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Ballerina Wisdom = Sick People Advice?
I read this article the other day about Tiler Peck (a top tier, rock star ballerina, if you don’t know her yet), and was really blown away by how openly she talked about “saving her legs” for dance.
Most dancers and athletes I read about talk only about how “over achieving” they are. If they’re not performing or playing a game, they’re training and cross training and training more. This not something I’ve ever been able to do, try as I might. In the past, when traveling for work, I would worry about doing “too much” in the days surrounding, and thus not being able to dance to my fullest potential.
Reading about someone who is openly admitting that they “save” a lot of their muscles and time and energy for showtime (metaphorical or otherwise), and choose stretching and resting over intensive training… that’s a rarity, to say the least.
And it made me think: How much of this relates to real life as a CF patient too?
How do YOU balance your energy levels to handle the tasks at hand?
Do you push hard one day and rest the next?
If this interview was about you, what would you say as your own training advice for handling the hard parts of life?
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1 Reply
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Oh, I am quite shocked to hear this is a rarity. I thought professional dancers and athletes would cherish their bodies more than anything else and take care of it very well, prioritizing this above all. And perhaps they do, only to project a picture of overachieving on social media? After all, if you are constantly pushing to the limit and beyond, and your body can’t recuperate from this, you are likely to have a very short career I might think. And of course we all know that top sport is not a very healthy lifestyle anyway, even if you do take care. Many of them end up being injured or compromised for the rest of their life because they just have worn out the tissues and damaged them beyond the repair capabilities of nature. Often, even a lot of surgery can not correct this abuse.
Advise-wise I would say: listen to the body, not to the overachieving mind. When tired, rest or sleep. Use intuition on this, don’t give it to the mind. These are the questions you have to answer intuitively, not by thinking because the mind has a different and mostly unhealthy agenda. Use the infinite and ancient wisdom of the body with all its many senses (not only the five we always talk about, but the thousands of subtle senses the body uses to function every second). You don’t have to know them, just listen to them and don’t get in the way. If you do this, many questions like you asked here will not even come up to bother you, they will be answered in advance by the body.
My own training advise: meditation and self-inquiry, it allows me to tap into this ancient bodily wisdom much easier, and even beyond. These are perennial practices, coming from Hindu and Buddhist sources, but I think nowadays these methods can be learned under the heading of Heartfulness and/or ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy). This will allow anyone to find out with a lot of clarity whether the lifestyle their mind has pushed them into, is actually beneficial to the whole or their being, or not. And if it’s not, finding other ways will be much easier as well, without using the mind for that. Never believe the mind when it says that the current situation is the only way you can exist or cope, given the circumstances (family, money, targets, job, health). It’s a trap. There are always alternatives. But you have to let them open up to you. For this, you must ignore the mind and follow intuition. Find this freedom from the known. It always worked for me. Often I suffered from listening to the mind, but I have not once regretted following my intuition.
PS Ms. Peck seems to have found out what works for her, and what doesn’t. In doing so, she appears to have developed a pretty expensive taste in bodily care products. I wonder if this is a result of mind, or intuition 😉
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