Movement and Song Saves the Day – and Every So Often the Night! 

After a diagnosis at seventy-five, I needed a new way to manage my ADHD and anxiety without relying on medication. It turned out, the answer was with me all along! Here I’ll share how movement and song transformed my life. Bringing calm and joy in ways I hadn’t imagined.

I knew I had to come up with something to replace the meds I had been taking for years for my ADHD and anxiety after an “asymptomatic” AFib diagnosis at seventy-five stopped me in my tracks. 

Until then, I hadn’t given my meds or how they might impact my cardiovascular health as an older adult a second thought. Now those days were gone. 

“But I soon realized that I had the answer all along.”

The answer was “movement and song”. My non-chemical coping mechanism for my ADHD and anxiety. I had just had “my eyes wide shut.”

It all came together one day when I was stretching at the end of a Zumba class to Angela Aguilar’s, “La Llorona, The Weeping Woman”. A hauntingly beautiful and mournful Mexican folk song. And then one night during one of my restless sleeps. 

It may sound cliché, but on that day in the Zumba class, I was transformed and transfixed. 

“I was consciously out of my body, yet totally present in the moment.”

Even though I had been doing Zumba for years and had my certificate to teach it. I had never been so captured by the movement and the song. 

I was swaying back and forth. Stretching and concentrating and instantly calm. Grounded and centered. Completely aware and fixated on the song’s melodic words, few of which I even understood. 

Then later in the middle of that same day’s night lying awake staring at the ceiling. I recall my mother telling me that when I was a little girl, barely two. I would sit on the floor for hours by myself in my bedroom with my pink Victrola, aka record player, rocking back and forth. Captivated by the movement and the song, while she was busy cleaning or making dinner for our multigenerational Italian household. 

She said I often would hum and try to sing with the music. Even though I had barely begun to talk. I suspect now, that I was captured by the movement and the song, concentrating and calm. 

“Exactly as I would be so many years later in Zumba class.”

Today, I walk every day and Zumba three times a week. On any morning just after the sun goes up. You can find me with Maddie, my Italian Spinone dog, dancing in the streets à la “Dance Monkey”. Mostly to Latin tunes, a nod to my Italian roots. 

You can find me rocking out in my Zumba class. In the movement and song “DITCHING THE WORKOUT AND JOINING THE PARTY”. Shimmying and shaking, hooting and hollering to the beat of DJ Snake’s, “Loco Contigo.”

Sometimes you can find me up in the middle of the night by the window. Looking out into the darkness humming and swaying to the soulful lyrics of “La Llorona.”

I no longer care if I’m seen as a “dotty old woman past her prime” 

Or as a “free spirit expressing herself”. Although I admit that the latter, with a wave and a smile from a passerby on one of my walks, is a welcome and instant mood booster. 

A few empathetic nods or a couple of hoots and hollers directed my way in Zumba class isn’t bad either. Nor is the peace I feel peering outside my window into the darkness in the middle of an anxious night.

“Movement and song” my answer once I found it, was a game changer for me.  

Or should I say rediscovered it?
The little girl and young woman all grown up, now a seventy-five-year-old adult. 

Many may call my interpretation of “movement and song” exercise. 

I call it my love affair.
❤️

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson