In this powerful episode of the Evolution of Medicine podcast, James Maskell sits down with Tasha Blank—DJ, movement catalyst, and founder of Powerhouse DJ School—to explore how dance, music, and embodiment can be powerful tools for healing and nervous system regulation.
For over a decade, Tasha has pioneered sober-conscious dance events that remove movement from the club scene and place it back into the realm of sacred, intentional expression. Her story is one of personal transformation, community leadership, and deep inquiry into how we heal—physically, emotionally and culturally.
Tune in to learn about:
- How dance and embodiment shifted Tasha’s relationship with her body and launched a decade-long journey of transformation.
- The health crisis in her late teens that forced her to look beyond conventional medicine and into nutrition, movement and energy work.
- A pandemic-fueled identity deconstruction that led to unexpected healing through metabolic, animal-based nutrition—and opened questions around gender, body image and healing.
- The launch of Powerhouse DJ School and teaching others to use music and dance as vehicles for transformation.
- The philosophy behind sober dance spaces and how reclaiming movement as medicine can heal individuals and communities.
This episode is a must-listen for anyone exploring somatic healing, community-based transformation, and new paradigms for health that go far beyond prescriptions and protocols.
James Maskell:
Hello, and welcome to the podcast. This week, we speak with Tasha Blank. She is a friend of mine from a long time ago. In the podcast, you will hear, one, the history of how we met
and her interaction with the early days of the Functional Forum; two, the power of dance to really create health and her journey; and then three, you know, in the spirit of
transformation, she has had a significant transformation in the last few years that has related to metabolic health and gender and transformation.
And I think it’s just a really timely story for our year of transformation. So enjoy. Enjoy.
James Maskell:
Alright. So a warm welcome to the podcast for the first time, Tasha Blank. Welcome, Tasha.
Tasha Blank:
Thanks for having me.
James Maskell:
I’m so excited to have this conversation. And today we’re going to talk about a range of issues and all in the theme of transformation, there’s the transformation of dance culture, there’s your personal transformation that I think will speak to the audience, but I want to just replay, so you and I were friendly, I guess maybe friends in the sort of 2013, 2015 time we spent the most time together and just as a marker of history. So 2014 we started the Functional Forum. We did five events in the early part of the year, and then we did the summit and then we did a number of events in the second half of the year and we didn’t have an event for December. And I was like, what are we going to do? And also the functional forum at this point was not really a business.
We’ve done a few events, we didn’t have any financial stability, we were just sort of doing our thing and we thought, let’s just host a party. We’re going to have a party, we’re going to have a Christmas party, we’re going to invite everyone that had come throughout the year and we’re going to blow all the money we have on a party and see what happens. And I had asked you to DJ for that event because over that summer I had heard you DJ a number of times and was just thought that it was the right vibe that we wanted to set. We were sort of bringing our own world. We had tried to make functional medicine cool and aspirational and we’d had fun music and music cues and I had DAF Punk as the intro music. And so there’d been some crossover with trying to take functional medicine away from quite an academic thing that it had been to try and make it cool and aspirational to be a functional medicine doctor. So why not have a party? And you were the DJ then. Any memories that you have from that event or our early engagement?
Tasha Blank:
I remember the room and I remember the space. Interestingly enough, I remember the lighting and kind of the ambiance. And that was my first year that I was really a DJ. That was the first year that I fully transitioned into doing this. I don’t think I had any other gigs anymore at that point. And so it was really exciting for me to be starting to get asked to play all these different things and things that were outside of my world. And I just remember being delighted to be there.
James Maskell:
Yeah, well it was a fun party. I would say that was the era in New York where the Functional Forum had fun after parties and it’s changed over the years as I’ve changed and as the world has changed. And I guess maybe that’s a good place to start. I think you were one of the first people that I saw that was actively trying to sort of separate the worlds of dancing and nightlife. If you lived in New York, if you wanted to dance, it would start at midnight and it would go to 5:00 AM and you’d have to drink a lot or take drugs. And you started, I think to put a new twist on that. And so much so that here we are a decade later and there’s a lot more sober dance events. People are dancing in coffee shops, we’ve come full circle. So I think you were one of the earlier thinkers and actors in that world. So what started that for you? And tell us about some of the early experiments you did in sort of sober dancing and different time dance events.
