Omni-directional movement.

Friend, I’m so excited to dance this focus with you. But first, a little story… 

It was the summer before my senior year at UNI, and I was working in the weight room. My job was to clean the equipment, and scan student IDs. At the time, I loved lifting weights and talking about lifting weights, so I was right at home. 

One day, a young man came in, walked over to a rack, set a bar on his shoulders, and proceeded to do something totally crazy: he started doing lunges in all sorts of directions. What was he doing?

At the time, I was an upperclassman in Exercise Science, worked as a personal trainer, taught fitness classes, and worked multiple jobs throughout the gym. I studied, worked, lived and breathed by my textbooks and fitness certification manuals. And (at the time) the books were very clear that we were (only) supposed to lunge in 3 very specific directions: forward, backward, or to the side. That was IT. 

What on earth was this guy doing lunging diagonally? 

I was 21, so (naturally) I was pretty certain I was an expert. This guy was definitely doing it WRONG.

Lol.

Ok… So… Well… Turns out, that guy wasn’t doing it wrong (and it seems I wasn’t an expert —-who knew?). 😆

Actually, he was a soccer and football player, and to prepare his body for moving all the directions under stress in his sports (and keep his knee ligaments from being ripped to shreds), he needed to train his body to handle moving all directions. So, naturally, he lunged all directions.

Oh my goodness. Of COURSE. That made so much sense! 

I think this moment was the beginning of me questioning everything I had been taught about exercise prescription. 

At the time (remember, this is the late 1900’s 😂), I had been moving in very uni-planar ways, often only moving in one direction, repeatedly, for a long time. I was running (only moving forward), or on some sort of cardio machine (repetitively moving in one motion). I was teaching aerobics where we pretty much only traveled straight forward, back, or side-to-side. I was performing weight-lifting exercises where body parts and movements were very isolated. And, to be honest, although I had great fitness metrics on the outside, from the inside my body felt horrible. I was highly disciplined, sure. But I was also totally out of balance, misaligned, and in a lot of pain. I had chronic overuse injuries from extremely repetitive motions, and to deal with the pain, my go-to was to ignore/detach/disassociate from my body. I mean, no pain, no gain…. right? Wasn’t pain just the cost of fitness and working hard and… well… aging… and life?  

Oh man, how wrong I was!

It’s not surprising that I was soon finding myself completely burnt out and miserable. 

Luckily, while traveling, I soon stumbled into the fields of mind-body dance and related somatic arts. 

It was so very healing. 

Instead of moving my body from the outside-in (trusting only how my textbooks told me to move), I began to learn to sense my body and move  from the inside-out. I began to heal and deepen my relationship with my body by learning to listen to, appreciate, respect, and trust it. Movement became medicinal and nourishing.

And when I stumbled into a mind-body dance class, I came back to LIFE! Movement wasn’t just medicinal… It was JOY! It was BLISS! THIS —THIS BLISS—is what I had been longing for! What I had been missing! This—-dancing for the pure joy of it—- is what I knew how to do when I was a child. I knew right away that mind-body dance is what I needed to be doing with my life. 

And it’s no surprise to me that those intuitive mind-body practices naturally, by tuning in and listening to the body, knew what my Exercise Science textbooks at that time didn’t: we need to be moving our body organically, in alldirections.

After quickly falling in love with mind-body dance, I came back to Iowa to finish my grad degree in Exercise Science with a new level of appreciation for the body and respect for its wisdom. Thankfully, the field of Exercise Science is also ever-evolving, and quickly began embracing more integration and embodiment. Functional fitness soon became a new focus in the field, and encouraged much more integration, rotation, mobility, multi-planar movement, etc. It has been a wonderful shift for the field, and for the health and wellbeing of bodies (and was great timing for me).

Fast forward to 2012, after finishing my degrees, and then spending many years training in formal (but also at times rigid and dogmatic) mind-body dance practices, I decided to branch out in order to discover what sort of integrative movement/fitness practice could feel more organic, intuitive, genuine, and true to me. I soon realized, with a wide-open blank slate, I now had the freedom to combine my passions for exercise science, somatic dance, mind-body integration, philosophy, psychology, mindfulness, meditation, and spiritual curiosity all in one place—-one holistic fitness practice.

And —yep— here we are, friends. That’s Aya in a nutshell.

Oh, and that guy from the weightroom? He’s now my husband. :)

Ok, so what (specifically) are we focusing on this week? We’re going back to what Jon first introduced me to in the weight room so long ago: the importance of moving our body in all directions.

And, friend, AYA is the perfect training ground (and playground) for this. In fact, it’s another layer that is woven right into every single class. We’ll move forward and backward. We’ll move side to side. But we’ll also move soooooo many additional wonderful directions and angles in between. We’ll feed our body movement in all directions, in order to continue to reclaim, maintain, and expand our ability to move in all directions with ease.

As always, we’ll do so purposefully via choreography AND we’ll give our body time and space to move freely, intuitively, and spontaneously too (which is FANTASTIC training for real-life agility & independence). Our “training” isn’t restrictive —Aya’s not about breaking you or molding you. It’s about nourishing and unleashing you. 

Like always, it’s about dancing ourselves free.

So… omni-directional movement, baby. That’s what we’re playing with this week. And, as always, can’t wait to see what we discover together. Seeeeeeeee you SOON!

With love,

💛 Dani