Beginner’s Mind

I just woke up from a three hour nap and as soon as I finish writing this and posting it (to the new site, woo to the hoo!) and returning some email, I’m going back to sleep. You thought just because I haven’t been writing for a while I’ve been living it up with hookers and blow, right? Well, I mean, I have, but there’s only so much hookers and blow one girl can take before she begins to long in a very pointed manner for her jammies and her flannel sheets.

Part of the reason I’m so beat, I’m sure, has to do with the crazy Suhaila format bellydance class my friend Renee has been teaching for the past two weeks and which is kicking my ass in a way my ass hasn’t been kicked since…well, since ever, probably. I’ve been doing various types of bellydance on a very casual basis since 1999 (Lord have mercy) but somehow none of that seems to have prepared me for this format. It’s hard to explain how it’s different from tribal…not the class itself, which is pretty much all drills and stretching and butt squeezes and downbeats and upbeats and is pretty much SAPPING MY WILL TO LIVE (this morning when I was attempting to do a sitting-down down-to-up undulation I looked at myself at the mirror and I looked like I had been sentenced to five-to-ten at a bellydance penal farm with no time off for good behavior)…but the way you think about each move. For example, in my tribal class, when we drop our hip, we do it by bending the knee and using the oblique muscles. I think. In Suhaila format we drop our hip by squeezing our opposite glute, and if this sounds confusing to you and you are pursing your mouth and knitting your brow, trying to figure out which bits of you are connected to the other bits, and how to make all those bits work together to do something as simple as drop your hip in time to the music (but don’t use your knees or your obliques! Obliques are for chest circles!), then, yes, welcome to my Sunday morning. It was such a hard class.

The studio where we dance has big open windows to the street outside and I wondered what people walking by must have thought about a room full of women with strained expressions on their faces, just…walking around. Sometimes we walked up on our toes, and sometimes we walked backwards, and sometimes we walked to the side, but from the outside we must look really stupid, because how hard can it be, right? The best must be when we’re sitting down with our legs out doing glute squeezes (which you do in time to the music, hilariously)…people must be walking by going, “That is the easiest yoga class ever.” Oh, ha ha ha HA.

What’s really difficult, though, isn’t squeezing my left butt cheek while trying to drop my right hip as I step on my right foots (seriously, stand up right now in your office cube and try it. Hard, right? Right), but failing at squeezing and dropping and stepping. Like I said, I’ve been dancing for a while now and while I am still not very graceful or accomplished (maybe another six years will help, you tell me) I at least feel competent most of the time. Like, in tribal class, when Sharon says to undulate, I can undulate and know what it means. When she says to shimmy I can rest secure in the knowledge that I am, in fact, shimmying. The dance vocabulary makes sense to me and I can see what I’m doing wrong most of the time and understand how to make it right.

This class? This class, I told Renee that I couldn’t locate my own butt. “I don’t know where it is!” I wailed, and a couple of the other women nodded their heads, like, they couldn’t find their butts either. Not being able to locate my plus-sized ass has not been, traditionally, a problem from which I have suffered, but I tried to squeeze when she said squeeze and nothing happened and it was all very humiliating. I’d felt bad earlier in the class when I couldn’t do a straddle squat very well, or when I couldn’t maintain plank position, or when I couldn’t do a split or pushups or whatever, but that’s nothing compared to having to ask someone…a woman to whose house you have been for dinner!..to help you squeeze your butt muscles.

So simple, and so difficult. I got so mad at myself during that class and I couldn’t wait for it to be over because I wanted to be good at something, like walking, again. I kept telling myself that it’s only my second class and that I shouldn’t beat myself up about it, but I kept thinking about how I really should be better at dance in general since I’ve been doing it as long as I have, and how I’m still not that good at tribal, and how I have often wanted to be in a troupe but that I really don’t have the skills to do so, and it feels impossible to ever get the skills…what with my not being able to drop my hip effectively. I was so mad at myself. Part of me just wanted the class to be over so I could go to Trader Joe’s and go home and get back into bed and another part of me was upset that I was even thinking of quitting and another part of me just wanted to be able to use my butt for a purpose other than making my jeans too tight and another part of me wanted to DOMINATE the class and blow everyone away with the power of my hip drops and another part of me felt really fat and sad and another part of me just wanted to sit down and stretch out.

“You really have to have beginner’s mind,” Renee said, when I told her I’d had sort of a frustrating class. I know she’s right, but it’s so hard to want to keep on beginning, over and over again, to accept that I’m not very good at something I really like…and to keep liking it anyway.