This blog was written by Tanvi Berry, Kalyani Kala Mandir’s senior student and founder of Tberry Atelier 

In 2018, just before I began shaping what would become what T.Berry

currently is, I returned from the UK feeling completely burnt out. I stepped away from fashion for over a year because of how bad it was.

I didn’t have a five-year plan.I didn’t feel creative. I was anxious, untethered, and unsure of what came next. My body was humming with stress, but my mind was frozen.

So I went back — not to strategy, but to movement.
To the choreographies and rhythm my muscles remembered even when I didn’t feel like myself.
And slowly, something began to repair.

Each gesture (mudra), each glance (drishti), each expression (abhinaya) became a way to sift through emotion without needing to name it.
A portal — into mythology, memory, and often, medicine.
For anchoring.
For clarity.
For emotional release.

Today, there’s growing scientific recognition of what ancient disciplines like Bharatanatyam have offered for centuries.
Ritual movement — especially when rhythmic, expressive, and intentional — is one of the most effective ways to regulate the nervous system. It calms the amygdala (the brain’s threat sensor), balances cortisol levels, and supports neuroplasticity — the brain’s ability to rewire itself toward resilience.

And movement that carries meaning — like storytelling through the body — becomes even more powerful.

What’s remarkable about Bharatanatyam is that it offers a complete, multidimensional practice.
It builds physical strength through grounded stances and core stability. It enhances flexibility, complex coordination skills, and cardiovascular health through continuous rhythmic patterns. It demands memory, emotional awareness, and focus through its choreography and abhinaya (expression-based storytelling). And it organically weaves in breath regulation — teaching the dancer to sync movement, emotion, and pranic flow.

To practice Bharatanatyam is to engage the entire self: physical, mental, emotional, and even spiritual. It is at once an arduous discipline and a fluid modicum of release. Precision and poetry.

Read the complete blog here.