I recently started doing an activity. As a person who does not have a set schedule for sleep, I usually schedule 5 to 8 hours of sleep on my bed (usually 5 or 6). After having a mental breakdown and thinking about somatic practices last week, I have learned that my body needs a lot of recovery after years of living in trauma and feeling chronic mental difficulties. I was abusing my physical health by ignoring the signals from my body and pushing myself as much as I could. One of them is the lack of sleep. It was after I started my therapy that I started not to feel guilty about sleeping. I realised that my chronic fear of “body needs a lot of time to rest and sleep” is rooted in not having enough sleep in the first place. The activity I have decided to start is to schedule my alarm and sleep for 9 hours every day.

Today is Monday, the day that I’m taking my ballet lesson. It is the second day that I have tried this activity of trying to sleep for 9 hours. However, I can already feel the difference in my ballet class from having enough sleep. I no longer feel super tired after the lesson. I feel quite energetic and mentally stable throughout the class. (I do speculate about other things such as comparing myself with the students who decided to do improver lesson. I decided to repeat the beginner class again.) I feel that my muscle memory is a bit sharper than usual 💪. I can remember ballet term and the exercises with ease, without pushing my mind.

This was a great discovery for my dance goals (and many other things as well). I would like to prioritise my sleep on my way to doing pointe and experiencing other things.

Another thing that I would like to record today is I realise that my favourite “warm-up” exercise is lying on the floor and doing nothing. It is weird but I love it. I was not the biggest fan of floor work based on my previous dance experience in contemporary dance, but for some reasons I feel that my body is getting ready for doing this in the next term. I will see how I feel like this “warm-up” exercise in the upcoming lessons.

Finally, I can’t believe that there are only two lessons left for my current ballet class. I know that I was ready to move up to improver class at the beginning of the lessons, but I decided to repeat it because I truly want to integrate the dance movements into my brain, muscle memory and my life. I also feel a bit more certain that after the next beginner class, I will for sure move up to the improver class. My goal for the next introduction class is to improve my balance and my muscle memory on the movements. I want to treat this as a lifelong process, and I want to be on pointe one day (hopefully when I’m still in this country). I look forward to embracing this journey 🩰.