Chronic pain is a condition that affects tens of millions of Americans and countless others around the world. Many people living with chronic pain are left with little hope when medical treatments cease to bring relief. Loolwa Khazzoom and Anna Tostrup Worsley are two outspoken women suffering from chronic pain who were among those left without answers or solutions. They independently sought alternative healing treatments and discovered a medicine that worked for them in music and dance.
In 1997, Khazzoom was struck in a hit and run head-on car collision that left her severely injured. She has suffered from chronic pain since then that was so severe for long periods that, in her own words, “contemplating suicide became as much a part of my morning routine as drinking a cup of coffee.”
Worsley became disabled at the age of eighteen after her spine was crushed in a bus crash in Indonesia. As if that were not enough, she was later dropped on the floor during back surgery at the hospital causing further spinal injury. Three years after her accident, while out on a walk, she was struck by a drunk driver. She has been in and out of a wheelchair for most of her adult life.
Both of these women spent years in desperate and debilitating pain. Both were given prognoses that left them with little hope to achieve future comfort and both felt abandoned by the medical systems in their respective countries (Khazzoom in the US and Worsley in Norway). Feeling deep despair, suicidal, alone and unable to live the life they wanted due to severe and chronic pain, both of them independently sought experimental therapies and found that music and dance helped them to relieve their pain and thereby to rebuild their lives.
Khazooom describes herself as having been a “dance fiend” and “uber athletic chick” before her accident. Seven years following her collision and still in chronic pain, she had nearly lost hope until one night she attended a retreat in the desert and watched a dance troupe perform. While watching the performance, she struggled to cope with feelings of deep loss that came from recognizing her own inability to move as before. However, once the dancers departed, she was left alone with the music. In those moments, she began to dance with her arms, the only part of her body without pain, and discovered a sense of relief that she had not experienced in years. Over the next few days, she reinvented her understanding of dance as not having to include “fancy footwork and twirls.” She began to connect to the music on such a level that by the end of the retreat, she was dancing with her full body and managing her pain effectively for the first time in years.
Through that discovery, Khazzoom continued to explore dance as a therapy for chronic pain and continued to find relief for her pain. She used dance to push and expand her own pain limits, in a process that she finds analogous to stretching during a Yoga practice. Out of this work, she developed a dance workshop called Dancing with Pain® to teach people with chronic pain how to find relief and even healing through dance. During the classes, she guides the students to contemplate healing thoughts by mindfully choosing her words and song selections. She carries the class through a variety of styles of music and she gives the students space to participate, or not participate, as needed by continuously reminding everyone to listen to their own bodies. The hope and confidence that she exudes in class by the telling of her own experiences are likely powerful enough alone to inspire hope for other chronic pain sufferers.
Worsley, off in Norway, discovered on her own that music, dance, and Yoga also brought her relief she had not felt in years. She found Khazzoom through her own research into alternative healing treatments and the two of them formed a friendship and often collaborate. These women were able to take their pain, sense of abandonment by the medical system and the insight they gained from their experiences and transform their life purposes. Though they still suffer from chronic pain, both of them now teach, write, inspire and lead others to seek pain free lives and to hope, using dance as therapy. Khazzoom and her Dancing with Pain® method has been featured in such media outlets as the New York Times and ABC News. Worsley writes the blog 365painfreedays.com to provide daily messages of hope and humor to other sufferers of chronic pain. She is also releasing a memoir about her experience in Norway this fall.
Their stories speak to the incredible healing power of music and dance. Such power may allow us to connect more deeply to ideas and emotions that really cannot be articulated with our spoken language or even interpreted by our thoughts. Music and dance also often provide a medium for physical contact and connection with other human beings. There is a profundity in such expression and connection that is pure love and pure bliss. Feeling that connection has a direct impact on our happiness and on our physical, emotional and spiritual health and healing.
Music and dance gave these women hope and empowerment to take action, move and heal. It’s also possible that using the insight from their experience in order to help others might also be part of the reason that they were able to come to manage their pain. It speaks to the message that if we survive and can share the lessons learned from our injuries purposefully and actively, then on some level, we all have the power to heal ourselves and to heal others.
Loolwa Khazzoom currently teaches Dance with Pain® workshops around California and the USA. Visit her website for further information: dancingwithpain.com
Learn more about Anna Tostrup Worsley’s courageous story and read her messages of hope for sufferers of chronic pain at: 365painfreedays.blogspot.com.
For more information about dance therapy, the American Dance Therapy Association is a resource: adta.org.
Rachael Cleghorn is a yoga student and teacher and a massage therapist who believes in the power of movement for healing.