Restoration Row - Episode 2
Description
Vocal Characteristics
Language
EnglishVoice Age
Young Adult (18-35)Accents
British (Received Pronunciation - RP, BBC) North American (General) South African (General)Transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
to a dancer. The flow is paramount. It is both a physical and a psychological partner. You learn to depend on it to lean on it, to leap off it. One of my favourite pre class rituals involved lying on my back in the studio, bundled in thick sweat pants and a hoody, feeling my bones make contact with the wood, those solid, orderly slats. It felt like meeting an old lover like coming home. When all else fails, I mangle the steps. I felt clumsy or lost. The floor was always there. 26. I've beena downtown modern dancer in New York City for almost five years. It was a life I'd cobble together in the rinky dink fashion we thrived on in those days with a farcically cheap, rain stabilised apartment in Brooklyn, a flexible job slinging coffee and good yoga teaching gigs all over town. I had in some ways arrived, although I didn't believe there was a fixed destination, and if they wass, I was sure I hadn't gotten there. It was always more, more, more. It was a career that required saying yes to everything with day to day of it was so far from glamorous that some wouldn't they even call it a career. But as it turned out, it was my kind of life one built on and through my body. The body I had since childhood found immeasurable joy in using to its fullest. One evening in dance class, I kicked up my leg and felt a sharp pain in my lower back I Hubble to a corner of the studio and got down on my hands and knees to assess. I didn't know it then wouldn't believe it for years. But the floor my home base had been pulled out from under me. Six years later, I found myself in a hovel in Paris, an old French woman named Noelle. I do fingertips on my spine and was screaming up, up, up in my ear. By then I was 31 I had lived with chronic pain since that day in class. For years I kept dancing cooks, work with burns, medical residents with sleep deprivation, dances with pain. This's my logic. Eventually, the ache in my back and hip hop down my leg, causing debilitating nerve pain Sai Attica that stayed there no matter what I did my career fell apart with it. Any sense of my identity toppled restorative yoga, acupuncture, massage is physical therapy and anti inflammatory diet Chinese herbs, cortisone injections, fistfuls of believe, narcotics disc surgery. When none of those provided any relief, I got on a plane to Franz. My friends and family thought I had gone insane. Perhaps I wass finally unhinged, but this is what pain does to you. It stalks you, insinuating itself into every facet of your life growing and volume until there's nothing else left. Although no well had bean B. K s, I angers First Western yoga student. She was entirely unknown in the yoga circles in which I travels or really, in any yoga circles. She even appeared in my Youngers biblical tome Light on Yoga, which features photos and detailed explanations off every single posture in their alignment. Base practise no Well, I was in the only photo I younger shares with another person in a striped bikini, sitting on the floor with her legs extended in front of her. Her face is being crushed into her thighs because I youngers balancing in a quasi handstand on it back, his hand, scooping around her rib cage. they look like some sort of Chinese circus act. She's going to fix me. I asked my friend Alison, who opened the book on my lap. She'd been similarly debilitated and had been miraculously healed by this bikini clad your genie. She's really old now, Allison said. But yes, trust me, I had no one left to trust, so I wait. This is all I knew. No. L taught a plan, an offshoot of a younger yoga that did away with actual asana and focused on the minutia of posture. The just of it wass. I re learning to stand my sai attic pain would disappear. No well, it's been decades studying people who did physical labour, stevedores, fishermen, farmers without pain well into old age. And she had made a simple discovery. We all have a natural alignment that should allow us to live with ease and mobility until the very end of our lives. The secrets of this pain free posture pelvis had to be tilted forward or in yoga. Pilots intact in regular people linger. The but had to stick out from the space spine could elongate up naturally. Any pain caused by a herniated disc would be alleviated with this freed up space between the vertebrae. Given no L's age and history, I expected clarity and wisdom. Transcendental experience, perhaps, but her directions were incomprehensible on the posture was impossible to get. The minute I walked into her apartment, I had to toss out any knowledge. I'd come through the door with Tuck. I'm being told in every single yoga and dance class I'd ever taken it protects your back. Squeeze your butt suck in your stomach. No, no, no, l yelled, gesturing angrily at my pelvis. What is this? Who taught you this? Should I take her seriously? I couldn't tell. This was not the Moloch bead laden ageing. Katherine. Dinner's off my dreams. She was a haggard old woman who lived in a smelly hovel. Her thread big clothing was stained, the hair unwashed, Most alarming. She had no bottom teeth, but her posture was the most perfect easel thing I'd ever seen. Regal and relaxed. If that's what would get me out of pain, I wanted it desperately. Day after day, I'd show up in a minuscule great gardens s compartment, No of pain bringing down my leg and do nothing. Stand, Sit stand again, try over and over to relax ever more in my body to fall into some sense of mysterious aplomb. Mostly, I failed. Mostly, she sighed or yelled with exasperation. Mostly, I'd wonder which of us was crazier. She put her ancient hands on either side of my spine and guide me, but the guidance was so saddle it was like trying to change your life with the tip off a feather. You're working too hard. No, AL would admonish, Do less, do less. I'd long understood this directive to mean take to your bed with an ice pack and to leave. I had spent much of the past few years there, but during a workshop one weekend when I was so despairing that I tried to slip out of class to do exactly that no, well cornered me in her in palm notable away. What will you do in your bed? You have to go on living obediently, I began to allow myself the joys of wandering in and out of boutiques of riding the long escalator up to the Pompidou of Sipping Cafe them in the Marais, and after months of daily practise, something started to happen I began to sense small improvements under No l's tutelage. My spine slowly cooperated, the discs buoyant, freed from years of compression, my chest resting, weightless, Lee atop my rib cage, opened. It was slow, frustrating, often imperceptible, but the shift was seismic. I was granted hours. Then days free of pain. No, I'll put into question not only all I knew about anatomy, but also all I knew about the nature and trajectory of progress itself. I'd spent years seeking help from experts on my body had shunned them old. But now something profound was happening within me. I was learning to stand on my own. I was learning that my body could change after all, and not because of some surgeons skills. I could learn to be in it differently. When I was dancing and teaching yoga, I was in the business of understanding bodies when I got hurt and couldn't figure out a way to make the pain go away. I just wanted someone to fix me with a scalpel or a needle, a pair of hands, anything to get it back to normal to the way it wass. As if that were a static place. The most shocking part of the injury wasn't the pain itself. Nor was it the fact that I no longer had control over a body I had spent two decades learning to master. It was that I no longer knew or understood that body. What would **** off or quiet her down And this didn't know myself. The centre would no longer hold but Noel and you're utterly unorthodox. Fashion pushed me to meet this new body, this new person, and eventually to accept her simply by teaching me to stand well. As I wass on my own two feet I didn't dance again and the pain does come back here and there. But it doesn't torture me on a daily basis. It no longer defines me. I would never be who I once wass agile and unafraid and physically bold. But isn't that the storey of ageing? There