Ballet and Getting in Tune with your Body

I have a couple of classes left in my first ballet course and I was thinking about what the class has done for me so far.

So I commented the other day that I can be hard on myself while doing ballet, but that I need to also give myself grace. I'm 55 years old and I had bottom surgery this year, so even attempting to learn ballet is a pretty big deal. More importantly, though, I have actually been getting better at it and that's a cause for celebration on a few fronts.

The last couple of years I have been working on getting more fit, generally. I walk a great deal, including to work (which is about 7km round trip), and try to avoid driving or taking transit as much as possible. Ballet is a part of getting more fit, it's a workout to dance and it's helping me become more flexible and supple in my movements.

The other aspect of it, and the one I value most, is that I am getting more in tune with my body. When I stop to think about it, a lot has changed in the last three or so years. Hormone therapy has made significant changes to my body, from the shape to the strength and muscle tone. Add in breast development, along with gender confirmation surgery, and you realize that almost everything physical about me is radically different than when I started this latest phase of my journey.

Ballet has really helped me get a better sense of my body again. It's a hard form of dance, the moves can be quite precise and require a great deal of coordination. I'm very much, and very clearly, a beginner in those moves, but even I can see the real progression. I've gone from feeling clumsy and uncoordinated to feeling substantially more coordinated and confident. That's huge.

Needless to say, I will be continuing the program. I recently discovered that you do each of the core levels (after the introductory course) three times! That's 7 years of dance in front of me and I am so excited for it.

Related, I have seasons tickets to the National Ballet this year and it's been an incredible pleasure to watch with that extra understanding of what they are doing. I will never dance professionally, I know that, but taking these courses is giving me a much stronger appreciation for the art, the skill, and the hard work that it takes. Next up, I am going to see The Nutcracker, the very performance that made me love ballet all those years ago.