Communal movement, breathwork and somatic healing are among the oldest human traditions. But a growing number of LGBTQ+ people are reaching for these modalities i
n an era when, practitioners and participants say, conventional medicine
and talk therapy are not always enough.
CAROLINE SAVOIE | East Texas Reporter
CaroSavo@StoryDustSearch.com
Christina Brena still remembers the night she danced barefoot in a patch of Oklahoma woods, surrounded by strangers, with a live deejay spinning into the dark.
“I left without speaking to a single soul,” Brena, 35, a grocery manager and aspiring personal trainer who lives in Whitehouse, said of the experience. “And I left feeling more connected to humanity than I ever had in my life.”
That event, part of a reemerging movement practice known as ecstatic dance, introduced Brena to a practice she said she wants to bring home to East Texas.
What she experienced was not new. Communal movement, breathwork and somatic healing are among the oldest human traditions. But a growing number of LGBTQ+ people are reaching for these modalities in an era when, practitioners and participants say, conventional medicine and talk therapy are not always enough.
Ecstatic dance, a freeform movement practice typically held in silence or set to a DJ-curated set, is one of the more visible expressions of the trend. The Dallas Movement Collective, based in East Dallas, is the nearest regular event for many East Texans, drawing participants from as far away as Tyler, a roughly two-hour drive.
For queer participants, the appeal often goes beyond the movement itself.
“In many environments, there’s an awareness of how I’m perceived,” said Tiffany Fitzgerald, 30, a real estate agent and transgender woman from Garland who has attended events with the collective since 2021.
“In spaces like DMC, that dissolves. I feel seen as a human being first.”
Fitzgerald said she has explored breathwork, sound baths, meditation and plant medicine, but described dance as uniquely embodied.
“It bypasses the mind and goes straight into the body,” she said. “It allows emotion to move through you physically.”
That framing aligns with how some practitioners now describe the science behind somatic healing. Dominique Ziegler (they/them), founder of Balance Breathwork and REC Coaching in Orlando and a nonbinary lesbian, began facilitating breathwork after falling in love with the practice after their first session in December 2022. They say what draws queer people specifically to these practices is not only community but neurological relief.
“What happens when you experience trauma is that it affects the brain so deeply that it messes with what’s called the metastability of your brain, which is your ability to shift to and from different states,” Ziegler said.
Trauma, they explained, causes the brain to overcalculate danger, keeping the nervous system on constant alert.
“These practices shift the state of the nervous system. And the more that you can shift in and out of these different states, it flexes the muscle of that metastability and actually allows for healing.”
Ziegler said talk therapy, while valuable, can sometimes keep people stuck by cycling them through the same narrative without relief. Somatic practices, which engage the body directly, can interrupt that loop.
“There are some things you can’t think your way out of cerebrally,” Ziegler said.
They came to identify as nonbinary and a lesbian only recently, after a trip to Lady Elliot Island in Australia coincided with National Lesbian Day of Visibility in 2025. Seeing a social media post that named the intersection of nonbinary identity and lesbianism gave Ziegler language for what they had felt for years.
The experience, they said, sharpened their commitment to building explicitly queer healing spaces.
“I wanted to claim it really loudly,” Ziegler said. “I had to work through some internalized homophobia before I was able to fully embrace that.”
In a coaching session with one of their long-term clients, a woman in a heterosexual marriage who had known she was queer since they began working together, Ziegler watched that kind of shift happen over eight months. The client moved from struggling to say her truth aloud on a coaching call to initiating a conversation with her husband about leaving the marriage.
“To watch her go from being terrified to even say it out loud, to getting to the point where she felt safe enough and loved herself enough to believe she needed to act on that truth, was just really beautiful,” Ziegler said.
Back in East Texas, Brena is working toward something smaller but, she says, no less urgent. She wants to start a women’s ecstatic dance in Tyler, one that is affordable and accessible to people who cannot make the drive to Dallas.
She envisions it beginning as a women-only space, rooted in what she describes as an awareness of how many women in her community carry body-based trauma.
“The world is such a mess right now,” she said. “It’s important to have these microjoys.”
Brena said she has navigated her own mental health largely outside conventional medicine.
After struggling with postpartum depression following the births of two of her three children and finding that prescribed antidepressants changed her in ways she did not recognize, she shifted toward what she describes as a combination of microdosing psilocybin, grounding outdoors, sunlight exposure and deliberate breathwork. She has not taken antidepressants in years.
“I still get sad and down,” she said. “But I know I have tools to brighten my life.”
For Fitzgerald, those tools have accumulated over years of attending ecstatic dance events, each one reinforcing something she says is difficult to find in conventional spaces.
“The depth of healing through movement is often underestimated,” she said. “Spaces like this matter deeply. They allow reconnection, with self, others, and something deeper.”
Ziegler, who is building a monthly membership program alongside individual coaching to make breathwork more financially accessible, said the message they most want queer people to hear is simple:
There’s hope,” they said, “even if you think you’re too far gone