When I was a child, every summer I danced
without knowing I was dancing.
No purpose.
No goal.
No reason beyond the movement itself.
When a piece of melody spoke to me,
I let the choreography move with me
I wasn’t concerned of being tired
or too hot.
Watermelons were always right there,
waiting for me.
School in China was demanding.
I learned how to be competent.
I didn’t remember when dancing disappeared —
only that it did.
In my mid-twenties,
when my life was organised around momentum and deadlines,
I met dance again.
Late at night, in the studio,
after squeezing time out of being “productive,”
my body could finally breathe.
I stood in front of the mirror,
trying body rolls and isolations.
Giggling with new friends nearby.
真 – can the body do this?
Am I allowed to feel this way?
It was an old feeling:
wooden toy blocks on my grandparents’ table,
white geese spreading their wings
by my other grandparents’ house.
And completely new, 太:
warm, salty Pacific air,
wide horizons,
a pink sun hanging low.
That was the year I began to dream in colours.
Night after night,
I danced through mountains and water,
as if the body were remembering a language
it had never been taught,
only interrupted.
There was a time
you did not try to be yourself.
You simply were.
You reached for what felt alive.
You stepped back from what felt wrong.
You trusted sensation before explanation.
This way of being did not vanish.
It went quiet.
Not because it was broken –
but because you were asked to “fit in”.
Somewhere in you,
there is still a pulse that knows:
how joy arrives without trying to explain yourself
how safety is felt, not negotiated
how truth registers before words
It is not innocent because it is naïve.
It is innocent because it is intact.
When this place is present,
you don’t need to convince yourself who you are
you don’t need to justify what you love
you don’t need to harden in order to function
You move and respond.
You sense and initiate.
Life feels both vast
and closer to the body.
Returning to how the world felt
before you learned to tuck parts of yourself away.
The part of you that meets the world
without rehearsal.
The inner child is not a story from the past.
It is a mode of being.
A way you enter a room.
A way you listen.
A way you stand with the moment.
A way your breath becomes curious instead of guarded.
内在小孩炼金术
is a space where this original pulse
is invited back into the centre of your life.
Not as a memory.
Not as an exercise.
But to be lived from again.
Where joy isn’t just a place you visit
but the ground you move from.
