Dance as a Healing Practice with Kristina Rich

There was a point when Kristina Rich realized something inside her felt less alive than she knew it could. Life had become more serious as the roles and responsibilities of adulthood accumulated. Somewhere along the way, something she had loved instinctively as a child had slipped away: dancing.

Kristina remembered making up dances with friends and recording songs onto cassette tapes. Movement had once felt natural, playful, and completely unselfconscious. As an adult, she began returning to it privately, especially when an emotion felt too big to contain. “I feel like what I was trying to express at this time was an aliveness that I knew existed inside of me,” she told us.

That return eventually became much bigger than dancing around her house. Dance became a language for Kristina and a way to explore emotion, intuition, creativity, and spirituality. It also helped her question the stories she carried about how she was supposed to act.

Our conversation with Kristina explores dance as a healing practice through her own deeply personal experience and group dance experiences she facilitates. We talked about movement without performance and the vulnerability of dancing in front of other people. We also explored tarot, archetypes, music, meditation, creativity, and what Kristina calls our own “mythological journey.”

Rediscovering What We Loved Before Life Got Serious

Kristina’s relationship with movement didn’t begin with a formal practice or a plan. She danced constantly as a child, as so many of us did. Then adulthood arrived, along with expectations that can make play feel less important. Eventually, she committed a year to bringing back more things she had loved as a child.

Dance became a significant part of that experiment, although it remained private at first. During difficult moments, Kristina noticed that her body wanted to move. Dance gave her somewhere to put emotions that didn’t always have words. During COVID, when uncertainty and overwhelm felt especially present, movement became one way she expressed what she was experiencing.

For Kristina, that distinction between simply dancing and dance as a healing practice became important. She wasn’t moving because dance belonged on a self-care checklist. She was curious about what might happen if she let movement become a language. “There’s a different experience when I’m going to let my soul speak to me through movement,” she said.

As that language developed, Kristina began wondering what it could feel like in community. She started hosting small gatherings for women at her home. Eventually, she knew she wanted a space with good floors, a sound system, and no mirrors. She wanted to create an environment where people could move without worrying about performing.

When Dance Stops Being About How It Looks

The word “dance” can bring up plenty of baggage. Some of us immediately think about choreography, rhythm, coordination, or whether we look ridiculous. Kristina wasn’t interested in teaching people a routine. Her work centered on creating room for people to move, play, experiment, and notice what emerged.

Many participants still arrived nervous. Some told Kristina they couldn’t dance, while others had no idea what they had signed up for. She understood that hesitation, so she found ways to make movement feel playful before asking people to go deeper. Paige and Jenna experienced this themselves at a retreat in January.

Kristina gathered everyone in a circle and started with something wonderfully unserious: animal noises. First, she made a noise and everyone copied her. Then each person made their own noise and eventually added movement. Paige remembered watching people who had seemed nervous begin having fun almost immediately.

That silliness wasn’t accidental. It sits near the center of Kristina’s work. “If I can make it silly, I feel like I succeeded,” she told us. “If people can be silly together, I really feel like I did my work.”

For Kristina, dance as a healing practice isn’t about perfect movement. Her experience has centered much more on permission and expression. She has noticed that when one person feels safe enough to look weird, someone beside them might feel safer doing the same.

Kristina has seen that dynamic within her own family, too. She and her husband have four children, and dancing has become normal in their home. They’ll dance together at local concerts, sometimes when nobody else has started yet. Before long, other people often join them.

From Tarot Cards to Archetypal Dance

Kristina is also a tarot reader and artist with a deep fascination for symbolism, astrology, and numerology. Those interests eventually collided with movement in what became her Archetypal Dance Adventure. The project unfolded across 22 months and followed the Major Arcana of the tarot.

Kristina spent a month deeply contemplating each archetype before creating its corresponding experience. She journaled, meditated, studied imagery, listened for music, and waited for ideas to emerge. The Fool, card zero, came first. Kristina spent that month thinking about curiosity and play, then translated those ideas into music, movement, games, and experiences.

