I Love Dance

I just got back from my Saturday bellydance class with Heavy Hips. My body rewarded me for less sleep last night with not being able to dance as well today. Bellydance has given me an incredible awareness that I HAVE A BODY, that a part of me IS a body, and that my body isn't some mule that I get to either punish or take care of, at my whim--I COULD punish my body by not eating right, not sleeping my eight to nine hours, and never exercising, but I would feel terrible and I know it. Now that I have been bellydancing over a year, I am more in tune with my body's rhythms and how stress or upsetting things make me tense up--and my physical self really responds to care.
Because I have a chronic illness (now almost completely in remission, thank the Goddess), I have switched to almost all organic foods in my diet, and have gone off dairy products entirely (as the old PG&E commercial says, "I'm a little lactose intolerant." I have also heard that dairy products can affect arthritis, so I use Silk soymilk with omega-3s, and soy yogurt. Soy yogurts took a little while to get used to--instead of the nice, creamy, pretty colors of the dairy yogurts, the soys tend to be a bit on the grayish side and taste like, well,. soymilk. I'm used to it now, although soy cheese has a long way to go in terms of learning to like it. It mostly looks and tastes just a wee bit like rubber). Changing my diet has slowly helped--I wish I could be a vegetarian, but I was one once, and that is when I got lupus. My doctor at the time (who was also following a vegan diet) told me that some people really can't be vegetarians--I lost nearly twenty pounds (after having weighed about 125 pounds), became horrifically anemic, and my immune system then got screwed up and, after a long bout with the flu, I developed lupus. Now my body responds to a mostly vegetarian diet, but with some good, fresh fish or organic chicken for dinner. I rarely eat red meat (sometimes, though !)--and I don't deny myself the occasional black-bottom cupcake from Peets or a croissant from the local French bakery.

I love my Heavy Hips instructor, Palika, for her incredible wisdom, humor, and strength--and the women there are really nice. I don't have a lot of close women friends--I went though a lot of women-betrayals in childhood and in college, especially with one friend in particular (whom I know now to have been someone who was suffering terribly). In my MFA program, I began to make women friends, and then more friends in the dance community. Another thing about bellydance is that my wardrobe is changing--I gravitate now towards Indian shirts and skirts, and more color and prettiness in my clothes. Plus, my feelings about this 46-year-old, slightly overweight body have changed--I do want to lose more weight (I've lost just under 20 pounds now in this year of bellydance, but have hit a plateau), but I am trying to love myself where I am at right now. I feel strong and very well; so what if I am not as thin as I was when I was 25? I was in terrible shape then, bodily and spiritually--I am, in some ways, much "younger" now in body and in spirit. So those are my thought for the day.