Love of our Bodies

Love of our Bodies By Eve Chalom

Eve Chalom is a two time world competitor in ice dancing. She is currently a dance/movement therapist, a performer in both ice skating and modern dance, a yogi, and a figure skating coach. She is continually exploring the connections between dance/movement therapy, figure skating, and life in general.

 

There is no ideal body type. I was taught by my culture, my sport, and the people around me to hate mine. And I am actually kind of slender, with some of the curves in the “right” places, and a fair number of girl friends are envious of my figure. And with my body being not so far off from what people consider to be an “ideal” body type, even I have a next to impossible time finding pants that fit. The sizes keep going up and I haven’t gained any weight. And there are some stores where I can’t fit into the clothes at all. How is this possible?

Others know this, but it is a message that bears repeating as often as possible. We live within a system in the world where there is the message that there is one “ideal” body type. What this ideal body type might look like differs depending on where in the world you are. But, nevertheless, most women are not that body type. So where does that leave us? In an attempt to conform to society’s ideals, women come to the conclusion that if they are not that ideal body type, their particular body must somehow be wrong. And then they try to fix it. This leads to many different strategies, such as dieting and plastic surgery to name a few. Very rarely are women taught to just be themselves with their bodies, and that they don’t have to try to fit into a preconceived shape or idea of what they are supposed to look like.

This is not even necessarily a thin to heavy thing. My grandmother was a young woman in the days after World War II and she was always naturally on the thin side. Because people were coming to the United States as survivors from the concentration camps, being thin was not in. So the trend shifted towards curvaceous with some meat on your bones. My grandmother was out of luck and grew to hate her unpopular body. I found that it is a simple step to take to go from hating your body to hating yourself for having the body you do. At least that’s how it was for me. Self-hate became a huge driving force in determining how I functioned on a daily basis.

 

Love can be a driving force for change instead of hate. It may take a little longer, but the effects are much longer lasting and the ramifications and ripple effects are hugely different as to how the world around is impacted. A student asked me what the difference was between losing five pounds quickly by starving herself for a week, or losing five pounds by doing more work to totally revamp the way she thinks about food and how she feeds herself. Why should she bother to do more work? I told her that the first way is more efficient, more direct, and it accomplishes the goal but not much else is helped in the process. The second way takes a little longer and is more work, but she has the ability to grow much more as a person the second way, and it has the potential to positively affect the rest of her life and her perspectives on other things as well. It will also more positively affect the people around her because they will become more interested in their unconscious attitudes towards food, or maybe they will see her differently because she is interested in being open to change. The impact will be larger and more widespread with the second route. There is an expression “to kill two birds with one stone.” To be effective human beings who have a positive effect on our world around us, working on any issue or learning any new behavior should be done in as holistic or “whole-istic” way as possible. This will ensure that as many people as positive benefit from your personal work and that the ramifications are more wide-spread. To do something in a “whole-istic” way takes more time, but it is healthier, not just for one person, but for our society. When you take a shortcut that boils down to the “what” without caring about the “how,” (why does it matter how I reach my goal as long as I reach it?) we lose sight of the bigger picture. We are all connected and every action we take impacts ourselves and each other. When one person is hurt, we are hurt too, even if most of us may not feel it consciously. When we sacrifice part of ourselves to accomplish something, that has an impact on our future happiness as well as everyone’s freedom to fully be themselves.

      

 

 

Breathing (for skaters and regular people, and irregular people too :-) )

Breathing

By Eve Chalom

Eve Chalom is a two time world competitor in ice dancing. She is currently a dance/movement therapist, a performer in both ice skating and modern dance, and a figure skating coach.  

 

A lot of my students ask me about breathing. They probably do this because I ask them to breathe, and they find this confusing. No one ever asked them to breathe before as a skating correction. How can this be a correction? The answer is fairly simple. When you breathe, it changes everything. The most important difference is how it changes the way you are living on the ice. When you breathe naturally at the same time as you move, you are more able to be yourself. What I mean by this is simply that you are more the human being you are rather than a machine. In addition, we feel more alive and can move easier when we are able to breathe fully and easily. Imagine how being able to breathe easily as you are skating will affect your skating. Because you are allowing yourself to breathe, you will feel freer and have better energy flow throughout all of your movement. To skate at an elite level while breathing well is quite a skill, because it requires a more sophisticated understanding of our bodies and how they function. But if you can figure it out, it makes a lot of things much easier because you don’t run out of steam half way through a program or have attacks of nerves that you don’t have physical tools to deal with.   It has a beneficial affect on the nervous system, as well as how we process lactic acid. It also adds to your ability to bring yourself to your performances so that the audience can better connect with you.

 

It is impossible to skate naturally without breathing freely. Skating naturally is a relief, because then we can use our flow, rhythm, and momentum to accomplish speed and various movements, and not use excess force, which ends up being hard on the body in the long run.

So I guess the next question is, how do we approach this? It’s simple. We work on breathing and skating at the same time. It is so simple that it seems silly. But it’s actually not that easy because most skaters have a long habit of mostly holding their breath when they skate so that they can muscle through things. Once we focus on breathing and skating at the same time, it changes the way we can move. Instead of using force to accomplish certain movements, we have to move using the skills of rhythm and coordination.   With this change in mindset, we can’t force the body to perform certain movements anymore if it’s not ready.

