Opinion: Listen: Dance helped this nurse heal from trauma. Now she’s bringing it to others
“You can’t pour from an empty cup” is what registered nurse Tara Rynders learned the hard way after two decades of work and one heartbreaking, life-threatening experience of being a critical care patient herself. Before that experience, she’d always found found that dance, play, and other types of movement helped her express and heal from the trauma she encountered and held in her body every day. After recovering from her health emergency as a patient, she brought that healing to several other nurses in a workshop, where they danced to “Eye of the Tiger,” pretended to be FBI agents, and otherwise moved their bodies, bringing them to tears, laughter, and often both at the same time.
The need for these workshops became all the more acute during the pandemic, when Rynders found herself resenting the “health care hero” language that permeated discussion of her work. Rather than seeing it as a tribute, she says, this mindset became a burden, an expectation that somehow nurses and other health care workers were more than human.
