192. We Stopped Singing, Dancing, and Playing. Dr. Swan Dao on Remembering What We've Forgotten
Most of us stopped singing somewhere around the time we were told we weren't good at it. We stopped dancing when it became a performance. We stopped playing when we learned to be serious. And in that process, we lost access to what Dr. Dao calls our most fundamental human languages, the ones that live beyond words, beyond analysis, beyond diagnosis.
Dr. Dao has spent his career helping people find their way back to those languages, through the body, the voice, and the imagination. In this episode, he joins Drs. Erin Hurley and Joanne Sotelo to talk about why physicians may need this more than most, and where to begin.
Key Takeaways To Listen For
- Medicine trains us to observe, analyze, and perform. Healing often requires something else: participation, expression, and presence with others
- Becoming an expert on your own patterns, knowing where they came from, naming the diagnosis, does not always change them. The body, voice, and imagination can move us where insight alone cannot
- Play is not the opposite of seriousness. It is the opposite of rigidity. Dr. Dao makes the case that play is an inherently open-ended, exploratory state where there is nothing to prove and nothing to achieve
- Georgian folk singers don't sound the same when classically trained performers sing their songs perfectly. What's missing is friendship. The singers who carry the deepest meaning are good mates who have been singing together for years. The same is true in medicine: the quality of connection in the room matters as much as the quality of the skill
- Reconnecting with the body, voice, and creative expression is more accessible than most people think. Dr. Dao's suggestion: ask yourself what game you loved as a child. Carl Jung did exactly that to reconnect with deeper parts of himself
"All of our ancestors sang, and danced, and took part in rituals. It is not just trauma that is intergenerational. We have inherited countless songs, myths, and stories that live within us, and they long to be shared and expressed again." — Dr. Swan Dao, PhD
About Swan Dao, PhD: Dr. Swan Dao is the founder of the Institute of Devotional Arts, which renews the purpose of art in the service of life.
Swan studied philosophy at the University of Oxford, theology at the University of Chicago, and theatre at the École Jacques Lecoq in Paris. He holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge, with a focus on self-transformation and system change.
A certified coach, psychotherapist, and experience designer, Dr. Dao works across transformative education, mental health, and cultural regeneration. He designs and leads expressive therapy programs for the world's largest conference on trauma and wellbeing.
He is known for guiding people through distinctive experiences that restore neglected human capacities: intuition, imagination, contemplation, and embodied forms of knowing, relating, and meaning-making.
Dr. Dao seeks to revive a vocation once shared by art, theology, and psychotherapy: the care of the soul.
Connect with Dr. Swan Dao, PhD
Website: https://devotionalarts.org
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/swandao/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/instituteofdevotionalarts/
Oxford Transformed Trauma Conference: https://mastersevents.com/oxford-2026/
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