I tend to start with simple exercises, such as swizzles forwards and backwards, and forward stroking. I often like to use the arms to move with the legs, to help with overall coordination and rhythm, and how the breath fits into that whole picture. The idea is that the skater has to go slow enough to be able to feel how the movement of his or her body fits together with his or her breathing. This helps them to allow the feeling of gliding and skating to enter into their conscious mind so that they can appreciate the feeling of it as well as enjoy the breath. As skaters, we work so hard to achieve certain goals that the focus is definitely on doing more than being. But I would like to argue that when there is space to “be” on the ice, just moving and breathing and enjoying those two concepts together, then the doing aspect become simpler, more direct, and more efficient when you get to it because you are more present in your mind and body.

Ultimately, paying attention to this allows skaters to do more than they thought they could and can be really healing, but initially, it may feel limiting because it slows the skater down. This is because we can only breathe naturally when we are comfortable and we often have to slow down to find our comfort zone. Often in today’s skating world, (and this is a mirror of the bigger fast paced world we live in), skaters are uncomfortable when they are moving, to the point where breathing naturally feels like an effort and an impossibility. In order to start working on the coordination of breathing and skating together, it is necessary to scale back the difficulty of the skating to a point where the breathing can start to happen easily. Then the work is one of coordinating the breathing with the movement so that one is able to move with less effort and strain.

The most difficult part for many skaters is deciding to take the time or figuring out how to back off on their muscular output to the point where their breathing can actually match their skating in a smooth and gentle way. This takes a while because the body is so used to pushing that it seems to require equally as strong an effort to stop the body from pushing. There is also a level of embarrassment sometimes with going slower or taking the time to do something softer or easier when you are used to demonstrating how quickly or strongly you can do something. But once you are able to find the balance of moving with the breath, there is a sense of wholeness that pervades your body. Then your body is really working together in a coordinated way rather than one part against another part or in a discombobulated fashion. This is extremely similar to what they teach in yoga. I attended a yoga workshop where we were constantly told that the breath is what supports the movement. Without appropriate use of the breath, you have to work much harder to create poses and hold them rather than the poses being self-sustaining with a continuous flow of energy throughout them by a continuous use of the breath. It is not just more efficient and allows for more freedom, range of movement, and power, but it is also a healing experience on many levels.

Not only does using the breath more completely have beneficial physiological effects, it also serves many emotional and psychological purposes. Focusing on your breathing when you skate allows you to stay present in the current moment and gives you something to come back to when you don’t know where to put your attention. It also gives you a way to calm down, by choosing to slow down your breathing if you notice yourself breathing quickly or to better coordinate your breathing with your movement. Often, movement, any kind of movement, will bring emotions with it. Focusing on the breath and choosing to skate in a fashion that is in more of a comfort zone gives people space to notice and process various emotions and sensations that surface in their bodies. Sometimes this can be overwhelming, but in my opinion, it is better to deal with the emotions than to avoid them, both for personal and professional reasons. As a coach, I have found it valuable to respect my students’ emotions and I find that the skating is better when I do this.

When you breathe, it is possible to find a quietness inside that allows you to be ready for whatever comes, no matter how busy it is on the outside. This quietness gives you space to be yourself with your movement. When it comes to external environmental changes, such as a test session or a competition, being able to connect yourself deeply through your movement and your breath is a saving grace. Then, no matter the circumstances, you can get comfortable enough to do what you need to do. As you breathe, and skate, and feel, and become yourself, you put yourself in a position of giving; giving to yourself as well as to anyone who sees you skate.

Falling gracefully

Falling is an important topic. You want to learn to fall without hurting yourself. You want to roll with it, find the momentum, and be able to get up again easily and smoothly, so going down the floor and getting up is just as easy as being on our feet. There is recognizing the weight of yourself, feeling your own body weight, sensing your own body weight. Then it is the sense of motion, of gravity, of momentum, of registering your speed. Then there is the ground. Familiarity with the ground facilitates a fall, because if your body is comfortable with the ground, it will best know how to accommodate itself to the ground. How to make the ground feel soft rather than hard, if the body is soft in the right places. Then a fall is delicious rather than painful. There are many, many ways to fall, and the more options you have, the more you have the possibility of a pleasant fall that is not painful. Each arm and leg, your head, your feet, your hands, all find their way in the fall, in the motion of it, to spread out upon the ground in the best possible way, to make contact with the ground in the best possible way. It is an encounter with gravity that is up close and personal, and it is a disturbance of our equilibrium. To get the balance back after a fall, it occurs on its own time, and in the process of righting one’s self. It is also a shock of accepting the encounter with the ground that most likely did not come out of choice. A fall comes out of the space, a person’s encounter with the space and objects in it. There may or not have been choice in the matter. Should you fall now, how is there choice in the fall, even if you don’t choose the fall? You can decide to fall gracefully, or you can just do the best you can to fall as smoothly as possible so that there is no pain. Falling also means that we give in. There is a letting go process somewhere, where we agree to go upside down, or not be right side up anymore for a moment. To fight a fall is helpful and sometimes possible, and sometimes, you hurt yourself in fighting the fall, or trying to hide the fall. Sometimes, it is better to dramatize the fall so that you really let go. Then you can see what is hiding behind it to begin with. Sometimes, there is just a fall calling your name. You can feel it coming for minutes before hand. It takes a dramatic shift, to change the energy and lead us away from a fall. It takes breathing, centering, and grounding. It is always worth it because the fall is more harmful than it is worth. In every exhale, there is a fall, and in every inhale, a rise.