Tango High - Totally Legal!

Wednesday's class went better as they usually tend to do. Same number of mistakes, same levels of anxiety, but yesterday, after a week of stress and bad news, I decided to dance out my anger and disappointment. Dance is therapy, right? Might as well exploit the lesson to get rid of my sadness.

Apart from tango for 3 months, I've been taking bellydancing for three years. I love to dance and I love the natural high it brings. I had never heard of a tango high until I experienced it. The high I get with bellydancing is more energetic and more instant, like an exploding bomb of sequins. Since you dance it on your own, you know you're guaranteed a high as long as you want it.

With tango it's turned out to be different, unexpected and in some ways more intense. It creeps up on you, ending in a crescendo of feather-light highness. The teacher led me into a dance on Wednesday (read: dragged me screaming by the hair; my stress levels were off the scale) and a few moments into the song, I was stumbling around and said "I don't know what I'm doing".

He told me not to think, just follow through with whatever feels natural. So I did. I switched my brain right off. I tried to loosen up and simply follow, though I knew I was making mistakes. As the song played and I tried to relax, I felt myself lightening. For a few brief moments it felt like I was far, far away from all my troubles and cares.

And you know what? It was 100% purely, double distilled bliss. In a life with so much responsibility and stress, sometimes it's the perfect remedy not to think at all, not to be responsible for where you'll go next, not to know what the next move will be but not to care either, to not be afraid of where the next step in your life is coming from.

All too soon, in what felt like a matter of seconds, the song was over, and with that it was back to the real world. A tango high I've found seems to happen all in the brain. With other dancing when I'm happy I feel it rushing in my veins. With tango, I feel lightheaded but not dizzy, refreshed as if I just took a nice hot shower.

I'm starting to understand the attraction of tango. I've never learnt a dance before that involved two people. Who knows? Maybe we carry with us energies that we can exchange when we connect in different ways?