fuel spiritual engagement, encompassing and chaining both one’s inner realm and the splendor of human universal and generous nature, far beyond mere performance.
Sat Nam
