Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now

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recent posts

  • Back, baby!

    Two weeks of taking it easy because of an injury left me hungry for full-on dance. While the brief healing routines I did felt right, my brain also craved the endorphins from fully aerobic dancing. Yesterday, I got back to it, keeping my movements small while dancing Synchronicity with Debbie Lee van Ginkel and then today getting a little bigger doing Alchemy with Kellie Chambers.

    Holy smokes! So so so good. Nia has become a mental health thing as well as a physical health thing. They are so intertwined for me now.

    I am coming up on my one-year anniverary of Nia white belt training, a week embedded in dance. I found it transformative. Because I’d spent a few years dancing Nia, I think I felt the training in deep ways. It’s a body-mind-heart-soul thing.

    I’ve been writing regularly about this (almost) daily dance practice since last August, and I get a little evangelical about it. There are lots of opportunities to take the white belt training all over the world. For those willing to make the trek to Eugene, Oregon, Kellie and Debbie Lee are offering it here in April. Here’s a link: https://kelliechambers.com/workshops

    I’ve had many mentors across several disciplines over the years. Kellie and Debbie Lee rank among the most meaningful because they helped me be aware of what’s going on in me physically and mentally. The helped me learn how to dance my dance. I treasure that experience.

  • Respect the pain

    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.

  • Because she can

    This morning I sought inspiration through an online search on the words “dancer’s wisdom.”

    I found a link to a BBC piece on 77-year-old ballet dancer Suzelle Poole, still dancing, still teaching and looking back on a 70-year career.

    Here’s the link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tP214lJtKlM

    After watching, I saw that the video was created seven years ago. It made me wonder if Suzelle Poole was still around and still dancing. The answer: yes, of course.

    Here’s another news video produced last year. She’s 84 now and still dancing every day.