Faith and belief are not synonymous. As someone who holds a degree in Philosophy, I am a bit ashamed to admit that I never thought to explore this notion of faith versus belief until I read Judith Lasater’s book Living Your Yoga this last March. In it Judith writes that beliefs are based on our preconceived ideas about reality whereas faith is more of an openness, a sort of receptivity toward the unknown. It's almost as if having read and ascertained the depth of this idea was a foreshadowing of what was to come...

In April, I severely sprained my right ankle. As a professional dancer you get accustomed to working through injuries and dancing through pain, so I brushed it off as just a sprain. After taking only a week off, I returned to work and continued to dance on it for another two months before the pain was so excruciating I finally had to stop and get an MRI. As it turned out, I had two torn ligaments in my ankle…a dancer's worst nightmare! You always hear dancers say, “Please, let it just be broken” because a broken bone usually heals cleaner and faster than a soft tissue injury. Needless to say, I was pretty depressed for the next month and a half. It's not uncommon to believe that anything over the age of 25 in the ballet world is old. At the ripe old age of 27, I constantly question whether or not I will be able to make this audition or that audition because I was brought up believing that a dancer's career is essentially over by the age of 30. It's like there's a ticker and after my injury, the ticking kept getting louder and louder. So, what could I do??? I had to stop dancing and take care of the injury, step one. After two cortisone injections and intense physical therapy three time a week for about five or six weeks, I returned to work very slowly and with extreme caution. Those five or six weeks off from ballet, were the most agonizing because my dome was ballooning with ideas based on my beliefs. I was in a constant state of “oh shit, what now?!” stressing about how much time I was losing and how all my technique and hard work had just gone down the toilet. My mind felt like a war zone being inundated with belief bombs. I needed something to pull me out of my own misery so I started to shift my focus to my teaching and practicing yoga and actually to finally starting this blog. So, I guess something good did come out of it :)

I knew deep down that this injury was merely another temporary phase and that it too would pass. Once I accepted what happened to me I immediately recognized this acceptance as faith. The beliefs and perceptions I carried with me from childhood manifested into insecurities as a mature ballerina. We are products of our environments and because of this our beliefs, especially about ourselves, are often misguided. In the ballet world where the ideals are as rigid as my wooden living room coffee table, it is even harder to break away from negaroty self-talk and ill-informed ideas about self. My experiences and thus my reality result directly from these misguided beliefs. All I can do is step aside for a moment, take a breath and momentarily detach from my own processes and in doing so, I can observe them with a little less judgment and criticism. Just by virtue of taking a step back from my situation I prove to myself that I am more than the aggregate of my beliefs. Ok, here I am, what do I do next? Keep dancing.

P.S. A week ago I was taking class at my old studio and ran into Arianna Lallone who was and still is one of my idols. She is amazingly tall for a ballerina….I think she is around six feet tall. Arianna also went through much adversity, especially in her early years as a dancer because of her height. She has been a principal dancer with Pacific Northwest Ballet in Seattle, one of the top companies in the U.S. for about 20 years. Having studied at the Pacific Northwest Ballet School, I once asked Arianna to sign a pair of pointe shoes when I was about 14 or 15. I ran into her earlier this year before my injury and she totally remembered me! Then when I saw her the other week we chatted for a little bit and she admitted that she was 42 years old! I said “oh yes! There’s hope!” And just like that faith crept inside my bones and whispered into every nerve in my body, you are still a baby ballerina.