Tasha Blank:
Oh yes. So many experiments. I definitely tried a lot of things before I found one that really worked and I got into it because I mean, I had been a dancer early on. My dad tells these stories of how I was doing ballet moves as soon as I could walk, even though I’d never been exposed to anything like that. And so it was always kind of in me and I danced growing up and I became a classically trained dancer and I was in a pre-professional company kind of on that professional dance track in middle school and high school. And ultimately what I found was that it actually, the deeper I got onto that path, the farther away I got from the joy of it and the farther away I got from the reason that had gotten me into it in the first place. Because that world for me, I am sensitive and there is a lot of pressure that goes on.
You have to be really frigging tough to make it in the professional dance space. It is very, very hard on your body. It is very competitive. It is not very nice. So I chose to go into academia when it was time to choose, do I go to dance school, do I apply to Julliard or do I go to NYU for academia? And I decided to go to NYU for academics and ended up getting myself into a serious mental and physical health crisis by the time I was 19 and 20. And my body was literally shutting down and it was a huge wake up call. It was a huge dark night of the soul. And it really woke me up to like, oh my God, the way I’ve been operating is not going to work the way I’ve been interacting and engaging with reality is not going to be sustainable.
And so I have to completely reroute how I’m engaging with the world. And in order to heal my body, I had to open up and become open to nutrition and energy. These things that western medicine, all the doctors I went to had no answers for me, none. It was so disillusioning, it was so disappointing. And it was a huge turning point. I was like, wow, this system that claims to know everything doesn’t know shit. I know more than they do about what’s happening for me. So that sent me on the path of falling myself and following my own body’s intuition. And within a year I had a completely different friend group. I was studying completely different subjects in college and I found myself at Burning Man dancing and dancing to electronic music for the first time ever. And that experience was this magical portal back to the original joy that I had accessed when I was five years old, that pure aliveness, that pure expression, that pure presence and being, it was the happiest I’d felt since I was that little. Probably it was the most alive I’d felt it was the most myself. I’d felt it was a feeling that I forgot was even possible. And as soon as that happened I was like, okay, well this is obviously it. This is the thing I’ve been looking for this whole time.
And that sent me on this path of exploration. And as soon as I got back to New York after Burning Man, it’s a bit of a long story, but we’ll get there. I was like, where do I find these people? Where do I find this music? Who’s doing this? And so I went to burner parties and I started trying to find that feeling on these different dance floors and I could touch it occasionally, but it wasn’t until I actually went to five rhythms in 2009 that I found a place where I could actually, it didn’t have the big sound system, you didn’t have the cool DJ, you didn’t have the costumes, but the spirit was there and the freedom was there and the ability to explore what was possible with my own body was there. And so that became my laboratory. But it was missing my favorite elements, which were the sound and the music and the ambiance and the whole vibe, which can actually contribute so much. But every time I went to go find those things, I found late nights and tons of drugs and nobody dancing and just like it was like one half of the equation was over here and the other half of the equation was over here and I really wanted to bring them together. So I started throwing my own events and at the beginning I was hiring other DJs and lots of musicians and there were these sort of, not over the top, but a lot of production and a lot of elements going into them. And I would take over yoga studios and it was called Get Your Dance on the First Parties. And eventually that kind of burned me out. It wasn’t financially sustainable and it became really clear that I needed to learn to DJ and actually just start doing this myself.
So I took a year off of Get Your Dance on. I think that was 2012. I learned to DJ. I started doing little dance, yoga, dance experiences and yoga studios just to kind of figure out how my music was impacting people’s bodies and learned a lot about how the sound was actually catalyzing movement. And then in 2013 we launched the Get Down and that became the big container for the big dance that I had been wanting to create for a long time. And it was much simpler than my earlier parties. It was one room we’d take over a club, we had the sound, we had the vibe, and it became a place where we could really focus that energy and I’d bring in drummers and worked with MCs and just created this really, it really took on a life of its own.
