Dance. Dance. Dance. Shake your Hips.

This video, of a two year old dancing, captured my spirit today. I’ve shared it with everyone I know who loves dance as much as I do. I’ve watched it over and over. Each time, it makes me grin wider and inspires me to get up, dance, strutting through my kitchen and dining room while swaying and shaking my hips and booty.

I woke up to this sentence in my inbox last Tuesday:

Next week we will dance in the stripper shoes if you are ready to go there.

No, I haven’t ditched my day job—a few weeks ago I embarked upon my S Factor journey, slipping into a dark dance studio with seven other women to discover our “erotic creatures” under the glow of the red light (check out my first post here). A few classes in and we’re upping our game—literally. About six inches or so.

When I was a practicing gynecologist, a huge proportion of my patients admitted to feeling sexually unsatisfied when I gave them permission to express their authentic feelings. Now that I’ve transitioned from seeing gynecology patients to working with coaching clients, I’m seeing the same thing. So many of us feel a restlessness, a sense of yearning, a longing for something perhaps we feel we don’t quite deserve. We may love our partners and enjoy the intimacy we do have, and yet we have long suppressed the wild pony that bucks and kicks within us.

When I heard that Debbie Rosas, founder of the Nia movement classes was going to be teaching a dance class at Mama Gena’s School of Womanly Arts, I thought “Sign me up.” I grew up taking dance classes and was in a ballet company in my younger years. Someone told me Nia was part dance, part martial arts, part healing arts, and as a dancer/doctor, I thought, “Perfect!”