Natasha Stern

Dance Alive has been and continues to be a profoundly amazing, radical and cutting edge education that has helped me transform my life by transforming myself from the inside out.

It is impossible to convey in a short testimonial the abundance of learning cultivated and awakened in this space and the gifts acquired that keep on giving. One such precious and priceless gift is that I've learned how to open to the sheer joy and pleasure of being in my body and the absolute fun of moving and dancing. And that gift has also translated into learning how to meet life in all her totality and enjoy being alive through even the most challenging moments.

Dance Alive has changed my life. It has taught me what natural movement is.

Natural movement is like a child’s movement: fluid, balanced, and strong where it needs to be. As a yoga teacher, I understood how postures directly affect both the physical and mental health. But Dance Alive deepened and expanded my yoga practice. In practicing Dance Alive, I tapped into the natural, already healed and whole wisdom of my everyday movement. Each movement is either habitual and not aligned or is a step toward alignment. Dance Alive teaches me how to choose alignment and ease in each step.

Since participating in Dance Alive, my vital energy has significantly increased, as has my core strength and endurance.

I am finding that I am far healthier and creative than I have ever been in my life, and that my energy and days run efficiently and consistently.

When I started I had a lot of resistance and I didn’t want to cooperate.  Through Mariane’s hard work and persistence, I was able to break down my walls and really come into myself at a whole new level.  

Things I learned here really helped me with being a teenager and being a young adult who is coming into the world and has to take things on and has to really fight for what he wants.  I have really learned to look at hard truths, how to look into myself and be a realist about what I am.  I have learned skills that most people think come for granted, but really people have to work for.  I have accumulated a storage of knowledge, skills and experiences that most eighteen year olds I do not think have.  If you were to meet me in the real world, you would see that I am not just an average 18 year old kid, and such a large portion of that comes from the time, work and energy I have put into myself at Dance Alive.

Mariane’s programs have completely revolutionized the way I live my life.

Her programs have helped me to work, play, and rest with greater stamina, intensity, and relaxation in my body. I am now much healthier and feel way more alive.

Take Charge Now has taught me the skills I needed to start my own business, balance my work with recreation, and maintain the healthiest relationships I have ever known.

Take Charge Now also has taught me how to manage my fear and anxiety, which formerly had prevented me from taking on new challenges. I can’t emphasize enough how utterly powerful Mariane’s teaching is: there is nothing out there like it.

‍Mariane listens deeply to my heart's desire and my next step for growth, and guides accordingly.

She guides me to access my own wisdom, truth, clarity, tenacity and resilience, and to relate to myself and others in and with love.
She is a living embodiment of what she teaches and truly an inspiration.

One of the things that I have been most impacted by in Dance Alive is the emphasis on TEAM PLAY.

Teamplay is something that I have not had much exposure to. Even being on soccer teams, surf teams, group work classes etc… in almost all of these areas the is an emphasis on individual performance-  “you want to look good, and even if you are on the team, you want to be the star of the team”… and one thing I have really learned from Dance Alive, that I’ve been able to practicing and integrating into my work, is that WORK is really about a group of people working together to create something.  At the core, if you want to be most effective, you want to utilize all the tools that all the people on your team bring. This is such a different approach and way of thinking about work than “I want to produce something good, so I look good…” The truth is, you probably DO think: “I want whatever end product we create to be a freaking awesome end product.” And, the way it will be the most awesome end product is if you utilize your collective intelligence. So I’ve really got introduced to that way of thinking through Dance Alive, and have been slowly integrating that into my work. I feel like it has made a dramatic difference.

One of the ways I apply Dance Alive is in my work, and in Team Playing with other people.  This is one of the big things that is taught and promoted at Dance Alive, is how to play well with others.  

I have a number of employees, clients, venders and contractors that I deal with on a daily basis, and how it has really helped me is to real see other people as being “on my team”.  So taking me out of being harmfully competitive with somebody and bringing them on my team, seeing them as on my team, experiencing them on my team and then going into cooperation vs. competition.

After being in Dance Alive, I’ve started my own business and built an amazing business that I love.

I work with golfers, athletes, and business people, in connecting to themselves and helping them to increase their capacity to be more calm, focused and steadier in their lives.  I used to work on them and fix them.  Now I teach them to be the authorities in their own bodies.  They don’t have to give their power away to somebody else to say “fix me, fix me, fix me” I’ve learned through Dance Alive to help them build their and be super functional and super happy and really enjoy their lives, and their jobs and their relationships and their bodies. It is super powerful!"

I love Mariane with all my heart….no difficulty there, and love her willingness to keep showing up and evolving and sharing from a place of complete authenticity.  You can trust that when she says something, she is telling you from a place of neutrality and authenticity. I’m so grateful that Mariane has been here, holding a space for us, to come and go, to be absolutely who we are, and to feel like we are home, in our souls, our hearts and our bodies.