James Maskell:
Yeah, well I remember that. And now that I’ve been in the world of functional medicine here for 20 years almost, I guess one of the things that keeps coming up, especially now that I’ve been focusing a lot more on cognitive decline, dementia and brain health, it seems that the research is starting to show that dance is about the best thing that you can do for your brain because of the combination of movement and coordination or otherwise. And starts to, you start to realize why cultures or have always had dance, why music is important, why rhythm is important and why that’s been a part of culture. And really if you look, I think it seems to me that the middle of the bell curve of dancing has died, right? There’s still dance culture for young people in different ways, but I would say the average American over 40 is probably not really dancing at all. And so there is a need to try and find ways to create voluntary excited movements that are not the gym in everyday life. And I think you were, even though it was in New York and it was mainly for young people, I think it was an initial exploration into how could we find ways for people to dance without some of the things that have put people off. So that was exciting. So what are your thoughts about dance as a health event?
Tasha Blank:
I mean I say all the time it saved my life on every level and I healed physical issues, dancing. I healed my digestive system with dance. I healed my mental health with dance. I’d never found anything that was a balm for so much. I think one of the things that gets in the way of people dancing more isn’t just that nightlife is what it is, and it’s very inaccessible for a lot of people, but a lot of people have this idea of what dancing is, and a lot of people have this idea that, oh, I can’t do that, or I’m not good at that, or I’m really awkward, or I have two left feet or whatever it is, I need a couple drinks in order to loosen up. Maybe you’ll see me do it at a wedding when I’m three beers in. But what dance really is, is it’s our birthright.
There have been studies done with babies from around the world, across countries, across cultures. All babies respond to rhythmic sound with physical movements, with rhythmic physical movements. It’s wired in us to respond to sound rhythmically. It’s our first language, we can do this before we talk. So it’s something that we’re all intrinsically born with the ability to do. And you see in cultures that encourage it and welcome it, that’s who grows up dancing together and being good dancers and the cultures that don’t encourage it and in fact stifle it and judge it and say, oh, dancing is something that people do on stages. People who are highly trained and have a certain body type. That’s what dancing is. That leaves out everybody else who actually completely has this ability. So it’s the quickest route to transformation, sustainable transformation, integrable transformation that I’ve ever come across. And that’s really why I chose this as a career path. It’s why I followed the impulse to create events and become a DJ is because I wanted to help people. I wanted to do something good, I wanted to have an impact, and this was the most effective and most efficient way I found.
You have a group of 200 people in a room and they start out one way and two hours later they’re completely changed.
James Maskell:
Yeah, no, that’s very interesting and I’m excited about it for many reasons. Last year we did an event called Vagus Fest that was all about the vagus nerve, and I think there’s some interesting vagus nerve dance stuff since I’ve got into this. I’ve met other DJs who are using music consciously to create heightened states for people. And I think there’s some interesting research and experiments going on in those areas. And so yeah, this is a call to everyone who’s listening to the evolution of medicine. I mean, this is in a certain way, a perfect example of the evolution of medicine. Look at the two journeys that you could have gone down to deal with whatever was going on at age 1819. One of them looks like lifetime medication and all of the side effects that go with an SSRI as an example, or some sort of antibiotic for your digestive complaints here on the other side, that’s the sort of pathogenic pathway, seeing it as a disease and treating it as such.
Now there’s this salutogenic pathway where you see dance as a vehicle for health, and now you are in the service of many other people seeing that same pathway and recognizing that pathway. I think many of us, part of the reason why I got into this work is that I realized that this actually happens to everyone. You can’t outrun it. Everyone in their life at some point has this moment where they decide are they going to go this way or the other way? And on this path along the path to salute to Genesis, it takes courage, but it also opens up the world in many ways that you don’t get open up to if you just sort of be part of the machine. So I really appreciate you coming and sharing that. I think dance is critical. I’ve tried to get dance parties going at functional medicine events pretty unsuccessfully.
I would say over the years though I would say, I’ll throw this in here. I spoke at the Mexican Association of Lifestyle Medicine last year, and it is just part of the culture that the dance culture has survived in Mexico. And so after every speaker there was a dance break and someone would get on stage and play the music and people would dance, and people were actively dancing in the same way that you would say like three beers in and at a wedding completely sober in the conference and just letting it all hang out because that’s what they do. And it was really amazing. And actually in the evening they had an African dance thing and I saw people who were speaking there who are American and who are sort of functional medicine celebrities, and I would put myself in this category all letting loose in ways to that African dancing that I’ve never seen them do that before. And it was just really because that was what everyone else was doing and it was just so freeing and joyful. And it was such a stark contrast to the often very stuffy medical conference where that kind of thing would be looked down on this is academia, blah, blah, blah. And so I would just say that’s been an experience that I’ve had in the last year that has said, well, maybe that’s not just how it is. This is all cultural conditioning, just like you said.
