Darcey and I (teaser two)

It all started about ten years ago when I first saw Darcey Bussell being interviewed on television. Somehow she looked and behaved differently from the people around her - the interviewer, his studio ‘posse’ and, from what I could see of them, the audience. I realised within a couple of minutes it wasn’t her star status, or the voice. It was something to do with her being a dancer, clearly she was the fittest person in the room, possibly the entire country! She was thin, but in the best sense of the word, having a very high muscle-to-fat ratio - as shown by the inevitable clip of her doing one of her high jumps. Then it occurred to me, it was more to do with the combination of body movement and what her face was doing.

She smiled a lot. Okay, so this was a chat show, but these smiles were so frequent, big and with a lot of laughter involving the whole body, joyful and child-like, innocence? No, she may have looked twenty-one, but she was in her mid-thirties at the time, married with two kids and the best in the world at what she did.

The word that seemed to fit was ‘natural’, as in her manner when being interviewed, not in the highly contrived and stylised dance of European ballet. But then upon her retirement a few years later she took up other forms of dance and learnt very quickly to perform at a high level.

No, the person I was looking at in that first interview was very fit, mentally relaxed as well as physically, confident enough to be herself, yet she stuck-out like a saw thumb because - she was so happy!

Darcey’s only recorded brush with mental health problems has been the depression she experienced when she stopped being a ballerina, but before she took up other forms of dance. She was being a housewife, doing no high intensity physical exercise, and had lost an audience. But it turned out to be dance itself, for when she went back to attending classes: ‘As soon as I was moving. I was happy’.

Darcey displays more ‘Duchenne smiles’ (a full smile, which moves up the face starting with the raising of the sides of the mouth, followed by the cheeks, and finally the skin around the eyes) than anyone I’ve ever seen. Like dance, smiles are gravity-defying. The thought first occurred to me that happiness itself might be gravity-defying behaviour!

A while after that television interview I became aware of Darcey’s use of Pilates and eventually acquired her book and DVD. Her version is somewhat modified from the original ‘system’ devised by Joseph Pilates in the early part of the 20^th century. He by all accounts was a bit of a control freak, insisting that his rational, contrived procedures were the way to physical fitness for all. However, reading about him it struck me that one theme within his approach is indeed natural and fundamental – the idea of ‘core muscles’ or ‘a center’.

In order to become re-orientated to natural body movement it is necessary for a while to stop moving in a reactive way towards our physical surroundings and focus instead on our own bodies, on where muscular movements will start if freed from external influence. Consider too, that all the muscles of the body are really doing is lifting against the resistance of gravity. Watch the breath, consider where involuntary movements begin and end. Then the idea of ‘core muscles’ (around the abdomen, lower back, hips and buttocks) becomes obvious, along with the breath that ultimately powers them!

Consciously starting every movement ‘from the hip’ can be a revelation, not just in the feelings it provokes, but in the new orientation you experience towards the natural environment and to other people.

But to talk of the natural, means one must be tapping into much more ancient knowledge, and some readers may already be shouting: ‘Hey! Yoga encompasses all that - and it’s been around for at least three thousand years!’

Yoga, considered in its historical context, with its particular forms of body movement, the thoughts and emotions they provoke, along with the meditative practices developed and taught by the Buddha which grew from it, was I believe an attempt to cope with the confines of early agricultural society. Restricted by fixed territories and concentrated populations, practitioners developed a ‘personal space’ to try and hang on to, or regain, the physical and psychological freedom that their hunter-gatherer ancestors had possessed as they moved through a landscape. A way to express natural instincts, but which over time became more and more formalised and prescribed by those in authority.

In the more recent past however the physical practice of yoga has become accessible to all, whilst what you take from it psychologically has become an increasingly private concern. I take inspiration and motivation from the DVDs and occasional writings of Leah Bracknell.

  

But modelling excellence, let alone claiming something as natural and therefore the best, has gone out of fashion, become very politically incorrect and for many with a stake in the health and equality industries, highly discriminatory. The kind of ‘fitness’ displayed by Darcey and Leah is, in the contemporary world, exceptional - but the scientific evidence suggests it was the norm for our ancient hunter-gatherer ancestors. They were tall, ‘lean and mean’ and exceptionally fit in a world of scarcity, whilst we lack health in a world of abundance. Much of that science will be discussed in future blog posts, but consider for a moment that much of the personal conflict we feel about physical fitness, health and diet, may be because genetically our brains and bodies still want to be like this modern hunter-gatherer, of Spanish and Native American descent, photographed on a California beach…