Nia Fitness?

Has anyone heard about or practiced Nia Fitness?

There was a poster about it at the dance studio last night, and I just looked it up online.

First, any fitness system that has "Celebrating Pleasure" as a tagline is a system I want to check out -- especially given the way my inner life has been moving lately.

This is what I found on a website:

Nia Blends Nine Movement Forms
Martial Arts: T’ai Chi, Tae Kwon Do, Aikido
Dance Arts: Jazz Dance, Modern Dance, Duncan Dance
Healing Arts: Yoga, Alexander Technique, The Teachings of Moshe Feldenkrais

Nia teaches you how to physically interpret and internally direct your actions and choices, and to listen to the voice of your body and allow the body to be your guide in discovering Dynamic Ease. Practiced barefoot to music, Nia is self-guided, adaptable and safe for any fitness level, from stiff beginners to highly fit athletes. Delivering cardiovascular, whole-body conditioning, Nia is based on creating a loving relationship with the body and following The Body’s Way – the innate intelligence of the body.

It sounds like a wonderful antidote to the estrangement from my body that I've experienced for much of my life. One of the things I like is that there are 52 basic movements, but each is expressed at three different levels of intensity.

I'm going to contact the teacher and find out more. . .

What's Different Today: The Erotic

One of the more interesting conversations I've had with my therapist has been around the topic of my feelings about engaging in regular exercise or active recreational pursuits. As my recent post "New Perspectives" described, I just haven't had an emotional connection to it -- and this kind of boggled my therapist. In fact, I got the impression that she's never before run into anyone who didn't have anything that was important to them that could be emotionally tied to fitness in a meaningful way.

For most of my life, my only desire to engage in exercise was motived by an intellectual understanding that it was An Important Thing to Do -- and while I enjoyed the positive results when I did it consistently, the satisfaction wasn't deep enough to be an ongoing motivator when stacked up against time and energy commitments to other things -- or outweigh simple inertia, sad to say.

But this morning, I want to dance more. I want to continue ballroom dancing classes and be able to get out on the floor during dance parties and have fun dancing well to a variety of music. I want to get out the short stack of bellydancing DVD's and books and do that too. I want to explore Nia and get some muscle in my moves.

The missing piece? The Erotic.

Erotic is one of those words that can be defined multiple ways, but for me it means "energy connection and exchange with the Other". That's what I've been achingly missing since my loss of L&L, and that's what I found -- in a much lower key but still real way -- last night on the dance floor, particularly with Jeremy.

My body has very little meaning or interest to me unless it's serving as a way for me to connect with another human being in an erotic way. Not necessarily a sexual way, but a way that involves energy touching, interacting. And because my mind is extremely erotic, I can have an erotic encounter without my body being involved in an overt way. Last night with Jeremy there was no sexual energy in our dancing, but the act of maintaining "tone" in our connection, moving our bodies together in harmony, following his lead, was definitely erotic.

One reason that bellydance hasn't "done it" for me in the past is that whether I'm doing it alone or in a class, it's a solitary activity, one in which my energy has never engaged with another's. I know that this exchange is possible, that others experience it, but there hasn't been enough in those first stages to get me past them. Maybe now that this aspect of myself is becoming more clear to my conscious mind, I'll be able to work with it in a positive way rather than just react on an instinctive level.


I strongly believe that this tipping point is being reached as a consequence of my spiritual practices, and specifically my recent message from Ereshkigal that I need to let go of a particular behavior pattern and replace it with something healthier, with Inanna's assistance. I was expecting some hard work, but it may be that my willingness to say "yes" has allowed for a lot to be done without my conscious need to struggle.

I'm not saying that I'm going to declare the issue resolved. This is all very fresh and exciting and new, and it's going to be meaningless unless I'm able to maintain it over time. But it's a delightful turn of events. I feel like I'm being taken care of.

One More Note on The Erotic

I've known for years that for me the erotic wasn't necessarily connected to the sexual, but after my intensely sexually erotic year with L&L and the lack of non-sexual erotic contact with others during that time, I lost track of that knowledge.

As I wrote in my last post, I've been aching for erotic connection -- but I've been extremely reluctant to risk exposing my romantic and sexual selves to anyone new. I'm afraid that the experiences won't be able to measure up to what I've lost, and that actual exposure of those still-bruised parts of myself will surface new waves of grief in really awkward, painful situations.

But venturing into the erotic while consciously separating it from the romantic and the sexual enables new kinds of healing to take place, as well as being fun and self-nurturing in a range of other ways.