Tasha Blank:
Yeah. So much of it is about safety and permission. We all have it. We just need the right conditions to allow it to come through. And as you know, dancing is one of the most beneficial activities for the nervous system. It’s so funny because as we learn more and more about especially chronic health conditions, they’re so tied to our nervous system and there’s so many people who are healing chronic pain, chronic long covid, all kinds of things through simply focusing on healing their nervous system. And dance is one of the most effective vagal nerve stimulators there is. You’ve got bilateral stimulation, you’ve got all of your proprioceptive senses get activated, especially when you dance in groups. That is a whole other thing that creates a sense of belonging, which we are wired to seek, which is our ultimate safety or source of safety. So it’s a huge signal of safety to the nervous system to be moving to the same rhythm with a group of people. And it touches us on this very pre-verbal level that’s hard to access otherwise.
James Maskell:
Beautiful. Alright, well this is the time for a commercial break and I’m going to do this live because our sponsor here at the Evolution of Medicine on the podcast, true Neuro is software that allows you to prescribe dancing and see if the patient did it and then see the impact on both their data as it comes every three months with blood markers, but also the immediate effect on wearables, the portal that practitioners are using Magni for cognitive decline. But we’re also seeing a lot of mental health. You can make recommendations as the practitioner in the eight different categories and perhaps a dance event could be in the connect category under the psychosocial, it could be in the move category under the lifestyle. So if that sounds awesome and interesting and you’d like to be able to prescribe dancing to your patients and see how it affects them and their data, go to true neuro.com and you can book a demo and come and check it out.
And there we go off the cuff sponsor connection. And that’s one of the things that I’m working on with Dr. Christine Burke, is to try and find a way to get enough practitioners prescribing it and actually seeing the outcomes of that prescription. One thing to prescribe it, it’s another thing to know whether the person did it, but I know from going to weddings that if I’m wearing my aura ring and my heart rate is elevated for five hours between the hours of nine and 1:00 AM at a wedding, you know what I was doing. So anyway, that’s the end of the sponsor segment. Now I want to get onto the other area and actually the reason why I decided to have you here on the podcast, because actually we could have just done what we just did, and that would’ve been a great podcast too, and we would’ve talked about the value of dancing, but it is the year of transformation and I saw you post a transformation that you’ve gone on over the last few years, and I think it’s super, super relevant to our community who are knee deep in nutrition and helping people of all ages.
So I just love to give you the floor to share your journey and what it’s meant for you and what the implications are for physicians around the country and practitioners who are supporting people in their journey to true health.
Tasha Blank:
Yeah, wow. Okay. So I’ve learned so much. As I mentioned, I had a really giant health crisis in my early twenties, late teens, and that wasn’t the first time I was, as they call a very colicky baby. And I got Lyme disease when I was a year old and I started having chronic fatigue when I was 10 years old and exposed to lots of things that we now know do not help the body thrive. So I was kind of set up in many ways to be a perfect storm, waiting for just extra stressors to come on and trigger really uncomfortable events. So that one at age 19 was the first. And I’d also had eating disorders and been a restrictive eater, especially from about age 13 on. And that kind of leveled out, but it was always in the background. And that body dysmorphia and the body image issue never went away.
This sort of hyper-awareness of how I looked and how my food might be relating to how I looked was always there even after I was eating enough, in quotes, I say, and 2019, I had a series of really stressful things, emotional and physical happen. I had some really bad dental work, I got toxic mold poisoning, and I had a really, really hard breakup and the worst that I’d ever had kind of thing where you’re just brought to your knees. And so, the physical and emotional stressors that were on my body were really intense on top of living in New York and not sleeping and being a DJ, et cetera, et cetera. And probably not getting enough nutrition for a really long time. And what I had learned was healthy for me over the years, had a lot to do with detoxing. It had a lot to do with being plant-based and of course organic and all of these things.
And what I know now is that actually after it helped heal some things, it actually put me out of balance. And so when those stressors came on and I tried to detox from the mold and tried to take care of myself after this breakup, I actually just made myself sicker by eating vegan and doing all of these detoxes and to the point where people know that I shaved my head new year’s going into 2020, but most of them don’t know that I did that because my hair was falling out. And I was planning to take a sabbatical starting March 19th, 2020, and it was going to be my last get down that was slated to be my last party that I was at in-person for several months, and I was going to go to Costa Rica or something like that and finally heal and whatever. And instead it was my first virtual broadcast during Covid.
