COFFEE & BISCUITS

My bones do not listen to me. I’m genuinely annoyed by the fact that my body is so inflexible. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have noticed it. But now that I am on my 3rd serious ballet lesson, I realized that out of about 10 women and 1 man in the class, I am the most inflexible!

My ballet class is so slow that it goes like a yoga class, where the predominant amount of class time is devoted to stretch excercises. Whenever the instructor told us to lean down to touch the toes, or lean down to touch the floor, or to do butterfly (press knees down and lean down), I would look at the mirror and I would be the single head popped up with body. The only part of my body that is leaning down is my head. Everybody would be waist down on the floor. I mean, for goodness sakes, even the 40+ women who had babies already are down on the floor (as well as the single male)!

So I went online to search for how to be more flexible. Then I see all these youtube clips of 6-year old telling me how to do a split. Yeah, right.

But ballet is sort of like yoga. The point is to be flexible. After my first lesson, I went home feeling like doing an upside down arch on the floor the whole week. Or just turning my whole body upside down. It’s sort of wierd how simple stretches can make you feel.

Can trying to be flexible become addictive?

PS. I display the following picture, borrowed from the site of “first day of Yoga” to demonstrate what I meant, by people’s head and waist touching the floor in my ballet class (in the following picture, it’s yoga).