I’ve Been to the Garden of Eden and We Were All Wearing Stripper Shoes

The lights were dim in the studio, tiny little electric candles flickering against scarlet-painted walls. There were eight women on purple mats, five poles spread throughout the room, a plush, olive-green, velvet-upholstered chair in the corner. The studio felt like a womb holding me. When the teacher put on a slow, sultry song with a low beat and started guiding us into the warm-up, my body sank in. I hadn’t felt real pleasure in so long. I think I might have moaned.

There weren’t any mirrors in the room, which I found strange for a dance class. I’d been a dancer ever since elementary school. There was always a mirror so you could make sure your form was perfect. As we moved through the warm-up the teacher explained this movement isn’t about how you look or getting the moves right. It’s about how it feels in your body.

I felt like I’d stepped into a foreign country where I didn’t know the language. I was raising four kids in the suburbs of New York City, where there was very much a right way and a wrong way to do things. How it looked mattered. Now I’d stepped into this warm, enveloping space, and told there was no right or wrong, and that my pleasure was all that mattered. It was the cultural opposite of the world I lived in. I didn’t even know how to exist without trying to make it look good.

It took a minute to really sink into the movement but at some point, the teacher had us lie on our sides, head resting on one outstretched arm, top leg draped over the bottom leg. She said, Let your gaze rest on your body. Let your hand move along your curves.

I looked and was astonished because what I saw was beautiful. The small of my waist leading into the curve of my hips. I hadn’t felt beautiful in a long time. I let my hand graze my hip and it felt so good to feel beautiful.

The women in the room seemed to have little in common. One in her 20s, one in her 70s, the rest of us in between. Different colors, shapes, sizes. I realized that everyone was experiencing their own beauty.

After the warm-up, it was time to dance alone to a song of your choosing. We took turns sitting in the plush chair while another woman had a conversation with us through movement. At first I thought it was performance and found this mildly annoying. Was this all about just shaking your ass and looking sexy for a few minutes a week? I came to realize there was no performance in this room. There was just being who you were.

When it was my turn to sit in the chair, a woman stepped out onto the floor for her turn to dance. I didn’t know her name. She looked a bit like me: late 40s, brunette hair that was shorter than mine. She wore leopard print pants, gold stiletto boots, and a hoodie with the hood up so far that it covered the top of her face and her eyes. The whole first half of her song, her face was covered as she slithered, serpentine across the floor. She spoke to me through her body, and somehow, I understood. When she finally pulled back the hood she gazed into my eyes. I felt an electric current connecting us. Neither of us could look away. She kept moving, and I could feel my body responding to her movement, attuning to her. When she twirled around the pole, my torso circled, microscopically, feeling and mirroring her. I noticed myself opening to her, taking her in. In that moment I was completely present in being with her and her communication with me.

I didn’t even know her, but I saw her.

When the song ended it was almost a shock. Applause erupted from the side of the room where the other dancers were seated on a cushioned bench, one of them screaming, “You’re so fucking hot!”

I’d never been in a room before where women screamed something like that. I’d never been in a room before where women lifted each other up, where women saw each other in their truth, where women allowed themselves to be seen in their truth, to connect, to feel. I wept.

I’d never experienced anything like it. And what made me weep wasn’t the joy of it, it was the grief. That a room like this was the only place it could happen.

I walked out of that class with a deep knowing, and the knowing said: I have to do this. Even though the class was in New York City and my life was in Connecticut, I started making the time every week for a two-hour class.

…

My life was rich by any measure. I’d been married for 15 years to a great guy. I had four amazing kids. I had a business that I’d built from scratch. I had friends. I had it all and then some, the life I’d always aspired to.

But I was cranky, anxious, and irritable, and I didn’t know why. I went to therapy and it helped me untangle the jumbled mess that was my childhood trauma, but understanding wasn’t the same as knowing how to heal. I was frustrated that my husband spent so much time at work and I felt like I was raising the kids alone. I had started to disappear as I adapted my life to accommodate everyone else. And somewhere along the way I’d disconnected.

I didn’t feel alive in my body anymore. Beauty was for other people. My feelings didn’t really matter. Pleasure was a relic of a long-ago life, so far down the priority list that it wasn’t even on the priority list anymore. It seemed like the natural consequence of the life I was living, something I needed to accept as just the way it is now.

…

Years later I watched Barbie depict an Eden-like world where women could be who they were with no comparison or competition. They celebrated and supported each other. They danced, sang, and lived in a perpetual state of pleasure and love. There was one scene where Barbie sat on a bench next to a much older woman. Barbie looked at the older woman, eyes wide, and said, “You’re so beautiful.” I wept. Because I’d been in that place.

I couldn’t make this world true for everyone but I could make it true for me. And so I began. I look back on this as my thawing out period. When anger came, I let myself feel it. When sadness came, I let the tears fall.

I started following what my body felt and knew, rather than what the rest of the world told me would look good. Slowly, my aliveness started to return.

This was a completely new paradigm from the suburban life I’d been living and the way I’d grown up. I’d been trained to please. I’d learned to fawn. This movement taught me to return to my truth. And my truth was a place where I could feel pleasure, and it was allowed. Where I could see myself as beautiful, and it was allowed. Where I could scream, “You’re so fucking hot,” at some woman I’d never met and mean it with my whole heart and soul, and it was allowed. Where someone could say those words to me, and I could take them in rather than deflecting. Where I could see another woman’s beauty and celebrate her truth, without it diminishing my own.

That first class was 17 years ago, and it’s still my weekly practice. It’s where I go to remember who I am, who we are as women. That my body is where I live, my home.

The Eden I discovered wasn’t a world where women were young, thin, or surface-level beautiful. It was a room without mirrors, where we could stop performing, tell the truth with our bodies, and feel alive again. Where we had permission to reconnect to all the parts of ourselves, all the feelings, the beauty, the sensuality, and the power that comes from that connection.

All while wearing stripper shoes.

xo

Nina