And that was an incredibly stressful time because I lost my work. I lost in-person dance floors, I lost my community. I left New York because it was not a good place for me to be, and I lost my income. It was like everything kind of went away at once, and it put me on this very, very interesting journey that stressed my body even further. So I started having really intense inflammation symptoms. Again, doctors put me on antibiotics and things that I didn’t need to be on for that, but I was so scared about what was happening with my body that I just would try anything at that point. And of course, I doubled down on detoxing. I thought that was how to heal, and things kind of leveled out as far as those symptoms went over time, over about the course of a year kind of calmed down as I started to find my way.
But the other thing that happened was that because so many of my identity markers disappeared, so many of the things, my touch points for who I was and what I did and what I knew to be true went away. And my main coping mechanism, IE dancing in groups went away. I had this wild identity disillusion and in rites of passage, they call this being in liminal space when we’re thrust into this sort of unknown territory that feels deeply unfamiliar and we don’t know who we are and we lose our sense of self, I absolutely went through that. For the first six months of the pandemic, I was nomadic. And then I lived alone in the woods for another six months. And it was just an absolutely wild time where I started feeling amongst many other things like distinctly. And it wasn’t so much that, and again, this is totally personal to me, gender is a completely personal experience, so I don’t speak for anybody else, but it wasn’t that I was both masculine and feminine. It was that I was neither. And it was like the Tasha we knew and that feminine identity completely went away.
And so over the course of time, what this made space for was for me to realize that the ways I was feeding myself, the ways I was treating my body were not working, and that they were actually making me sicker and they were making me more inflamed. And I think in 2022, it took me a while to get here, but in 2022, I connected with my friend Eric Levinson, who is a health coach and teacher, and we caught up and I told him about all the symptoms I was still having and all of this stuff and what I was trying to do to heal. And he just very sweetly and calmly said, okay, so Tasha, are you ready to admit that none of this is working? And I was like, yeah, because at that point I had tried everything. It absolutely wasn’t working. I was divorced enough from my identity as an attractive woman at that point that I was willing to eat more, eat differently. And he suggested metabolic animal-based way of eating. I stopped detoxing, I stopped taking supplements, I started eating a lot more. I started drinking raw milk. I started eating meat, eggs, orange juice, like honey, things I hadn’t touched. I hadn’t any, I hadn’t had dairy in 15 years probably. And within a couple of months, 60% of my symptoms were gone and I felt better in my body and I started feeling like a woman again, and I met my partner.
And yeah, it’s really been an absolutely because that was at this, it was two and a half years ago, and I have not gone back. I’m still animal-based, sometimes bordering on carnivore, but I also don’t really have rules. One thing that I learned during that time was that I didn’t have to be afraid of foods anymore, and I can eat sugar sometimes and I can have something that’s not organic. And the really phenomenal thing that happened over the course, it took maybe a year or two years, but I ultimately lost a bunch of weight. My body composition totally changed, which was probably partly inflammation coming down, but it was like I had put my body through so much deprivation that it was just holding on for dear life to anything. And once she started learning to trust me, trust that there’s going to be food trust, that there’s going to be fat trust, that there’s going to be protein trust, that it’s going to be coming from happy, healthy animals that grew up nearby, then my body just kind of found it’s what feels like it’s natural shape.
And I haven’t, oh, and the other piece, there’s so many things that changed. The other piece that changed really quickly was I stopped caring about food. So since I was 13 years old, since the coupling of what you eat and how you look happened, it had stayed that way again, even though I was eating stuff, I was eating more than when I had clinical eating disorders. And as soon as I started eating more, eating metabolic, eating, animal-based, really giving my cells in enough nutrition, my brain stopped thinking about food. It stopped caring about food. And that alone that happened long before my body changed. And that alone was the greatest freedom I could have imagined because I had tried everything. I had done therapy, I had done brain retraining, I had done tapping, I did everything to try to heal my body image issues, and nothing worked until I actually fixed my metabolic health.
