Be Thankful for your Body

Thanks for being pretty awesome, body!

When it comes to body love, I often talk the talk without walking the walk. I'll post empowering articles and I'll encourage other ladies, but then I look at my own body and I'm like "Teeth, why you gotta be so sticky-outy? Belly, why you gotta be so fat?* Hips, why are you so TIGHT?"

So I have to be honest, I haven't been dancing this week. Part of it is natural laziness, and we don't have bellydance class this week, but it was easy to make excuses because my right hip was so. damn. sore. And it has been for about a week. I don't know what I did to it, but I am guessing at some point I stretched too far, or forced a stretch when I wasn't warm enough, and I messed things up. I mean, it's not unusual for me to have a little pain in my right hip after a really hard class, but this was a lot of pain and in different areas of my hip, and it sucked. And I honestly think I made it worse by using the pain as an excuse to not go do some ballet or what-have-you, because then I sat home and didn't get warm and spent too much time sitting on the couch with 20+ lbs of dog pinning my hip into position. I'd think to myself "I should warm up and stretch this bad girl out while I watch this DVD" but then I'd sit down and someone would get into my lap and that would be it.

This was a good reminder to be kinder to my body, in my actions and my words. To honor my limits from day to day, to have patience with the sloooow progress of stretching and not try to force my hips to be more like other dancers' hips. And besides, my body gets a lot of other things right. It's given me long, flowing hair, strong fingernails, elegant limbs, pretty eyes, and skin that takes ink well. I don't have any major health problems, I don't have to wear glasses, and I don't have allergies. Good job, body! You're pretty awesome.

Take a moment and thank your own body for the stuff it gets right. After all, it's the only body you're going to get, until we perfect either cloning technology or android bodies.

*Ok, that's my own damn fault. I eat cookies every day. Cookies are amazing. 

Dance Hard!

Whew. What a night. We did leaps and turns and extensions. Since we were doing leaps we had to do a major warm-up, which included stretching and splits. I have the worse splits of anyone in class. When I have to do splits, I just hate my body. But then Jolie said "Ok, run 5 times around the room as fast as you can" and you know what? I owned that. I outran everyone and I was ready to keep going. I guess I could have ran faster than I did.

My turns are also getting a lot better, which is a nice feeling. It's really good to feel like I am making progress on things that have been difficult for me for a long time.

Dance and Body Image

You never realize how white you are until you accidentally stand under a brighter light than the rest of the troupe. Fire & Gold Bellydance, photo by Pedro Romano (I think).

From time to time I see surveys about how belly dance has affected a woman's self esteem or body image. For me, the answers vary from day to day. Sometimes dance builds me up and I feel like the most beautiful, wonderful person in the world. Other times it tears me down and I feel like a failure who should definitely wear a bag over her head.

Dance also changes what I love and hate about myself. On a normal day, I'm not too fond of my belly fat, and often I hate how it looks in photographs of me dancing. But when I do a big Egyptian shimmy and it jiggles all over and makes the movement look like an earthquake? Then I kind of love it. On a normal day, I am happy being fair-skinned, but on a day when everyone else I'm dancing with has a tan, I feel really out of place and awkward... especially when my spot in the formation puts me under a light that shouts "HEY LOOK HER BELLY IS SO WHITE!"

Some things never change, of course. I always love my hair (long! red! just thick enough!), and I always hate my teeth (overbite! yellowness! ugh!). And I always feel just a little too tall even if most of the troupe is the same height as me (I'm not tall, just limb-y), and like I am going to take someone out with my fingernails during a spin.

Body image was much on my mind yesterday as I looked at proofs from out photo shoot and mused about what I loved and hated about my body, and how I looked compared to other members of my troupe (ladies, I think you're all more gorgeous than me, so no worrying that I told myself "Well at least I look better than XXX." I would never think that about you). Then my family came over and our conversation took an interesting turn.

True fact: As a young man entering the Air Force, my dad was 6'2 and 107 pounds. That is not a typo. One hundred and seven. At six foot two. As a full grown adult. I expressed amazement. I knew my Dad had been skinny, but I didn't know how little he had weighed back then. And let's be honest with ourselves here: I'm 5'6"ish and I don't think I've weighed 107 or less as an adult.

So my Dad started telling a string of one-liners about how skinny he was, finishing with "I've heard them all, and told most of them about myself." And it made me think about being a skinny teenager (back before I developed the curves that ensure I will never be 107), and how no one ever said any of those jokes about me. No, all skinny teenage girls get is well-meaning adults (usually older women) telling you to eat more. I got told I didn't eat enough to sustain a bird, which was pretty ridiculous because I ate until I didn't feel hungry any more, and then I ran around and biked and was a generally active girl, so obviously I was fueling myself well.

