Working with a Trainer Brings Back Dance Memories

When the third doctor emphasized the importance of keeping one’s muscles strong as a senior, I thought it was time to act.  A friend had mentioned an excellent trainer who came to her house, so I asked for the trainer’s name, made contact, and set up a date to begin.

It’s now three weeks later and I am loving the experience. We meet twice a week, and a third time I do some recommended exercises on my own. There were some challenges at first and I learned how important it is to communicate directly my reactions. I’m 83 years old. Keeping myself safe screams out at me.

“Please be mindful,” I calmly explain to my trainer on our third meeting.

I continue, “I want to feel the movement deeply and correctly and it’s important to go slowly with me and not push too far.  Last session when we lengthened the twenty minutes of the first session to forty-five minutes, I was exhausted and it took me two days to recover.”

“Thank you,” Villi Alfaro responds. “Some people would just call and cancel.  You didn’t.  You are sharing your reaction. We’ll slow down.”

I sigh and am relieved.  I am enjoying working with Villi and had a lot of fun the first session as we did playful twisting, reaching, squats, and modified pushup using the kitchen counter as our floor.  It was the second session, which lasted over twice as long with more repetitions of each exercise and ended with walking around the atrium in the house with two-pound weights in each hand, that did me in.  After making two circuits I felt shaky and like I might fall.  Villi had noticed and wisely said not to do that on my own.  When the fatigue lasted that evening and the next day, I knew I had to either quit or speak to her.  The idea of quitting didn’t appeal to me.

Villi balanced the next workout at a pace that I could enjoy.  She reminded me to rest, take deep breaths, and sip water between exercises or before a new set of repetitions.  It worked. Muscles that have been asleep are stirring.

A special moment occurred when we were doing twists turning to one side, seated in a chair.  As I twisted, a movement memory reminded me of being in class at the Martha Graham studio in New York City.  We were sitting on the floor doing turns around the back.  I remembered how the series began and advanced to a fall to the elbow, then a whip around of the upper body to the other side before a stretch out to the beginning side.   I could feel sensations in my body that I hadn’t felt in years, particularly the first 6 counts of the Graham “turns around the back,”  and I loved it.  Over the next several sessions this pattern continued.  Villi would introduce a new exercise and my muscle memory would take me to a modern dance class or a ballet class and I would find myself smiling and happy to be rediscovering movement that was familiar but hadn’t been used in years.

So often we read about how the body holds trauma.  Much has been written about how trauma affects the body with the body remembering danger even when the threat is no longer there.  Now I am experiencing the opposite.  Beautiful memories are coming back. What surprises me is how detailed each memory is.  I know the kind of class I am in and even the teacher.  At one point as I was reaching over my head with a pole I found myself back in Alfredo Corvino’s ballet class and his emphasis on using the muscles under the shoulder blades.

Oscar loves to be a part of our training session.  He walks with us in the atrium and sometimes sits right beside me when I am doing exercises in the chair.

He is the first to greet Villi at the door and expects to be acknowledged.  He loves to smell the different dog aromas on Villi’s legs and shoes.

A big thank you to the three doctors, each of whom emphasized the importance of maintaining muscles as a senior!