Our first Spanish word is: Abrazo. Hug. And that may be a very good place to begin, because before tango becomes steps, figures, technique, leading, following, musicality or anything else we might eventually call dancing, two vertical human bodies have to meet. But first, there is only one. Yours. DANCING WITH MYSELF Stand up and notice. There you are. A vertical vertebrate balanced on two relatively small feet, with a heavy head at the top, a long articulated spine underneat

Presto — Find Your Square One! Not everyone loves square one. You roll the dice. “Go back to square one.” It feels like losing. We want to get ahead. We want to know what’s next. We want to leap across the board. But your body is not a board game. It is a living organism—of movement, perception, and possibility. So we return. Not as punishment. As orientation. Stand up. Land on your own two feet. Barefoot, or in socks. Feel the ground. This is the crux: Your feet are not here

The Fine Art of Not Giving a Quack There is letting go, and then there is Let Go. Most of us are already quite familiar with the first kind. We let go when we get a massage. We let go in savasana. We let go on vacation, in the bathtub, after the second glass of wine, during a walk in the woods or for twelve miraculous minutes before somebody sends us a text that requires an immediate and unnecessarily complicated response. Then we pick everything back up. This is perfectly un

A Low Back Remedy There is a peculiar thing humans do when they are worried about their backs: they hold them. We tighten the abdomen, stiffen the lumbar, pull the shoulders back, brace the core and generally try to make ourselves into something structurally reassuring. If the back feels vulnerable, it seems perfectly reasonable to hold it more. If something hurts, hold it still. If something feels weak, make it stronger. If the spine seems unstable, stabilize it. This can wo