You’ve heard of pre-natal yoga, but have you heard of pre-natal belly dancing? If you’re looking for an exciting way to stay fit while pregnant, give belly dancing a try. In addition to being entertaining, belly dancing during pregnancy has a wide range of benefits.

Health Benefits: Belly Dancing Strengthens Your Pelvis & Core

Belly dancing can strengthen abdominal muscles, pelvic floor muscles, vaginal muscles, and even the birth canal. Keeping these muscles toned can considerably enhance the childbirth experience. Tucking and untucking your pelvis along with moving your hips works your core muscles, which can help increase your center of gravity and balance. Strengthening your core can result in better posture and helps to keep weight evenly spread throughout the body. You can even use the fluid dance movements you learn in class, such as hip circles, hip rocking, and swaying, and figure eights while laboring!

Emotional Benefits: Body Positive Feminine Dance

Whether you are emotional about your changing body or embracing it, belly dancing can increase your body awareness and celebrates the feminine frame of all shapes and sizes. Learn to embrace your curves and motherhood with this empowering form of dance. For even more information visit our Belly Dance page https://artfitlubbock.com/bellydance-classes-lubbock/

Community Benefits: Meet other Women

The ArtFit belly dance community is very embracing. Meet women of different ages and life experiences, and you may even make life-long friends! This unique dance studio is about empowering women and supporting each other. Just be prepared to laugh – a lot – during class, (which has its own list of health benefits).

Belly Dance Classes Available:

Beginner Bellydance is on Mondays at 7 pm, and Intro to Tribal belly dance is on Wednesdays at 7 pm. Sign up for classes here.

Instructors Cheryl, Carla, & Theresa would love for you to join!

Disclaimer: As with everything during pregnancy, you’ll want to clear belly-dancing with your health care provider.

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We live in a fast paced society that makes it hard to remember that some things are still earned through hard work and sweat. On every television and radio station, website, or grocery isle is an advertisement for products that promise amazing results with no work. These products primarily appeal to our vanity. They tend to focus on wrinkles, cellulite, weight loss, and just about every industry manufactured “problem” that pertains to our bodies. Unfortunately, this is a marketing contrived misconception. They are quick fixes that do not last, and can be harmful, if they even work at all.

Put in the Effort

The good news is that there are truly ways to curtail these “problems” if you are inclined to do so. The bad news is that it may take getting a little sweaty, a bit of self-control, and even a little discomfort. Weight control and health can be attained, but forget the easy stuff. Resign yourself to putting in the effort as distressing as it sounds.

Sweat Earned Accomplishment

At ArtFit, we specialize in sweat earned accomplishment, so I have learned a few things about it over the years. Without trying to sound like a motivational poster, accomplishments are so much more meaningful when they are earned. We have become so accustomed to not being uncomfortable that we have forgotten the exhilaration of accomplishing something through hard work and effort.

Set Goals

Find something that you enjoy doing, and set goals to accomplish activities, not inches around your waist. Focus on what your body can do, not what it looks like. Fuel your body with food that is good for you, not just easy to find. You will find this makes the work so much more enjoyable, and the goals more achievable.

Achieve

You can win a title fight! You can achieve that crazy pole dance move! You can lose 75 pounds! In the midst of the struggle it seems like you will never get there. You may feel like you can’t even make the next five minutes, but you can. You can achieve these goals. When you do, you will never forget how good it felt. You will want to do it again. Set another goal, work hard, and achieve it.
Be careful. It might even become addicting.

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As a dancer, how do you step into stillness?

How does immobility weave itself into the dance, the choreography? To quote an old ballroom instructor from Haiti,” the stillness needs to mean.” At Artfit, belly dance instructor Cheryl Bushey echoes the sentiment, ” your pose needs to be held with intent. A singular tension needs to vine itself through your body, all the way to your tippy-toes and the tips of your fingers.” In other words, the lack of motion is not just simply freezing, holding your body at one angle or another; it’s a quiet gathering and outpouring of energy. And that energy carries a particular weight to it, a particular feel.  For instance, the hunter in the woods, eyes locked and steady on his target, is still. The hunted prey, aware of the dangers of the environment, is also still. On both accounts, the nature and meaning of the stillness is different; the tension which animates the hunter’s body is very different from the one coursing through the prey. Consider stepping into stillness with intent. Make the moment “mean.” Step into stillness like the hunter in the forest, poised and ready and grounded, or the antelope,  light and furtive,  the stillness restless and agitated.

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To move or not to move?

Think “dancer” and movement comes to mind: arms reaching through the air, muscles denying gravity’s pull. A dancer’s movement is elegant, swig, or quick and almost violent, but from hip-hop to ballet, a dancer is defined by the way sound waves through her tensile body and animates her limbs with motion that is part technique, part inspiration.

But Cheryl Bushey, owner and principal dancer at Artfit Dance Studios in Lubbock, Texas, also teaches her advanced belly dance students to consider the practice of stillness.

“There’s immense power in being still on stage,” Cheryl says. Within the choreographed symphony of leaps, chest undulations, hip bumps, slow him circles to the left and slow hip circles to the right, all layered with shimmies, being suddenly still is not only unexpected, it can be a moment of revelation and reverence.

Revelations, because in being still while a melody hums in the background and frames your body or the song stops in a brief, tonic silence which is echoed through your taught, unmoving limbs, and intimacy establishes itself between the song, the dancer, and the moment.

In essence, quieting your gesture and pausing mid-movement creates a luxurious moment which invites, if not seduces your audience to pay attention to you. Stillness also teaches you “to trust the fullness of who you are on stage,” says former theater director Roderick Vann. Being motionless intensifies your entire presence within the landscape of both the dance floor and the song.

Reverence, because stillness also enhances your musicality. By quieting your movement and holding a pose, you not only bring your particular spirit to the music, but you are also to highlight unique moments in, behind, and around the melody. You are able to teach your audience to hear and feel the music in new and exciting angles.

From a practical standpoint, Cheryl is also quick to remind students that stepping into your stillness offers you a chance to catch your breath, gather your thoughts, and make yourself anew; all the while, to your audience, you are still dancing.

“But it’s also awful scary,” one Artfit student shares. It is. But it is also invigorating. As dancers, we delight in motion, but whether choreographed or improvised, stillness in movement can animate the atmosphere with an irresistible authenticity.

So the next time you are bellydancing in your living room, on stage, or surrounded by a crowd, pause for a beat, or two, or three…

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