James Maskell:
It’s an amazing story and it touches into so many sort of cultural phenomenon and also the work of all the practitioners who are here. I’m glad I didn’t know Eric Levinson was part of the story, and I’ve known Eric from years before I started the Functional Forum in the Energetics days. And yeah, he’s a great guy. And the way that you described how he engaged with you is the way that I would expect him to engage based on how I know how he is. And it’s amazing how that one kind of question can really create a portal for transformation, which is how’s that working for you basically? Right. Totally. Great question for all of us to work with that. I mean, I guess you’ve had your own experience, and I know that these experiences, not everyone’s experience, but how does your experience of your own transformation affect the way that you look out into the world now and see the cultural phenomenon around these kind of issues that you’ve experienced? Do you have a conclusion? Do you have a
Tasha Blank:
Sense? Well, I mean there’s a lot of issues that I just talked about, and I think there’s so much going on culturally around identity and sense of self and who we are and what we’re supposed to look like, et cetera, et cetera. And in the sort of, well, actually what I’m talking about too many things at once. Do you want to be more specific?
James Maskell:
Well, I mean in a certain way, I witnessed you go from being what I see, my perspective in the years that I knew you in New York and you played at the functional forum as a very attractive female, and then now sort identifying in a different way for a number of years through a health journey and then now coming back to being that again, and ultimately for kids, we are living in a profound metabolic health crisis.
Tasha Blank:
Yes.
James Maskell:
That that’s definitely happening. We are living in a cultural moment of trying to understand what’s happening to kids, where the gender issues are growing much more rapidly than any sort of genetic changes or the other changes would allow. It’s clearly a cultural phenomenon. You have friends who go to schools and see that the majority of kids have something on this spectrum or are considering it particularly girls. And so now that you understand that there’s also environmental issues that you understand very well because you have been through the mold and if you’ve been through mold and detox and those kinds of things, you’ve typically done a lot of research into the effects of toxins and toxic mold and biotoxins. So you’re in a pretty unique place to be able to have an opinion. And I just want to know what that is.
Tasha Blank:
Yeah, well, so if we’re talking about gender, the thing I would preface this with is that I think there’s a culture war happening and that culture war has, and gender is being used, a talking point in this culture war and this culture war harms people in multiple different ways and is not here to serve anyone’s betterment. It’s here to distract from what I perceive to be or would call the military industrial complex. But that’s a whole other story for a whole other time. And so yeah, I just preface it with that, that there is acknowledging, there’s this huge discourse that really impacts people. And when it comes to the conversation about gender, the thing is we are talking about humans who deserve compassion and good treatment and love and listening and empathy and understanding. And because of my history engaging with the Western medical system and being like, I’ll call it what it is, betrayed by it and harmed by it many, many times, I don’t see that system as a problem-solver. It’s really good in certain situations and sometimes we really need it. You get in a car accident, thank God the ambulance is on the way. But as far as attempting to provide curative solutions for issues that are multifaceted and have to do with psychology, have to do with environment, have to do with metabolism, have to do with trauma.
A pill is never going to be the answer. A surgery is never going to be the answer from what I hear from people who’ve been through it. And I think the way that the culture war is being framed right now is really doing a disservice to people who need love and compassion and listening and support and research that needs to be done. How do we give that support in the most effective way? What I experienced was I had been vegan and detoxing for a very long time. I didn’t feel non-binary. It wasn’t until life threw me into this incredibly liminal experience of losing everything of what I believe to be true changing.
I had that experience of my identity, including my feminine identity being completely stripped away. And as I actually dug back into some research about rites of passage, because since then I’ve started a school that teaches transformational DJing and we talk a lot about rites of passage and how do we actually catalyze transformation in the body? I dug back into these texts about rites of passage and they talk about the liminal space that anybody experience a rite of passage. It goes through, you have to kind of enter the unknown in order to discover something new, in order to become something new, in order to truly grow and have a paradigm shift. And that traditionally, one of the hallmarks of that liminal experience includes a sense of having no gender and that that’s actually something that’s been known about for a really, really long time, thousands and thousands of years in traditional indigenous cultures where rites of passage are actually part of how everybody grows up. It’s like, yeah, you go and you have that experience and then you come back and you’re a different person and maybe you get to reclaim a gendered identity once again. But that disillusion of identity, whether it’s gender or anything else, it’s like there’s an interesting phenomenon where we assume it’s permanent or we assume it’s the answer. And for me, it was important because it actually allowed me to let go of the unhealthy aspects of femininity that had shaped my behavior and how I related to myself.
