Last week, I signed up for my very first dance class - specifically, Nia dancing, a fusion of free movement combining dance, martial arts and mindfulness.
I’ve always wanted to try some form of dance, but it took time to pluck up enough courage to show up for a class. What I dreaded most was the challenge of free movement. Unlike other exercise and dance modalities, free movement encourages you to move in a way that feels good - a way that releases tightly held stress from the body.
All forms of exercise I had ever done before was about holding my body tightly in specific postures. I thought I could benefit from experimenting with free movement. I had no idea how challenging this would be.
I felt uncomfortable, even embarrassed. It challenged not only my ability to move freely, but also how I see and hold myself. I detested the feeling and was taken aback by my inability to embrace physical freedom.
You may wonder why I am sharing this cringeworthy story - why I am talking about my personal physical discomfort? Because, upon reflection, I realised that my experience was not about dancing at all. It was about learning. And about ageing.
As we age, we often stop learning. We stop exploring.
All learning involves discomfort. Embarrassment. Physical exhaustion. Emotional turmoil. It’s hard - and perhaps that’s why we shy away from it in midlife. We become lazy and set in our ways.
Yet learning is vital for healthy ageing. It is necessary to keep our brain capacity from shrinking. It is also necessary for our bodies. To age with vitality, it is not enough to keep exercising or even reading in the same way we always have. For vitality, we need novel activities to stimulate new neural pathways in the brain. We need new exercises to strengthen muscles and maintain balance. We need new information to expand our thinking.
New challenges also expose our identity and belief systems. Dancing showed me the limiting beliefs I had about myself. It was yet another reminder of how deeply rooted my conservative, Calvinistic upbringing is. Understanding our belief systems, gives us the opportunity to change them, if we want to.
We also need novelty to counter the monotony of midlife. By now, most of us are masters at work, even masters of our lives. We can do most things without much thought. If we don’t insert some freshness into that sameness, we risk becoming irrelevant – sometimes, even to ourselves.
And we do need to have fun - to laugh at ourselves and with others. There is so much that is serious happening in the world. My word, do we need fun!
I’m determined to keep embarrassing myself in my dance class. I know it’s good for me.
And I challenge you to do the same.
Do something – anything - however small. It just might help you take that giant leap toward the next new thing in your life.
If doing something new includes thinking about your future, join us for our free Retirement Workshop in Johannesburg on 26 March 2025 - a space to pause and explore what this next step could look like for you.
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Kind regards,
Sunél