Sometimes, she changed the plan minutes before people arrived. Rather than designing everything intellectually, Kristina wanted to understand each archetype through her own experience first. She described the process as devotional. The more attention she gave an archetype, the more connections she began noticing.

Some people attended every session in the 22-month journey. Over time, Kristina watched participants recognize those archetypes in their own lives. Even her mom, who Kristina described as someone who isn’t normally “into any of this stuff,” started noticing them.

After attending a session about the Hanged Man, her mom later recognized what she called a “Hanged Man moment.” Kristina associates that archetype with pausing, observing, and waiting when a decision doesn’t feel clear yet. Her mom had begun using the symbolism as language for her own experience, which Kristina found meaningful.

“You’re now seeing your life as its own mythology,” Kristina remembered thinking. She sees archetypes as another way to recognize patterns within our stories. The huge arcs we encounter in Star Wars or The Odyssey can also appear in ordinary moments. A pause, beginning, ending, or transformation can become part of how someone understands their own story.

The Vulnerability of Being Seen

There’s a particular vulnerability in moving freely when someone else can see you. Kristina’s personal experience with dance as a healing practice started largely in private, and she still dances alone regularly. Yet she has also discovered something different in being witnessed.

At home, Kristina sometimes tells her husband she’s “really going through it” and asks him simply to witness her. He doesn’t need to fix anything or respond. She moves while another person sees her, and that experience feels different from dancing alone.

The group experience adds another layer. When Kristina facilitates, she thinks of herself as holding the space rather than having the same experience as everyone else. Each person contributes something through their movement, and the room becomes collaborative. One person’s willingness can affect the person standing beside them.

Kristina connected that experience to something much larger than dance. She believes many of the stories saying “I can’t” come from outside conditioning. We absorb ideas about how we’re supposed to look, act, sound, and behave. Eventually, those messages can become difficult to distinguish from our own beliefs.

Movement became one place where Kristina started questioning those messages. Instead of analyzing everything from her head, she became interested in listening to what her body expressed. She described that process simply as “a sacred practice of listening.”

We heard a different version of that mind-body connection in our conversation with Lena Walker about breathwork, ketamine therapy, and finding your way back to yourself. Lena’s experience was very different from Kristina’s, but both conversations touched on what changed for them when healing involved more than thinking their way through something.

Finding Emotion Through Music

Music plays an enormous role in Kristina’s relationship with movement. She listens widely and intentionally, and one Spotify recap told her she had listened to around 500 genres in a year. She joked that she didn’t even know there were 500 genres.

Exploring unfamiliar music changed the way Kristina danced. Different sounds seemed to access different emotions and forms of movement. Some songs felt silly and playful, while others opened something heavier. That range became especially important while she created her Archetypal Dance Adventure.

An experience around the Fool couldn’t sound like one built around Death, the Devil, or the Tower. Kristina chose music to complement the emotional landscape she was exploring. Some archetypes brought her toward lighter experiences, while others took her into what she described as shadow work.

Jenna noticed something interesting as Kristina explained that process. Sometimes music seems to identify an emotion before we have language for it. A song hits something, and only then do we realize what we’re feeling. Kristina’s exploration of new music expanded the range of emotions and movement available to her.

Her everyday practice can also be incredibly simple. Kristina keeps a small collection of songs she loves, and sometimes she puts on headphones and dances for five minutes. On any given day, what comes out might look completely different. Those few minutes have become one of the most consistent expressions of dance as a healing practice in her life.

Moving Without Trying to Look Cool

One idea kept surfacing throughout our conversation: the difference between performance and expression. Kristina has normalized movement so completely that she dances while doing chores. She keeps speakers throughout her house, and sometimes turning up the music is enough to get her kids out of bed.

Her yoga practice can also turn into dancing without warning. Family outings become dance floors. Movement shows up throughout her life because it feels natural now, not because she schedules every moment of it.

What matters to Kristina isn’t whether it looks cool. As she put it, “it feels cool,” and that matters more to her. She doesn’t need to produce the correct movement for someone watching because she’s more interested in what happens when she stops performing.