And it lasted about a year and a half and it was not permanent. And ultimately it seems like my metabolic health really played into it because once I started healing my metabolic health, everything came back. And so I do get curious sometimes, what if I had been eating like this that whole time through that whole experience, would it have been nearly as stressful? Would I have gone through that whole disillusion of identity? I dunno. But as I’ve been sharing about it and sharing about it more publicly, I’ve definitely gotten a lot of comments from people who’ve been through similar things and made similar changes and were like, yep, me too. My sex drive came back and my sense of being alive and my body, my power came back. So I think for a lot of people, this is a huge thing.
James Maskell:
Yeah, I think so too. And I think you are hitting it from very interesting angles. I think it’s a very good fit for the Evolution of Medicine content generally, because this is the evolution of medicine. It’s empowering those people to go on this journey themselves and go through the experience they need to be themselves and be healthy. And you’ve done it. I think it’s especially relevant for the year of transformation that we’re in here and all of our content is put around. So I want to thank you for doing the work. I want to thank you for being willing to share the story. I know there’s elements of it that are probably not easy to share still, but you can see that as you share the story and people hear it and it’s impactful for them, that could make a big impact. So yeah, thank you.
Deep bow to you and I look forward, I do think I’m coming off the back of having spent 10 years organizing functional medicine doctors to be connected to each other in community. I think I’ve just come to the next phase of my career, which I think is helping to take this medicine to the people. And I think there’s a role for dance in it there in that journey. And I have to work out The dance party in the event that I just hosted on Saturday was sort of the weakest part of the whole event. There were so many amazing events. Part of it was just because it was at the end of the day and most people that arrived really early and was done by then. But I would say that I do know that it’s powerful for our health and I have always dreamed about having my own music festival. And so then it will happen next year and we’ll work out how to keep people to the end and have them do that. And maybe you want to be a part of that seeing as the area pretty well. So thank you very much. Excited to our connected future and grateful for you stepping into yourself. Do you want to share a little bit about the academy that you’ve started, if people are interested in finding out more?
Tasha Blank:
Sure. Well, it’s so funny because hearing you say, well, it’s hard, the dance party’s been the weakest part, or it’s hard to keep people on the dance floor. It is. It’s really hard, especially in a culture where people generally rely on drinking to dance and often don’t feel comfortable enough in their bodies to do so. And the brilliant thing about that whole kind of liminal, ridiculous, I call it a shamanic death spiral experience that I had when I was living alone in the woods and such was I actually figured out the method that I had been using for years prior and the reason behind all my success in creating these electrified dance floors. And I figured out how to teach what I had been doing from how you do the music, how you hold the space, what elements need to happen and come into place for people to really lock in.
There’s so much that goes into it. You can’t just hit play on a cool song and expect people to dance. There’s a lot that has to go into it. So, I started a school called Powerhouse DJ School, also known as PhDJ, and it’s an eight-month program that the next one we’re about to do. Our fourth one starts in September of this year. And we train people not just to be really freaking good DJs, but to be powerful, transformational space holders and to use their music to catalyze transformation, to support nervous system regulation, to kind of be the thing. I think that humanity craves ritual. We crave connection, we crave deep embodiment and expression and dance floors can be the answer to really a lot of what we need. So I’m all about building an army of brave souls who want to hold that kind of space.
James Maskell:
Beautiful.
Tasha Blank:
Yeah.
James Maskell:
Alright, well we will talk about 2026 and I will have feedback from that conversation for the audience here. But thank you so much for all of your work and thank you for being here on the Evolution of Medicine podcast. We’ve been here with Tasha Blank. She is a DJ and a leader in now this world of transformational dance. And I want to share my appreciation for you. I’m your host, James. This is the Evolution of Medicine podcast, and we’ll see you next time.
Tasha Blank:
Thanks for having me.
James Maskell:
Thanks for listening to the Evolution of Medicine podcast. Please share this with colleagues who need to hear it. Thanks so much to our sponsors, the Lifestyle Matrix Resource Center. This podcast is really possible because of them. Please visit goevomed.com/lmrc to find out more about their clinical tools, like the Group Visit Toolkit. That’s goevomed.com/lmrc. Thanks so much for listening, and we’ll see you next time.
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