The Handless Maiden

Become Unapologetic and Dare to Embody Your Life!

So how does it work to dance a story? Not by setting out to perform or interpret it, but by listening to what arises through the body in sensation, movement, gesture and imagination. When we move with attention, stories don’t (have to) stay in books. They surface from our inner landscape right bang into our everyday awareness.

One day on a dance floor, many years ago, I suddenly found myself dancing the story of the Handless Maiden. The image arrived without prompt or warning. I simply followed what was unfolding in my body. First, I noticed a tightness in my wrists, a subtle bracing that felt oddly familiar. My hands weren’t fully extending. I was keeping them partially curled, held close, as though I were always preparing to flinch or withdraw.

I followed the sensation with curiosity. As I let the movement develop, tuning in with breath and awareness, a shockingly powerful image emerged. I saw myself without hands. My wrists had been severed, arms ending in stumps. It was not just a dramatic metaphor, but something I felt in my whole body. The absence, the loss, the shocking ache of disconnection.

The story of the Handless Maiden asked attention through imagination-in-motion. I hadn’t set out to dance her, but she had come anyway, through the subtle (or not-so-subtle) intelligence of the body that remembers what the mind forgets.

Severed from Instinct

As the dance deepened, so did the layers of meaning. The myth moved from archetype to autobiography. I began to recognise the girl in me who had, long ago, made a silent bargain: to be accepted, I would abandon parts of myself. The intuitive dreamer, the wild dancer, the deep-feeling one, each had been sent away as too dangerous, too much, too easily misunderstood.

At a very young age, my instinct told me to hide them, to trade them in for something safer. And so I did, like so many of us, without even knowing it. I believed that if I denied the wild (= natural!) language of my body and soul, I would be more lovable, more acceptable. In Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ words, I had “made a bargain without knowing,” surrendering a birthright for a promise that turned out to be hollow.

Performance Joan van der Mast, New Dance Center, The Hague. Mover: Eline Kieft, probably 1999

Later, as a teenager, I stopped my professional dance training, the very practice that had once been the purest and most joyful expression of my life force. In its place, I constructed a new identity. The perfect daughter. A good student. A responsible young woman who took up just the right amount of space. The loving wife. The hands that once connected with joy and truth were gone, and I didn’t even notice their absence, until they painfully began to grow back.

Dismantling the Box

Once the image had taken root in my mind, my body began to unearth deeper patterns, shapes and shadows I had been living within for decades. I saw how I had learned to contain myself, to flatten or soften my edges in order to meet unspoken expectations. I remembered the tight box I’d created around me, inherited from family and culture: don’t be lazy, don’t be loud, don’t be strange, don’t stand out. And certainly don’t move like that, whatever that was…

Even my assertive and exuberant energy had been polished and policed. “Do your best, but don’t overdo it. Be kind, but not wild. Work hard, but don’t draw attention.” This unwritten choreography shaped my posture, my gestures, even my thoughts. Until that moment, on that London dance floor, where I became conscious of the weight of that box pressing on my shoulders.

But I also felt the power to push back. This had been enough. I started to move in ways I wasn’t supposed to. I extended my limbs beyond what felt polite. I shook off the constraints, not with aggression but with quiet determination. I opened the flaps of that old cardboard box and stepped out of it, barefoot and awake.

Becoming Unapologetic

The return of my hands did not arrive as a neat conclusion, but as an ongoing work-in-process, fragile and often bittersweet. In the days that followed, I found myself both celebrating their presence and grieving their long absence. As I moved, I stretched them fully, consciously, daring to reach into the world again. And with that movement came the old, familiar record of voices.

They whispered: You’re being too much again. Too expressive. Too sensual. Too spiritual. Too proud. Too strange. I knew those voices well (and the different people in my life they ‘belonged’ to). For years, they had kept me in check. But this time, I met them with a different response: “Thank you. I hear you. And I choose differently now.”

Each time I moved beyond the boundaries they tried to reimpose, I felt another thread of freedom weave itself into my being, my metaphoric hands strengthening. I was no longer interested in shrinking to fit. My body was no longer available for half-truths. I began to feel what it was like to move without apology, what once had been self-evident when training to dance on stage.

An Invitation

Hang on. Why should only professional dancers allowed to fully embody their movement? For them it’s an obvious requirement, otherwise you can’t see them at the back of the theatre.

But what if unapologetic embodiment wasn’t reserved for trained dancers? What if all of us dared to inhabit our own lives fully, to move in service to something deeper, older and true, rather than in reaction to (real and imagined) judgements from others?

This is my passion: to share movement tools with non-professional dancers. To open up spaces where we can all remember the power of free dance, story-dance, healing movement, or meditative motion in slow, sacred rhythms.

If the Handless Maiden speaks to something in you, if you’ve ever felt the cost of silencing a part of yourself, or the quiet joy of recovering something essential, I invite you to join me this summer for Sealskin Soulskin. This story speaks of loss in a different way; when we forget to regularly return to our soul-home, to recharge and nourish ourselves.

Sealskin Soulskin (25–27 July, Birmingham) is a women’s weekend workshop of conscious dance and sacred ceremony, shaped around themes of soul retrieval, shapeshifting and embodied myth. Let’s see what happens when we let stories express themselves through our bodies.

I’ll be receiving you with both hands and open arms!

Details at a Glance

📅 25–27 July 2025
📍 Birmingham, UK (B19 area)
👯 Women only, non-residential
💰 €230 / or 2 x €115
🌊 Bring a Friend (by 18 July): €190 each

You can read more and sign up here. See you in Birmingham?