Kristina has also noticed that this freedom can spread. When somebody confidently looks quirky, weird, or different, other people sometimes loosen up too. One person stops performing, and someone else realizes they might not have to perform either. That shared permission became one of the most memorable parts of experiencing her work ourselves.

Meditation, Creativity, and Learning How to Listen

Dance isn’t Kristina’s only practice. Her relationship with inner listening began through an intense meditation practice. There was a period when she woke around 4:30 in the morning and meditated in her closet, exploring practices including transcendental meditation and Vipassana.

Over time, she became more familiar with what dropping inward felt like for her. Eventually, her practices changed because she no longer felt that connection required such an elaborate process. Instead, she created rituals that worked within her life and the time she had available.

That evolution reminded us of our conversation with Melissa Seil-Butler about energy healing, meditation, and learning to listen. Both conversations explored what it can look like to become more aware of your inner experience, although their personal practices took different forms.

Kristina journals extensively, sometimes keeping five journals for different purposes. She paints, writes fiction and nonfiction, prays, practices yoga, and spends time at an altar in her home. The altar serves partly as a place of remembering, with objects that connect her to ideas and experiences she wants to integrate.

That same curiosity runs through her creative work. Kristina is developing Tarot in Space, a project that combines tarot, archetypes, comedy, improv, and a fictional virtual dive bar. Different characters arrive at the bar with their own cocktails and lessons. Kristina imagines the whole thing with what she calls a “glam punk rock” energy.

The project was still taking shape when we recorded our conversation. Kristina was experimenting with the technical side of podcasting and figuring out what she wanted it to become. That unfinished quality seemed fitting for someone so interested in curiosity, experimentation, and letting ideas reveal themselves over time.

The Archetypes Kristina Is Living With Now

Toward the end of our conversation, Jenna asked Kristina which tarot archetype felt especially present in her life. Kristina couldn’t choose only one. She had been thinking about the Magician and the Hermit, along with the relationship between them.

To Kristina, the Magician represents creative power, words, influence, and discovering what we can create. The Hermit feels like a more mature expression of some of that energy. Instead of constantly sharing outwardly, the Hermit turns inward and becomes more selective about where to place attention.

Kristina has also been thinking about the Wheel and its reminder that nothing stays permanent. No matter how much she learns, life changes. The wheel turns, and she encounters beginnings again. She loves finding connections between these cards, numbers, and archetypes, sometimes joking that following the clues makes her feel like she’s in National Treasure.

Those ideas have also led Kristina to think deeply about influence. She wants to notice the voices shaping what she believes is possible. More specifically, she wants to recognize when an outside influence becomes so loud that she mistakes it for her own voice.

That desire circles directly back to movement. Kristina wants the freedom to dance how she wants, make the art she wants, and follow her creative interests. Dance as a healing practice became one expression of that freedom. Tarot, writing, meditation, and art became others.

When Jenna reflected that Kristina seemed to be searching for freedom from outside influence, Kristina refined the idea with one word: “Clarity.”

Trusting Her Own Mythological Journey

At the end of our conversation, we asked Kristina what had become most important to her through all of this. She returned to the idea of trusting her own mythological journey. For her, that includes listening to intuition while also paying attention to outside influence.

Kristina wants to recognize which stories belong to her and which ones came from somewhere else. She also wants to notice the limits she may have absorbed without realizing it. Movement has given her one place to explore that distinction without needing to think her way through everything first.

Her relationship with dance seems to embody that exploration. She started with something she had loved as a child and brought it back into her home. Then she let it become stranger, deeper, more playful, and more meaningful. Eventually, she invited other people into it and created a 22-month exploration of movement and archetypes.

What began as private movement became community, creativity, music, tarot, and a new way for Kristina to understand her own experiences. Beneath all of those layers was the feeling she described near the beginning of our conversation. She knew there was an aliveness inside her, and dancing became one way she learned to let it come through.

Listen to the full episode: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube

Connect with Kristina:
Kristina Rich: Instagram: @asha__kristina

Tarot in Space: Website | Instagram: @tarot.in.space

Related Episodes: Energy Healing and Meditation: Learning to Listen, Ketamine Therapy, Breathwork, and Healing: Finding Your Way Back to You