Lessons I Learned At The Bar(re)
“GIRLS. Point your toes!”
“SMILE.”
“Point! Your! Toes!”
“Spot your tur—WHY are you not spotting your TURNS.”
“Head up. Shoulders back. Lift. Turn out. Smile. USE your core. For the love of everything good and holy, please just POINT YOUR TOES.”
If reading any of those statements creates a mild anxiety attack in you, makes your feet start cramping up in anticipation, or causes your brain to start ticking in counts of eight. . . you might just be a dancer.
Pretty much everything important that I’ve ever learned in life has come from dance class. I mean, not everything. But a lot of important life lessons have been a direct result of the countless hours I spent in the dance studio growing up.
I never played traditional sports because the whole “being athletic” gene didn’t kick in until the third and fourth kid in my family, and I’m the firstborn. Please feel free to do the math on that one. However, dance always clicked well with me—especially ballet. Thus, I danced. And thereby learned lots of life lessons. So buckle up, y’all, you’re about to be dang educated.
1. Teaching Leads To True Learning
There is an embarrassingly large amount of concepts and steps that I didn’t truly comprehend until I was attempting to teach those same concepts to classes full of younger girls.
Learning typically involves watching someone do something, and then trying your best to copy the general movements until it looks like a semi-appropriate replica of whatever the first person did. Teaching, on the other hand, requires that you understand each individual step in the process so that you can effectively break it down for your students.
If you don’t know the steps of something complicated, try explaining the process to someone else. It forces you to slow down, stop generalizing, and digest each component of the process rather than swallowing it whole.
2. Mind Over Matter
One of the single most important lessons that I received was the concept that your mind has almost limitless power over your physical body. This was one of the hardest pieces for me to truly grasp on a soul-level, because it involved focusing my thoughts in a way that was just not a normal thing.
The command was “Lift!” and the explanation involved tying an imaginary bow to your heart that was connected to the ceiling by a string that was constantly pulling you up. It was intended to get us to hold ourselves with that classic ballerina posture, appearing weightless and airy, and not like a bunch of chumps slumping around (because that’s literally what I looked like without it).
My logical brain did not comprehend this. How could a string (implying flimsy lightweight-ness) possibly be strong enough to pull me up towards the ceiling? Why do I even need to be by the ceiling if I’m dancing on the floor? It’s an imaginary freaking piece of string—it takes too much energy to try to conjure up that bizarre imagery, and I need to focus on p e r f e c t i o n.
I will never forget, however, the day that it finally clicked. I think I finally took the time to really imagine the experience of being pulled up by a rope, instead of just dismissively not giving it the time of day. The light bulb turned on and I realized that choosing to focus my thoughts on things above me literally made my body feel less heavy. Extensions became higher, lines became more symmetrical, and it just felt right. Enjoyable, even.
It taught that when you choose to dwell on the fact that an event is going to be heavy, unenjoyable, miserable, painful, or any other kind of negative-albeit-true experience, that’s exactly what it’s going to be. But when you choose to dwell on things that are above you—literally or figuratively, interpret that as you will—it changes how you experience that event, even though reality stays reality.
3. Just Keep Dancing
There was one time when everybody in my entire class turned to the left, while I blissfully turned to the right.
All year rehearsing this dance, I had turned to the left. I was never even tempted to turn to the right. I helped other girls get over their tendency to turn to the right. Yet there we were, up on stage for the entire world to see, and I had turned left.
So what did I do? Fall on the floor and start crying? Stop in my tracks and freeze for the rest of the dance? No. Of course not. (I grew out of that after a few years.) I just improved some random combination of steps to join the other girls, plastered a huge smile on my face, and owned it (even while wanting to cry, freeze, fall over, and run off the stage all at the same time).
Afterwards, when talking to my adoring fans (my parents and less-than-enthused siblings), I lamented the failed turn. Interestingly enough, nobody noticed. (They may have just been saying that to be nice, but that’s beside the point.)
The point is that nobody in the audience knows the choreography! Nobody knows what you’re supposed to be doing with your life. Nobody knows what the song you’re writing is supposed to sound like, or what the picture you’re painting is supposed to look like. If you mess up, own it. Smile big. Make it part of the end product, and no one will know it was never “supposed” to be there.