Dance Alive brought me out of my head and into my body and being, and it’s been a fascinating and joyful journey ever since.

The classes provide a perfect bridge between my profession as a statistician and my passion as a yogini. Mariane is continuously evolving and synchronizing the Dance Alive system, so each class is newly inspiring. My experience in class naturally flows out into all areas of my life. I can relate to myself and others with much greater clarity and compassion. I have made participating in the Dance Alive top priority in my life, now that I’ve experienced the life-changing effects.

I learned the foundational skills of how to have a healthy relationship, from Dance Alive, in my marriage, and how to do that as a mother.

I think the most Important thing I have learned about relationship in Dance Alive, is how to Listen, really listen to someone.

I have found that as my skill in the partner movement exercise has increased, my ability to follow where my partner in relationship is going has increased and my ability to back her up in the direction she is going has really improved.

One of the main things I’ve learned through Dance Alive my ability to be in relationship with another person.

I notice how I hold my energy, whether it’s too far in, too far out or just right when I’m with someone else.  I’ve learned to bring myself out, bring my energy out, when it feels too far in, or bring it in when it feels too far out.  I think that practice of modulating my experience in myself, when I’m with someone else, and really looking to harmonize and team play with the other person…. is one of the key things I’ve learned about myself and have seen other people learn in Dance Alive.

Dance Alive is waking up my body’s own magic.

In Dance Alive classes, I practice accepting, being with and moving parts of myself I’ve never moved before in an easy way with great music and Mariane’s incredible knowledge and spirit.
Her example and teaching make it easy to acknowledge myself and begin to learn the deep physical, mental and emotional expression and expansion that is useful to my well being on every level…and fun!

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Mariane has a unique and extraordinary ability to understand the mechanics of vitality and break them down into very tangible movement skills that anyone, regardless of their physical or mental circumstance, can learn.

She adds to this a deep commitment to each individual she works with to discover their highest personal potential. Mariane has created the framework by which I'm able to have a career that I love, and more vitality than I thought possible.

I am impressed by Mariane’s supportive yet non-invasive approach which allows me to work at my own pace and reconnect with my true self.

Over time I have learned not only how to access my vital energy but how to use it in my daily life to support and give power to the actions I choose to take. I know of no other system that offers the potent combination of freedom of expression and spaciousness with systematic challenge and vigor for the purpose of being fully in charge of one’s self than Dance Alive.

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Mariane is incredibly gifted at seeing your strengths and gifts, and helping you to bring them forth into the world!

She has an intuitive, down-to-earth, compassionate, and go-for-it approach to moving her students through layers of doubt, fear, and whatever is in the way of realizing our dreams. I have never felt so connected to my inner strength, vitality, courage, and pure joy
of living than I do now after studying with Mariane.

Through Dance Alive, I’ve become more connected to the inner experience of life - the life force that is moving through me.

This connection has organically allowed me to take every area of my life - relationships, business, and personal well-being - to the next level, again and again. I practiced and studied yoga, movement meditation, and breathing for over 14 years, and nothing I’ve ever learned has come close to the effectiveness of the Dance Alive system. It just works. Period.

Mariane Karou is the most gifted, effective teacher of life skills on this planet.

I can recommend her unequivocally to anyone who wants to live life at the highest levels of functionality and who is willing to do the self-study, work and practice necessary to get the maximum benefit from her teaching and leadership.

I think Mariane Karou has figured out how to be a healthy human being (in the highest sense of mental, emotional, behavioral, and spiritual health) and that she has developed a system and style of teaching and role modeling that is AMAZINGLY effective in helping other people to be healthy functioning human beings.

What I have been learning and practicing is how to work really well with my husband and our team together. There are a whole lot of things to do and not to do, to say and not to say. I’m learning when to speak up, when to internally process, and also just make mistakes, learn by doing and getting feed back in the relationship.

Dance Alive has been enormously effective for me in my life in Learning How to Learn…. I am learning how to approach life like it is a discovery, as opposed to this is how life is supposed to be… fit into these pre-set categories that are predetermined.  

The brilliant thing that I have discovered through Dance Alive is living from being in relationship with this organic, alive system that I am, and when I run into a challenge in my life, I have actually have access to the intelligence inside my body.  This is profoundly useful in my life.  And that is something that I have found really unique to Dance Alive… is being able to get that very organic, internal connection and then translating that into how I handle an area in business or an area with my child.  Having that connection to my own knowing is such a profoundly useful resource that Dance Alive provides.

As a result of being in Dance Alive my relationships are thriving.

It’s given me the tools to approach any sort of unexpected situation with way more ease and way more confidence.

Results tell the truth.  The results over the 6 years that I have been in Dance Alive are that I have amazing relationships now that I didn’t have when I started Dance Alive…

I was really hiding out inside myself and not letting anybody in.  I had a lot of suffering doing that.  I just saw everywhere where my life was not working.  Now, after all this Dance Alive experience, I can actually see where my life is working and where I am stronger and where my relationships are stronger.  Everyone in my family is learning from me as I am guiding and leading the way into more functional relationships and everybody else in my life is more functional in what they can do too.  It’s made a huge difference in how I relate with my husband and how my husband relates with me, how I relate with my kids and how my kids relate with me.  it’s priceless.

