Over the past few weeks, I have had several conversations with students that all seemed to lead to the same question:
How do you learn to trust?
It is a topic that feels very close to me because trust has never been easy for me. For a long time, I struggled to find the balance between being open and feeling safe. Sometimes fear had a stronger voice than confidence, and it influenced the way I experienced tango more than I would like to admit.
What I have learned over the years is that trust is not something we are born with. It is something we develop. Something we practice.
And in tango, trust is everywhere.
Not only in the connection with another person, but also in the relationship we have with ourselves. In fact, I believe that learning to trust others often begins with learning to trust ourselves first.
When I look back at my own journey, I realize that in the beginning I was mostly focused on trusting things outside of me. I wanted to feel comfortable going to milongas. I wanted to feel safe dancing with strangers. I wanted to stop worrying about making mistakes.
Today, I see it differently.
Before confidence comes trust.
When we first start dancing tango, most of us do not know how to walk, pivot, navigate the floor, or understand the music. Yet something keeps us coming back. We keep showing up to class. We keep practicing. We keep trying.
Looking back, I think that is already an act of trust.
Trusting that we are capable of learning something we cannot do yet.
Later, I had to learn to trust my body.
Many movements felt unfamiliar and sometimes impossible. There were moments when I genuinely wondered if I would ever be able to do certain things. But every time I kept practicing instead of giving up, I discovered that my body was capable of more than I thought.
Then I had to learn to trust another person.
For me, this may have been the hardest part.
I remember dancing with people I had never met before and feeling tense during the entire dance. I could not relax. I was so focused on avoiding mistakes that I was not really listening to what was happening in the embrace.
At some point, I realized I was trying to protect myself instead of connecting.
What helped me was seeing myself in the other person.
We were both standing there trying to do the same thing. We were both hoping to connect through the dance. We were both taking a small risk by stepping into that embrace.
Once I understood that, something changed. I stopped seeing the dance as something I had to defend myself from and started seeing it as something we were creating together.
And then there was the music.
The music has always been my strongest impulse. I have always felt connected to it in a way that is difficult to explain with words.
The challenge was not hearing it.
The challenge was trusting what I heard.
There were many moments when I felt something beautiful in the music, but I did not respond to it because I was not sure if my interpretation was correct. I doubted myself. I hesitated.
Over time, I learned that musicality is not only about understanding the music. It is also about having the courage to respond to what you hear.
And that is something I am still exploring today.
I still get nervous sometimes.
I still make mistakes.
I still find myself in situations that challenge me.
But tango has helped me trust more.
Trust my body.
Trust another person.
Trust the music.
Trust the process of learning.
And sometimes, trust what I do not yet understand.
The more I dance, the more I feel that learning tango is, in many ways, learning to trust.
Un abrazo de tango,
Cami
P.S. I'm curious: what has been the hardest thing for you to trust in your tango journey?
Yourself? Your body? Another person? The music?
I'd love to hear your answer.