Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now

Pain that hits out of the blue is the damn weirdest thing. I don’t know quite what I did that led to such deep pain in my left glute that I couldn’t bend at all from the waist without triggering it.

Before that, I had been feeling pretty self-satisfied, what with daily walks and three lively hourlong Nia dance sessions a week. That all changed overnight.

Perhaps it was the six hours of gardening, up and down and leaning forward, to weed and prune? Maybe.

The how-did-this-happen to vigorous healthy me isn’t clear. The more important question: What now? I started by trying to figure out what I could do that wasn’t painful. Fortunately, that turned out to be walking (not a steep uphill, but on mostly flat terrain).

I also tried one Nia class, but it was too much too soon, so I continued walking, consulted a physical therapist, got some stretching exercises and did them, being careful to avoid any moves that hurt.

After several days of stretching, I turned to Nia’s online catalog of choreographed routines. They include several “moving to heal” dances designed for situations like mine. And I also discovered instructor Nia instructor Fred Bass’s therapeutic movement series.

I’ve done two of these routines (they’re 10 to 20 minutes) and they’ve reminded me to stay centered on how moving feels in the moment. When I haven’t been in pain, there’s a great joy of community in dancing with others. But this dancing privately, by myself with Fred Bass as guide, has let me go inward for a kind of emotional release that feels healing in another way.

Dance is a way of loving my today body, of recognizing all the ways I can still move, despite being in recovery mode.

In the first of this series, Bass describes what brought him to Nia and to create these routines. I appreciated his story.

I’ll stay with these therapeutic routines (seven in all) until my body says it’s ready to move on.