For teenage girls and adult women, the general expectation or goal is skinniness. Especially for teens, when we haven't finished developing. Our peers find other things to tease us about (for me, it was my teeth, no wonder I hate them). It's not until we become adults that skinny suddenly becomes a sin. The media holds up airbrushed images and stick-thin models, sure, but your Facebook friends constantly post memes declaring that "real women have curves" and "it wouldn't be fair to the other women if I was this awesome and skinny." They build themselves up while tearing others down. I feel like I've talked about this before, though.

I have never been more aware of my body than I have been since I became a dancer. Sometimes it's a wonderful awareness, the soreness of abs well-worked in class, the admiration of arms that creative beautiful lines. And other times it's looking at a picture of myself at the bottom of an undulation and going "great. I look pregnant. I hope no one in my family gets the wrong idea." And it's painful sometimes, that constant worry of whether I'll be able to make progress as a pro while I have braces, the question of whether I need to make serious diet changes or just run more, the possibility that weight loss will mean smaller breasts and suddenly I need to remake all my tribal bras.

I feel like this will always be a complicated relationship, this threesome between my body, dance and I. It will only get worse as I age, and my knees get creakier and my face gets lined. It's something I just have to accept, and just remember not to let the struggle ruin the things that I love about dance.          

I've been sick

Days 356-360 of "practice."

I apologize for the long silence. I have been down with my worst cold so far this year. It figures that the one weekend when I have no dance plans and my husband is done with school for the year and has no major work projects is the weekend that I would spend sick in bed.

A quick rundown of the days I've missed blogging:
Thursday: Woke up feeling poorly, blamed it on dehydration. Went to holiday party in Phoenix, had a wonderful time. Practiced chest isolations and belly rolls while driving home. Felt pretty rundown by the time I got home and had to admit I was probably sick.
Friday: Woke up feeling horrible, spent maybe 2-3 hours total out of bed. Did a few isolations in bed but mostly dozed in and out while struggling to read a science book.
Saturday: Much the same as Friday, but with a few more hours out of bed and at some point I switched to a steampunk novel.
Sunday: Merry Christmas to me. Still sick. Felt well enough to dance in my chair while beading, though.
Monday: Yep, still sick. Did glute isolations while reading before bed. Hey, when I started this year of practice I had no idea that I could isolate my glutes. PROGRESS!
Today: Still sick but hopefully I can get in some sort of gentle dancing or maybe zill practice.

Luckily BreakOut is closed this week so I didn't have any classes to miss (and poor Jolie is sick, too, as are several other local dancers, because it is a BELLY DANCE PLAGUE!), but Fonda said she would have class at The Dance Loft tomorrow so I really hope that I feel well enough to do that.

Still going to do my best to continue daily practice even though I have fallen way short of my original New Years goal of 30 mins a day. Honestly, I have always done poorly at keeping to daily goals so I am really proud of myself for sticking to this one and only missing it when I am ridiculously sick.

Ego: deflated

Day 340 of practice.

I guess I was feeling too good about myself after last night! Tonight's classes were rough and full of stuff I am bad at! I managed to conquer some exercises but others had me almost on the verge of tears. My body really was not willing to cooperate, even when my mind knew exactly what we were supposed to do. Oh well. As Jolie said, I'll just obsess about them until I get better. She already knows me so well!

A complaint: Our little room is still not adequately heated. It has a garage door and a vaulted ceiling which is connected to a warehouse loft and they have a small radiator style heater in there. Do you want to know how cold it was when I was driving home? 37 degrees. If it's that cold out, a studio should not be renting out rooms that are inadequately heated! We were all REALLY miserable during the first class. Everyone had numb fingers and our muscles were sluggish. Thankfully for the second class we were able to once again move in to the big, warm, wonderful room, but an hour in the cold room was way too much. If not for the fact that Jolie is only here through March, I would simply skip her classes until warmer weather returned.

Layers of frustration

Day 291 of practice.

Uuuuugh. I hate when my brain grasps an idea but my body just won't catch on! One thing that we had to do in drills class tonight was layering a chest circle over a maya. It shouldn't be that difficult, but my maya kept turning into a hip circle instead. I'm not sure that I managed to do it successfully even once. At least I did a little better with layering umis over walking.

It probably doesn't help that I just plain suck at mayas and taxims (which we had to drill in 101). I am so frustrated with how tight my hips and thighs are, and how much trouble I have sinking into my knees. Why did I ever stop going to the gym? I had so much more strength and flexibility then.

Tomorrow I am doing some friggin' yoga and that is final!