This is really a class where you get to explore how your body moves and how you move with others, this is not rank and file ballet training or something like that.  I love it; it is like being a little kid on a play ground….

In my work, using the Take Charge Now system has dramatically increased the productivity and morale among my employees and managerial team.

I would highly recommend the study of Dance Alive to anyone who wants to be maximally effective in their life.

Dance Alive is a whole educational system, and there are a few things that it does that are really unique, that you probably won’t find anywhere else.

All the information that it shares is already out there- you can read it in books, watch it on videos, its stated and used in different language, stated by different people. Ok….. so I read a book on how to have an awesome marriage,  that doesn’t mean I can DO what is needed to have an awesome marriage- there is a lot more needed than just reading some words on a piece of paper. At Dance Alive you are exposed to what is really needed- the DOING, practicing over and over again with feedback by someone who is an expert in the field. You want to do that with a dynamic group of people, both one on one, in small groups, large groups, that’s how we learn! This type of learning integrates into your whole body, not just reading, copying, memorizing.  It is about actually integrating something into your being, and then finding how you express that concept and take ownership over your learning. That is how the whole Dance Alive system is designed.  It’s designed based on that principle.  All the classes are based on learning by DOING.

I’m so excited because I love problems now, because that’s how I learn.

I learn by solving problems. It’s so much fun!

The Dance Alive movement training has helped me increase my level of energy and vitality!

I am participating in my life in such a bigger way, due to both the movement work and the Take Charge Now.  To really step up in your life in every way – this program is essential. Unlike other programs where it’s hard to apply the material after a week or two, Mariane teaches you in practical and useful ways to live life fully. Every class I attend is profound and useful and I notice amazing changes in my vitality, my relationships, and my career after each one.

I have transformed my physical health.  

I have had headaches since I was 6years old… taking tons of pain killers.  I was successful in unwinding my headaches and getting off painkillers and learning how to learn these tools to manage my health and as a result I am so much healthier and happier in all that I do.

Dance Alive consistently provides me with an exhilarating physical workout, a psychological cleansing and a spiritual teaching.

It has supported a journey from divorce to happy marriage; a self image of ‘Sufferer’ to ‘Celebrator.’ I am forever grateful to Mariane Karou and her work.

I have been astounded by the depth of what I have learned in Take Charge Now regarding group dynamics, positive interaction and human relating.

As a psychiatrist I have had much exposure to studying group dynamics, and it is my whole hearted opinion that the Dance Alive program experientially teaches the art of human relating better than any other system I have ever studied. If you are wishing to increase your effectiveness, efficiency and become a leader in groups and in life in general, then this program is for you.

Take Charge Now is the best investment I have ever made in my personal life, my relationships, and in my career!

It has taught me how to set goals that I am connected to, reach them without sacrificing the balance of my whole life, and to thoroughly celebrate my successes. By utilizing the moment–to-moment dynamics within the group as a teaching tool, Mariane, has found a way to bridge knowledge with experience. I walk away from every session with skills that I can immediately apply in all areas of my life. Participating in this leadership program has dramatically changed my attitude towards life, challenge, and fulfillment. I highly recommend this work to anyone willing to grow and change and enjoy life more fully!

After 5 years of coming to Dance Alive, I am finally beginning to realize that Inner Rhythms really is the foundation of all movement, the place where I connect with my body and spirit, so that I am able to bring myself authentically into my whole life and into all my relationships.‍

This is the FOUNDATION, the place where I can deeply nourish, revitalize, source inspiration and knowing, and problem solve WAY more effectively and efficiently than I could just thinking about the problem. It is a rigorous practice to keep my attention in my body without interfering or drifting off, but the more I practice, the more I FEEL connected and nourished in every area of my life.

What I have taken away from doing Dance Alive work on the relationship level is really how to read the underlying communication that somebody is giving.

Dance Alive is an integrated body/mind system that is practically applicable to “real life” outside of the classroom.

I have learned how to be a better husband, father, employer and friend.  I get more energy, focus, ability to start something quickly, maintain it, and then also stop as needed.  I have also been able to access ”whole body strength” and I have FUN doing it!

Through my work in Dance Alive I have been able to get way more jobs than I did before I was training rigorously in Dance Alive.

As a substitute teacher, I am always waiting for somebody to call me to get hired for a job that day.  And with my precise, sort of, understanding of how finances and giving your full attention and energy to a job has become more refined, I have gotten so many more calls and I feel that I have to turn away jobs because people want me to work for them and sub for them.

Mariane has a steady, smooth, firm, caring, sharing, and vivacious dedication to being herself.  

She more than talks the talk, or walks the walk, she dances the dance!