If you have been following me for a while you will have heard me talk extensively about the importance to me of “being in the body.”
This has always been true.
The story goes, through my mother’s tales, that I walked at 10 months old and my childhood is peppered with the outdoors between skating, running, trees to climb, and if trees were missing, road sign posts would do (a precursor to pole dancing?!).
And then there was her, dance, the joining point for the child I was between art, movement, personal expression, silence, concentration, discipline.
For the first 15 years of my life, dance was the safe place, the place that ennobled my days, that filled my heart sometimes with wonder and sometimes with bitterness, that nourished my aspirations and my wounds. A real training ground for life.
From sabotage to sabotage, between sprained ankles and strained tendons, the time came at some point to take my leave, and from there I went through several difficult years in which the lack of this “everything” was painful and made me feel a bit lost.
It was about mid-1990s when the mythical aerobics broke out in Italy, with the usual delayed timing compared to the US. And it was as if the life inside me was rekindled, again music, movement, adrenaline!
I won’t tell you now (there may be occasion) what gave me the courage to enroll in fitness instructor training…. fact is that I did! and that, with a courage that really did not match me at that time, I still remember the day I walked into a newly opened gym, offering myself as an instructor!
From an “okay let’s try it” started one of the most enjoyable periods of my life, and if I look at it today I see how the mission of “being a guide for wellness” had already found a form of expression.
I don’t have photos from that period but I’ll put you this one, by Jane Fonda, which very well tells a little bit about that historical period, in the fitness world 🙂
