[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] good afternoon my name is Anna and this is what I do for a living sounds looks very easy known but not the case now before I start today I know it's very early in the day but I would like to ask you all to do something very shortly together okay if everybody just takes a breath and close their eyes and take their your attention from the stage and from me and just put it inside your bodies just feel how you're sitting in your chair and feel your legs and your
back and arms your chest and shoulders and neck and the head and just feel if there is anything in your body like attention or pain or maybe you're really relaxed and also realize have you noticed this before or did you just realize now when you paid attention thank you you can open your eyes now so our body constantly sends us messages bit of basic survival like thirst or hunger or of our emotions in the present moment no like me going red right now because I usually dance and I don't talk but also by pain it
lets us know there might be something wrong but can there be more can our bodies tell us a deeper story if we learn to listen now as a dancer I know a great deal about pain I experience it on a daily basis but because it's my passion and who I am in a way I have learned to deal with it but I also made a few discoveries dance is a beautiful art form creates worlds for the audience the world of passion beauty and imagination from outside it looks effortless but it's our job to make it
look so it's a lot of hard work and we usually pay a high price for it with our bodies so we polish this ability to work with our body and also our brain no it takes a lot of effort to remember all those steps and as a result we develop a very high awareness of ourselves but most importantly of our bodies and through the years of my professional career I have realized that this ability and awareness of my body is not only important for me as a dancer but also as a human being and I
have learned that if I really learn to listen I can also learn not only be healthier but also learn and grow and so what taught me to really listen so deeply to my body was actually my body I have learned through injuries and I have had a lot of those through the years now ballet is a very competitive sport and being healthy is not just how we want to be it is a job requirement if you cannot or not able to dance you're out and somebody's gonna take your place so our body is the instrument
and we need it to fit and tuned but sometimes what even adds to the pressure is that even if you have pain you don't know why getting injured does not only mean you're out of the show or you're missing out on work it also means countless visits to the doctors now in my 12 years here I probably been more than 30 times to a doctor because of pain injury or an accident I've had countless MRIs and x-rays and two operations and not even mention a lot of hours spend with the physiotherapist but again what adds
to the pressure is that times you have pain but we don't know why or it's just not so difficult for the body no it's okay so you end up being sent home with some painkillers and you're told to wait and for the dancer waiting is a killer no this career is short so we cannot lose the time it's very precious to us and sometimes even waiting doesn't help so facing such difficulties in my early years here in reston I have decided to look for alternative ways to help me deal with my injuries not only to
deal with stress and pressure of it but also to maybe find out if there was something more maybe there was something more that my body was trying to tell me I have tried different things like acupuncture different alternative healing techniques and then one day I came across something called regression therapy I have literally stumbled on it just walking on the street and Dresden just like that was not an accident so regression help therapy is helps you to find the roots of your current problems or difficulties be their emotional or physical by accessing the Forgotten memories
and experiences in your past does not only help you to find them but also to resolve them so you can get back the energy that was lost it deals with many things like childhood experiences prenatal period or experiences passed through generations and even past lives and the first time when I started working with this therapy I've had a small little bone extra bone in my foot which is actually not so unusual to have but what was unusual about it is that it would make my food get stuck out of nowhere in the most unexpected places
rehearsal show before show I didn't know when it was gonna happen and I could have done of course an operation but that would mean losing time again plus I really wanted to know why it was happening in such a way and so do the therapy I have established a deeper connection with my body and I have realized that this always happened when I didn't want to do something because I was afraid insecure feeling uncapable or even unworthy now there was a time when I was an aspiring young dancer and I wanted to move forward in
my career so my foot actually pointed me towards all those blocks and insecurities that were preventing me from doing so so I sat on a path of releasing this negative patterns and beliefs and I have discovered that my body possessed so much more knowledge about me than I did and it sounds a bit funny but my food became my greatest teacher so I continued to learn not only with injuries but also with any pain that happened to me and I have learned so many things about myself and about this power that I've had the strength
within me about being confident as a dancer and artist as a woman and also as a human being I have also learned more about Who I am and so this journey helped me to heal a lot of things and to get stronger and so I became a principal dancer after all so the journey continues of course and I keep learning like with everything in life you just keep going and again I just learn now not only with injuries but with anything that comes up I can also tell the difference if it's just I have pain
because I dance for six hours or maybe there is really something that I need to pay attention to and so my body keeps taking me forward and even pushes me to go to new horizons like for example I also became a regression therapist myself so I can help people to access all these knowledge in their bodies among all the things that this therapy does and now I strongly believe that this awareness and ability to listen to your body is not only a key to being healthier but also to personal transformation but you don't have to
be a dancer to become aware we all have bodies and we all experience pain and discomfort to a certain level the natural way of the body is towards wholeness and healing so with any discomfort that may arise your body tells you that there might be something that needs your attention it can be physical or also emotional and in the modern world it is very easy to just live in your head now with all the technology and stress and pressure it is easy to disconnect or simply take a pill and for and ignore the signals but
wouldn't it be great if we started to pay attention to our bodies and realize their roles in our lives if we would start taking them serious and do more things that take us out of our heads and put us into our bodies like movement sport even meditation or something what we did just now before I started become friends with your body because when we realize that everything that happens in your body does not happen to us but for us and that our body is there to help us on this journey of living experiencing and growing
then we will fully understand the importance of listening and paying attention because a lot of the answers are already there within us we just need to learn to listen thank you you
