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So there's a friend of mine Stan who is a native American from British Colombia said
to me he's visiting a friend up in British Colombia and
went to his little house and he heard this drumming.
And he came in the house and the friend was dancing in a bare skin in circles
around the fire on side of the house.
And stand to says, what are you doing?
And the man says, Stan, I love you a lot, you are a good friend of mine.
And I just want to tell you that my job is am a star bear dancer.
I dance in the circle and it creates a tunnel that goes up star bear.
And star bears are the bears in the sky that heal us every moment in the star
light and see to all the bears on the ground and you don't want to do this Stan.
You're a bear dancer in Southern California, you have friends,
you have a tribe.
You see I'm all alone in his house, dancing in a circle, all my life, and
Stan laughed.
And when he told me that story, my bear changed a lot.
Because suddenly when he worked with people,
he connected the people to the star bears.
And I think when you do an animal, when you dance as an animal,
when you dance as a tree, when you dance your own spirit that comes from inside
you, you're dancing something way beyond your conscious mind.
You're dancing the part of you and your spirit that reaches
the furthest to your greatest source of healing and power.
1:33
You're dancing to the stars, you're dancing to the center of the Earth.
You are dancing to your furthest ancestor and
it all happens by itself, you do not have to anything except dance.
Right now I work with a woman named Debra Cohaan who's a very interesting woman.
She's a gynecological surgeon specializing in AIDS patients at UCSF and
she had breast cancer and she decided that for the mastectomy surgery at UC,
she would choose her team by the one that would let her dance before her surgery.
So before the surgery, the table is there, she's dressed as a patient, the surgeon,
the anesthesiologist, and the nurses are all dressed.
And she puts on the music, I forgot which one.
And danced with the whole team, because she said, that's the way they're going to
do the best surgery and the way I'm going to do the best.
Unbeknownst to her, the anesthesiologist videod it, and it went viral on YouTube.
And now there are women dancing before their breast cancer surgery
all over the Earth.
You can Google it, it's Debra Cohaan, C-O-H-A-A-N.
So this is dance, again, the world of art and healing,
it goes way beyond our imagination.
No one had done that before, and she did it on TV now twice,
and now she runs a program at CommonWheel for Best Cancer women of Dance.
So I invite you to join the art and healing world of dance,
it's the most fun because dancing is the most fun.
Mary Rockwood Lane, PhD, RN, FAANAssociate Professor
Michael Samuels, MD
