Meet the Authors
Claire Pierce
Claire Pierce is a Psychosynthesis counsellor, therapist, and Biodanza facilitator dedicated to helping people live happier, healthier, and more fulfilling lives. For almost three decades, she has supported people through life’s challenges and transitions, across private practice, an NHS clinic, Employee Assistance Programmes, and a charitable organisation.
When Claire discovered Biodanza, she found an approach that brought together movement, music, embodiment, and authentic human connection. She trained as a facilitator and has since dedicated herself to sharing its impact with a wider audience, particularly at a time when loneliness, stress, and disconnection are so widespread.
Claire is available for talks, presentations, podcasts, and workshops on community and belonging, nervous system regulation, resilience, and the role of movement and connection in building healthier individuals and communities.
Priya Mahtani
Priya Mahtani is a writer, facilitator, and editor exploring the intersection of love, belonging, creativity, and community. Her background spans more than three decades across communications, education, and community-building, including six and a half years in the international community of Auroville, South India, and over two decades working alongside Steiner Waldorf education in the UK.
Priya’s work has long explored what allows people and communities to flourish, through writing, editorial leadership, and the founding of platforms and gatherings centred on storytelling and connection.
As co-author of Dance Yourself Happy, Priya brings her lifelong interest in the relational, creative, and communal dimensions of being human to the page.
The Story Behind the Book
Behind the Book
Dance Yourself Happy began with a simple impulse: Claire’s desire to share something that had changed her life. Over nearly four years, that impulse grew into a book, and a creative partnership neither author fully anticipated.
Claire brought the lived experience, the client stories, and years of Biodanza training. Priya brought language, structure, and narrative shape. Each chapter began the same way: conversation. Interviews, memories, and reflection, worked and reworked between two friends until the writing found its rhythm.
The result carries two distinct but intertwined voices: Claire’s first-person lived experience, and Priya’s reflective narrative drawing connections between story, theory, and research. Together, they wrote the book they wished had existed when they needed it most.