Twerking Is Spiritual

I had a conversation with my roommates one night talking about the carnival happening in Sint Maarten (SxM). One of them showed me a video of women dressed to the 10s, twerking and whining their waist. To which I then commented saying "you know that's spiritual, right?" causing my roommates to laugh uncontrollably because they knew I meant what I said but it was just so unserious at the same time.

I remembered taking a class at FSU that focused on French influence in the Caribbean, where my professor showed us the connections between modern dances like those in Soca, Kompa, and Rara music to their origins in West Africa. One video showed African women painted, in a circle, shaking their bodies in ways we'd call twerking today, but it was clearly spiritual, without any hint of sexualization.

So while my roommates and I were laughing, all these connections were happening in my mind, but I lacked the information to make my case. Hence, I’ll be exploring what I couldn't articulate that night: how twerking represents a sacred practice with deep historical roots.

The Western Misunderstanding of Sacred Movement

Let's be real:  when most people in Western society hear "twerking," they picture music videos, clubs, and sexually charged performances. The Oxford Dictionary even defines it as "dancing in a sexually provocative manner." But this narrow definition erases centuries of cultural and spiritual significance embedded in these movements. As Elizabeth Perez, a religious studies scholar, explains: "Viewing twerk through a western lens renders twerk 'ratchet' or 'ghetto,' delegitimizing the dance as a legitimate art form. When contextualized as a Black Atlantic art form, twerk appears the descendant of sacred dances in the worship of Afro-diasporic deities in Brazil, Cuba, and Haiti."

I need to emphasize this: just because the Western world has sexualized women who are twerking doesn't mean it's not spiritual. Just because the women themselves who are twerking aren't aware of the power and knowledge behind how sacred twerking is doesn't mean the magic isn't happening. The body remembers what the mind forgets.

Healing Through Movement: The Body's Wisdom

Trauma is stored in the hips. This isn't just some new age theory; it's backed by research in somatic psychology. The psoas muscle, sometimes called "The Muscle of the Soul," is where we physically hold tension, fear, and unprocessed experiences. When we engage in movements that activate and release this area, we're literally shaking loose what no longer serves us. According to the Trauma-Conscious Yoga Institute, "The Psoas Muscle holds onto traumatic experiences on a cellular level. Releasing it with the right yoga poses can help the body process through and release trauma responses that have been locked within for years."

In traditional African communities, women have gathered for centuries in sacred circles, engaging in movements that Western eyes would label as "twerking." These weren't sexual displays but rather ceremonial practices connected to fertility, childbirth preparation, celebration, and spiritual communion. What was interesting in my findings was that the men in these communities would often be present without sexualizing the women's movements, understanding their sacred nature.

Mapouka: The Divine Connection

The traditional dance Mapouka from the Ivory Coast is said to literally draw dancers closer to God. This "dance of the behind" is performed at celebratory festivals and ceremonies, where women isolate movements of their butts from the rest of their bodies.

When you're in that squat position, knees bent, hands on your knees (or no hands depending on how skilled you are), connecting to the earth through your feet, you're grounding yourself. When your hips move in circular, vibrational patterns, you're activating and clearing energy pathways, similar to practices like kundalini yoga but from a different cultural tradition.

Preservation Through the Diaspora

During the transatlantic slave trade, African people brought these sacred movement traditions with them. As Lizzo stated in her TED Talk, "Black women carried these dances across the transatlantic slave trade to the ring shout in the Black American church, into the hips of Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith when they sang the blues, into the bounce of Josephine Baker's banana dance."

These weren't just dances; they were cultural preservation, spiritual resistance, and community healing in the face of unimaginable trauma. When people were stripped of their languages, religions, and freedoms, embodied practices became one of the few ways to maintain connection to ancestral wisdom.

Universal Wisdom: Hip Movement Across Cultures

This wisdom isn't limited to African traditions. Similar movements appear in belly dancing from the Middle East, traditional dances from the Pacific Islands, and even certain Slavic traditions. Across cultures, hip-centered movement connects to women's health, childbirth, emotional processing, and spiritual practice.

Research examining women's traditions has found that movements resembling modern twerking were used to prepare women for childbirth, strengthen pelvic floor muscles, and create community healing spaces. A Cultural Evolution Study notes, "The similarity of postures in dance and in gymnastics, and in milling and in sex, means the muscles used in those activities are the same that are used also during childbirth, hence the practice of those activities enhances the process of childbirth."

Reclaiming Our Power

When we dismiss twerking as merely sexual or "low class," we participate in the colonial erasure of African spiritual traditions and deny ourselves access to powerful embodied wisdom about releasing trauma, connecting with our bodies, and processing emotions.

Western society has made us disembodied, disconnected from our physical selves. We live in our heads, treating our bodies as objects to be controlled, displayed, or hidden according to cultural standards. These traditional movements invite us back into embodied wisdom, into the knowing that resides in our tissues, muscles, and bones.

As Blackfeminisms.com notes, "In some contexts, Black women's dance has sacred properties. In others, their dance gets treated as 'incarnating the very sins committed through enslavement, systemic oppression, and sexual exploitation: lust, sloth, and gluttony.'"

Shaking Off the Shame

Even when twerking happens in contexts divorced from its spiritual origins: in clubs, in videos, in pop culture, etc. I believe the magic is still happening. Bodies are still releasing trauma stored in the hips. Energy is still moving. The sacred is still present, whether acknowledged or not.

So the next time you see twerking reduced to a sexualized performance, remember there's a deeper story; one of ancestral wisdom, spiritual practice, and embodied healing that deserves to be known, respected, and reclaimed in its fullness. Because twerking is spiritual, whether the Western world recognizes it or not. And our bodies know truths our colonized minds have forgotten.