How Dancer and Nurse Tara Rynders Is Using Movement to Fight Health-Worker Burnout
Tara Rynders has always associated dance with healing. While navigating a tumultuous childhood that often required her to care for her siblings, she found refuge in the studio. And when her sister lost her speech after developing acute disseminated encephalomyelitis, a rare inflammatory disease of the brain and spinal cord, Rynders used dance as a connection tool.
But Rynders, who is a registered nurse, often focused on healing others, neglecting her own needs. When she found herself in the emergency room with an ectopic pregnancy, a nurse offered a hand to hold and words of support, and everything changed. “I remember softening into my nurse’s hand and feeling so grateful that she remembered my heart, and remembered me as a person,” Rynders says. “I learned something by letting myself receive care, and I wanted to share that.” Now, Rynders uses performances and movement-based workshops to extend that learning to other nurses. “My mode of storytelling has always been dance,” she says.
Caring and Sharing
In 2017, Rynders founded The Art and Heart of Healthcare Institute, which uses movement, art, and storytelling to help fight burnout, compassion fatigue, and isolation. “Nurses are taught to just give and give, and receiving can often feel like shame,” she says. “So much of our identity and worth is tied up in our work. It’s hard to untangle that.”
The Art and Heart of Healthcare Institute’s main offering is Rynders’ signature (Re)Brilliancy workshops. (“Re-brilliancy” is a play on “resiliency.”) “ ‘Re-brilliancy’ is about helping people remember the brilliant humans they already are,” she says. Rynders travels to health-care facilities around the country to work with nurses in person. When participants arrive, she welcomes them personally, washing their hands for them to create an atmosphere where they feel honored and cared for. As the day progresses, they create music and poetry, and they put on an improv-based dance show together, complete with costumes. Rynders says the performance, which begins as a guided story-based experience, often morphs into friendly dance-offs. “For my colleagues, who are usually so serious—running codes and navigating life-or-death situations—just belly-laughing and playing together is really freeing,” Rynders says.
(Re)Brilliancy workshops include a performance excerpt from Rynders’ A Nurse is Calling. The solo dance work takes inspiration from her experiences as an emergency-room nurse; in one scene, Rynders addresses the concept of “health-care heroes,” with herself as a lone boxer, fighting an invisible opponent. “It shows all the hype and joy of being called a hero, then all of a sudden you’re in this ring, all alone, and everyone’s watching,” she says. The work also details the loss of Rynders’ mother and brother, and sets the tone for participants to share their own stories during a post-performance discussion.
Ripple Effects
Dance is a uniquely helpful tool for this work, says Rynders; by directly working through embodiment, it’s easier for nurses to bypass cognitive processes that might make them feel uncomfortable or judgmental about accepting care. “They’re receiving through their body, so their minds don’t have time to stop it yet,” she explains. Jessica Brooks, a registered nurse based in Fresno, California, has participated in two of Rynders’ workshops, as well as in small-group and one-on-one sessions. On the day of her first workshop, she arrived at a Kaiser Permanente facility with her badge and scrubs, prepared for a meeting like any other. But the experience, she says, defied her expectations, and the chance to connect with her body was profoundly impactful. “We’re trained to think things through the nursing process, and we’re constantly analyzing, so we get kind of disembodied,” says Brooks. “Dance provided a way to help us tune into ourselves again.”
Rynders worked with 600 nurses over a two-year period to gather quantitative and qualitative data from (Re)Brilliancy workshops through a partnership with Kaiser Permanente. The results are promising: Among the group, self-reported rates of burnout, secondary traumatic stress, negative self-judgment, and loneliness all decreased significantly. Self-kindness increased.
This work offers another example of how movement can be a powerful healing tool. And while Rynders is mostly focused on helping nurses, she’s also engaged with creatives, dance educators, K–12 teachers, and LGBTQIA+ youth. She says her work has implications for anyone in a demanding position—and even beyond. “This work, at the end of the day, is for everyone,” she says.
