Couple dancing is an adventure that involves a common understanding of the physical language and the other communication channels at play in the creation of the shared sensations shaping the couple dancing experience. Before I began my dancing learning adventure, the mind images I created watching couples dance allured me. I wanted to have the experience I saw others having when dancing; I wanted the experience of dancing sexy dances, like cumbia or salsa, dances that looked fun and engaging. Yet, for many decades, a self-imposed sense of awkwardness and insecurity in the process of learning kept me shy and away from the experience. Somehow, that changed when I was exposed to Tango and I decided to learn. However, two years into my Tango dancing learning process I was not finding the “je ne sais quoi” I did not know I was looking for. I was about to quit when I had the fortune to meet a teacher who not only teaches tango as a dance and a cultural phenomenon; he lives it. His approach and demeanor caught my attention and I found Tango speaking to me in a familiar language, a language evoking a particular sense of belonging, nostalgia, and intimacy.

As I continued my journey, embracing my sense of belonging and a growing understanding of the dance through its culture, I began to realize how dancing Tango brings out some of the intrinsic physical and emotional subtleties of our relationship with ourselves, subtleties that are manifested and created with and through our dance partner during each Tango. These shared subtleties have at least two common pivotal centers: balance and rhythm. Our sense of balance and rhythm are embedded elements of our emotional stance and physical movement that usually are not within our conscious span of attention. However, paying conscious attention to our balance and rhythm grants us the opportunity to engage more fully and purposefully with ourselves and with those we are in contact with. When dancing Tango, for instance, being consciously aware of our own and our partner’s balance and rhythm are essential for communicating and creating a shared and deliberately purposeful experience. When thinking about it, this dynamic holds true for many of our other significant relationships.

Balance: Our sense of emotional and physical balance are crucial elements in both couple dancing and other human relationships. Our physical sense of balance determines how, when, and where we move towards, which is essential for dancing as well as for walking, running, and lifting objects.  Our emotional balance is a key component of how we behave and communicate with ourselves and others, and consequently plays a significant role in the quality of the experiences we create. When dancing tango, each partner is responsible for maintaining their own balance; and together, both are in charge of creating and maintaining a shared axis to move within mutual connection. This is not different in our other human relations. Maintaining balance within our own and shared axis is the essence that allows for the elegant pivoting and the pursuit of playful wooing, within a synchronized yet unchoreographed movement. The shared intimate experience created when dancing Tango demands full attention, on yourself as much as in your partner, a level of attention that is conveyed through the embrace and the direction of your sight, even with your eyes closed.

Rhythm: Physically, our sense of rhythm is how we flow in motion. Generally, our sense of rhythm is also kept in an other than conscious sense of awareness; granting us the ease to respond to the multiple physical stimuli we are exposed to when we move in the environment, such as other pedestrians moving with or towards us in a hallway or sidewalk, how we merge lanes when driving in the freeway, or how to move together with our partner and the rest of the dance floor when dancing.  On the other hand, one way to describe our sense of emotional rhythm is the congruency between the experience we want to create and our external and internal (thoughts) behavior and the environmental stimuli we are exposed to. In congruence, our emotional rhythm tends to manifest as a sense of ease and flow, and our attention is mostly outwards and receptive. When not, our external and internal behavior tends to be tense and most of our attention is inward and closed, and our outward attention is primarily being alert and scanning for potential threats, or simply by being there by not being there.

Neither our emotional nor our physical sense of balance and rhythm are static, and people display a wide range of emotional and physical sense of balance and rhythm. Being out of our conscious attention, we are usually unaware of the multiple patterns we experience and display. Bringing conscious attention to how we do what we do gives as an opportunity to review if our external and internal behaviors are aligned with who we believe are and want to be and assess if they are congruent with the life experience we want to create. Greater awareness brings the opportunity to make conscious revisions on how we do what we do, so what we do is better aligned with what we want.