I am not always kind to or easy on myself. I mean, in general I think I have pretty good self-esteem now and I have a good idea of my flaws and strengths. I don’t think I’m made of awesome and I don’t think I’m made of crap. I think I am doing pretty well in life but could do better, and I look nice and I put myself together well and people enjoy watching me dance. And yet, there are times when I completely lose patience with my limits, and I need to stop doing that.
Recently I had a fun Skype private lesson with Heather Shoopman. She was running a special and I hadn’t had any one-on-one belly dance instruction in forever. I asked her to just give me a great session of drills so I could get some work in and hopefully get some new ideas to jumpstart my home practice, which was getting a little stale. We were working on some omis and I complained about how my left-initiated ones were real non-starters and my omis in general needed some work, and after watching me, she told me to do them smaller.
Now, it’s not like I’ve never had a teacher tell me that it’s better to be small and precise and build up from there, but I definitely needed a reminder. Whereas in most things I had taken that advice and focused on precision over size, for some reason when it came to a few movements I was really struggling with, I was doing the complete opposite. Instead of staying small and paying attention to form, I was muscling through the farthest range of motion, forcing my body into an awkward approximation of the more-flexible dancers around me. Not only did this make for crude, impolished moves, but it also made for a lot of discomfort as it felt sometimes like I was just jamming my hip into its socket. Not cool.
So last night, I was doing some late-night drills, and I stood there in front of my mirror and I did my tiny omis and my tiny taxims, and they were smooth and even. You wouldn’t be able to see them very well on the big stage, but they didn’t hurt and they looked like what they were supposed to. Instead of shoving my hips where I thought they should be and just making myself more frustrated, I’ve taken a step back and been gentle with myself, and patience. Hopefully if I stay on this path, I’ll soon find myself with left omis that don’t look like a mutated comma, and juicy taxims. It’s just a matter of time.