It's been a long time, let me tell you why...

I was on a roll for a while, sending out at least one blog post a month. I loved that they often led to thoughtful, personal replies. My last post was sent on January 27th, 2026. My Mom responded with a heart emoji. I didn’t know it then, but it would be the last email exchange we ever had.

Although my team has done a beautiful job keeping our newsletters going, I couldn't bring myself to write another personal blog post. It meant acknowledging a before-Mom and after-Mom version of my life. It meant writing a blog she would never read (she read every one) and facing the guilt that I never responded to her heart emoji.

But the time has come. This first post-Mom blog is an homage to her. The journey of grief and healing that carried me through DTM’s spring season and into this new chapter.

On February 16th, 2025, while I was desperately trying to make my way to her from the other side of the planet, my Mom died. I said goodbye to her over FaceTime from a hotel room in Paris.

Her name was Dorothy Ann Measures, but to her family she was simply Nana. She was a dancer. Yet, for as long as I can remember, problems with her hips restricted her ability to move the way she wanted. 

In the weeks leading up to her death, the hip injury I sustained while teaching the Star Rating System at the 2025 DJ Training suddenly began to worsen. It progressed to the point where I could barely walk, let alone dance. By the day of her funeral on February 25th, it had become so severe that I needed assistance walking into the service.

Exactly one week after her funeral, the Online Facilitator Training opened our Spring season. I will never forget the strange combination of how difficult and soothing that class felt. I was heartbroken, struggling to speak without crying, and unable to dance. Yet returning to my work gave me the very first sense of solid ground I had felt since her death.

Five weeks later, I left my Mother’s home, where I had been staying with my four daughters, and traveled to Portugal for DTM’s first-ever sold-out Facilitator Training. With 57 people onsite, I was amazed by our growth, but mostly I was afraid. How could I hold space for so many when I felt so fragile myself? How was I going to teach the art of dance facilitation when I couldn't even dance?

Returning to Quinta São José dos Montes, the home of two past trainings, felt like a mirror for everything I was moving through. A storm had swept through the venue and destroyed our beloved dance dome, a space we had described as a womb during the previous training.

My Mom was so much more than a womb, of course, but it was the first place I ever met her. Creating a ritual to honour the dance dome at the opening of the training became a way to honour her, grieve her loss, and step back into purpose.

I placed the necklace she wore until the day of her cremation on the altar, and began a powerful week of teaching the skill of embodied facilitation. By the end of the training, I was dancing again. Only in short bursts, often little more than a shuffle, but I was dancing.

Next, I set out on a road trip with my favourite travel companion, my youngest daughter. It was during this two-week journey through Spain’s wildly varied and breathtaking landscapes that I finally began to integrate my grief and accept that she was gone.

The alchemy of this time can be summed up this way: I came to terms with the dissolving of a security I never even realized was tethering me to this existence, a connection that can never be replaced. I needed to continue being the tether for my own children without the benefit of having one to draw strength from. And it was existentially terrifying.

Eventually, we picked up Mikaela in the south of Spain before continuing to Almería, where we would run INCEPTION, our first-ever Immersion Retreat.

Who knew the retreat would be so aptly named? It marked the inception of my new life as the matriarch of my family, inheriting the role my Mom had carried since her own Mom’s passing in 2007.

While I have led many retreats throughout my life, this one was different. Something about the alignment of the theme, the group field, the dancers, the land, and the team created a depth of experience unlike anything I, or many participants, had experienced before.

It felt as though I finally had the wisdom, the team, and the courage to bring to life what I had dreamed of creating throughout my entire career. I believe it is no coincidence that stepping into my role as matriarch and bringing this retreat to life took root at the same time.

In the middle of the seven-day retreat, we entered a two-and-a-half-day ceremony that culminated in me jumping fully clothed into a pool of sacred healing waters. As I floated there, surrounded by this group of dancers who felt as though they had been handpicked by the Divine to midwife me through the grief that had wrung me out and deliver me into a new life, I realized something extraordinary…

I jumped!

I had done something that would have been unthinkable just two months earlier. My hip was slowly, slowly growing stronger, and for the first time, I began to wonder if the operation I had been told I needed was not the answer. Could dancing be my hip's medicine?

After bidding farewell to our gorgeous new retreat center, Oasis Al Hamam in Andalusia, and all of our new and old DTM family who had joined us, the admin team (shout out to Yasmin and Mikaela) finalized budgets, sent out feedback forms, ate pizza, and swam until it was time to part ways.

Jovy and I then flew to Greece to meet up with a group of Ecstatic Dance DJs and geek out at SoundGarden on the island of Corfu. 

While there, I got sick and spent most of the time in bed, missing out on much of the fun and, of course, missing my Mom. After two in-person events, my body decided it was time to stop, rest, cry, and shed another layer. By this point, I was beginning to wonder if the grieving would ever end.

In a rather serendipitous turn of events, a supermarket run for coconut water and soup near the end of my illness led me to discover and immediately book the venue for our Fall 2027 Leadership Training. Now that is what I call multitasking!

Then, on May 27th, we flew back to Canada, where I returned to my Mom's home and promptly fell apart once again. I have noticed that grief lives in the little things. In this case, it was seeing her bedroom exactly as she had left it. So I decided it was time. I packed away her things and made the room my own. My Mom's bedroom now contains a kick ass DJ setup, and I have no doubt she would be delighted by that.

My return home did not yet mark the end of our spring season. We still had the final two modules of the Online Facilitator Training to complete, and then there was one final task: the official launch of the new DTM Teacher Certification Pathway. And launch we did.

On July 2nd, we held the inaugural online mentorship session. Becoming a certified DTM teacher includes a year-long peer mentorship group, and every session includes a dance facilitated by one of the teachers in training. There, in the very same room where I had begun the season barely able to dance, I twirled, shimmied, and grooved. I danced through the entire set without thinking about pain or worrying about getting hurt. I simply danced as though I had never stopped.

With that, the season came to an end. On paper, it had been a light one, with only three official events. In reality, it was the hardest season of my life.

I will spend the summer here in my Mom’s home. In August, my children and I will spread her ashes nearby and prepare her home for sale. Then, I will say goodbye to the place where she lived and to the town we both called home for the past eighteen years before making my way to Germany to begin the fall season with our Leadership Training.

As I sit here on her couch typing away, taking care of the work tasks that I had put aside since February 16th, including writing this blog, I am committed to soaking in every last blessing of living in her space.

One of the most amazing things about my Mom’s home is that her front door is less than 100 meters from an epic trail system through a breathtaking forest. Today, I want you and my Mama to know that, for the first time in nearly ten months, I ran.

And not just on flat ground. I ran up and down a winding path, and it felt like flying.

I did it, Mom. I lost you, I grieved, I kept going, and I healed our hips. ❤️

In November, when we gather for the second Immersion Retreat, LINEAGE. Once again, I am amazed by the profundity of the theme, one which was chosen while my Mother was still very much alive, volunteering at the local theatre and having coffee every day with her crew of feisty elders.

I’m taking you with me, Mom. And we are going to dance our asses off!

With Love,

Bernice & The DTM Team