Zumba mantras & universal hatred

I have one purpose in writing this entry.  I have to tell you how much I love Zumba.

I.  Love. Zumba.  Love, love, love, love it.  Kemish’s class is my favorite, but Vanessa is good, too.  I’ve never enjoyed any type of exercising at all until maybe a year or 18 months ago, and now gym time is the ME time I refuse to sacrifice.  Maybe that sounds braggish.  I hope not.  I don’t mean it in any braggish way; I just want celebrate having a new kind of joy in my life that wasn’t there before.

In one of Allie’s lectures, she talked about mentally dedicating any physical activity to the purpose of metabolizing stuck emotions.  You just choose what experience you want to metabolize, from anger about some workplace incident to the rejection you still feel from high school.  You let your body, your spirit, your energy know your plan — and then just workout like normal.*  IT WORKS SOOOO WELL.  Super well.  Amazingly well.  And it makes my Zumba time absolutely therapeutic.  There’s lots of call-and-response or guttural shouting.  I’m the loudest.  Sometimes I cry.  Sometimes I pick a mantra to repeat to myself aloud, but it’s nbd because Zumba is for the nearly-deaf.

Today I decided to pick the manta, “What if everybody hates me?” because (to the best of my self-inquiry) that’s what’s underneath the reticence I feel to really engage with the NSSA commonwealth group.  So you lean into it.  You can’t process something you are afraid to feel, right?  That’s just suppression.  So I’m there, saying that out loud: “What if everybody hates me?” again and again, and really digging into it.  I’m giving voice to part of me that deep down that has been repressed, judged, minimized, and ignored, and letting her talk was so freeing. Saying my weird mantra long enough, things just changed inside of me.  I don’t have words for it.  I don’t care enough to find them; they wouldn’t be right anyway.  Is this question is entirely settled or not?  Rationally, I doubt it.  I’ll have to see how I handle the next few NSSA weeks — but I know I had some big shifts and I’m grateful for the progress.  I’m more than happy to patiently work with Val for as long as she takes.

Val

P.S. Also, on a totally different note, I secretly love that people think I’m Latina and try to speak Spanish to me.  It’s so sad when I have to answer in English.
P.P.S. I contemplated digressing to explain how my 11th house Leo Hygeia is what makes me have this Zumba obsession, but I’ll spare you.  You’re welcome.

*I still find myself internally dialoguing about it and doing mantras and stuff — but you don’t have to.