People feel stress these days more than ever, it seems. Of course, life is stressful at any time in history, and we always feel that what is happening to us is unique even though, as the wise man supposedly said, there’s nothing new under the sun. Stress can be a killer, leading to health issues as we go through life. The issue, then isn’t that stress exists, but rather, it becomes how we will deal with it and its impact on our lives. Some people take up hobbies that take their minds off their issues. Others practice yoga or other meditation habits that those who practice these things say does indeed relieve stress. Some turn to religion. Perhaps the point is that, no matter what you decide to do, you should probably find an outlet for the stress in your life.

Ryan decided to turn to dance.

Saying that his life was filled with work-related stress, Ryan is taking his dance therapy (if you wish to call it that) to the world. You see, Ryan looks at dancing as the optimum way for humans to express their individuality in a world that seems to try to make us all alike. What makes Ryan’s passion interesting is that he started his dance journey when he was only 27 years old. He was in the business world, and today is almost an evangelist for spreading the gospel of dancing. It all started when he began to feel severely depressed because of the load of pressure he was feeling at his job.

Ryan noted that some people turn to negative things to relieve stress, destructive things like drink or drugs or unsafe sexual practices. Despite his youth, Ryan was astute enough to realize that those paths were as unhealthy as the stress itself. In his words, he was lucky to have found a dance class not too far from his home in San Francisco. And what he found at the dance class was eye-opening. Those people at the class–the instructors and the other dancers–were a community of positivity in a world filled with the negative. In his words, the people who were expressing their emotions in dance were folks who “had their souls intact,” and he knew that was a rare and beautiful thing in this world. As he attended more and more dance sessions, Ryan found his own mind released from the stress he encountered at work. His frustrations found expression in dance. He left the sessions refreshed and restored.

And, over time, Ryan found that he wanted to share his new-found stress relief with the world. In his job, he said, he often felt like a “taker,” someone who was after those things that benefitted him and the company he worked with. By telling others about dance, he felt, he could become a giver, sharing the joy of dance with others and somehow reversing the sense of taking he felt at work. And the way he chose to begin to share his love and joy of dance was to start a non-profit organization that would be devoted to sharing his newly-discovered passion. The name of the NPO, which he set up in 2021, is MOVEMENT.

MOVEMENT works like this: Local dance instructors offer free dance lessons in all dance genres to anyone of any level of skill and knowledge. That’s it. And Ryan took MOVEMENT first to Miami and then to New York City. The group stresses the health aspect of dance, the health of mind, body, and spirit. Ryan knows that getting up in front of people and freely moving through space can be stressful by itself, certainly. On the other hand, he has a way of convincing someone that if you would only try it, the freedom you’d experience in that action would be several times better than any stress you may feel. In other words, it’s ok to feel silly. Silly, he argues, is stress-relieving by definition.

Ryan’s NPO came out of the Covid pandemic and provided stress relief from that world-wide experience as well. It has allowed people the venue to reconnect to their communities and to the necessary social aspect of connectiveness that was so lacking during lockdown. Word spread quickly. MOVEMENT’s classes were soon filled. More venues and teachers and classes have been added. More are to come. People are happy to contribute to the NPO, but Ryan is completely fine if they don’t.

And that’s because Ryan is almost completely funding MOVEMENT with his own money. That fact, that he is using his own money, gives Ryan great joy as well. He’s happy to spend millions if needed to spread MOVEMENT to Los Angeles, New Orleans, and other cities in the US going forward. His goal is to take dance to the whole world, no matter what the cost.

He can do that, after all. You see, Ryan Breslow is the creator and owner of the tech company Bolt and is one of the youngest billionaires on the planet.