Not long after my first Zumba class last winter, an instructor advised, “Remember that my movements are a mirror image. My left hand is your right hand.” My intellect understood her meaning, but my body didn’t get it. During a song, I would hesitate while thinking, “Wait, does this move start on my left or the teacher’s left?” Glancing from the stage to the bold dancers at the front, I became more uncertain about which foot went first. Becoming familiar with the routines eased confusion, but I rarely trusted myself to relax into the movement.
At the start of a recent class one year later, I listened as if for the first time to Mike’s suggestion for newcomers: “Follow our movements like you’re looking in the mirror.” It sounds simple, but the repetition of this tip deepened my understanding in a revelatory way: “Stop overthinking and experience your dance in connection to the human mirrors on stage.” A wall of anxiety dissolved when I allowed my head, arms, hips, and legs to reflect the moving patterns I saw in front of me. Separation between mind and body thawed. And learning Zumba more holistically hushed self-critical thoughts like “You’re too old and fat to belong in a class with all these graceful beings. You call yourself a dancer?”
When negativity strikes, I love how Mike, Kim, and the dance squad strike back with embodied positivity, serving as mirrors of movement and models of joy. When I feel slow and withdrawn, I am grateful for a collective reflection that shimmies with energy and panache. Zumba’s mirror offers more grace than the two-dimensional version, for everyone in the room is a dancer in its eyes.
Our three-dimensional mirror neither judges nor produces copies. Within its generous frame, we dance together as souls with multiple demographic labels. No two dancers are alike, yet we learn who we are from each other, nourished by a wider field of expression. When one of us shines, we all sparkle.
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