Your early ballet training has clearly stuck with you!
"Actually my passion for dance was not in ballet at the time. I wanted to be in hip-hop and in lyrical jazz—which was super in—and my mom just was like, “No, the foundation of dance is ballet.” She wasn’t like a crazy ballet mom. I was always more athletic-built, and all the other girls in class were a lot more svelte than I was, so trying to get me to be a ballerina was not her focus. The discipline as a metaphor for life was her whole thing. Dance gives you a worker-bee mentality because you’re constantly trying to get better and better. The work never ends."
How did that exposure to movement shape your approach to fitness later on?
"For me, it was just a way of life. My parents were active; I was in dance class my whole life, and then I started playing sports. But then you start realizing that, for a lot of people, they didn’t grow up with that kind of foundation. How do you create something to get people excited about connecting to themselves? That is what the company is about."
How does exercise play into the mind-body connection for you?
"It’s just scientifically proven that when we are active, the healing aspects for our brain are huge. Obviously as you’re working out, you’re strengthening your heart, but your brain has to work with all of it. Now, if you want to talk about longevity, you can’t not talk about exercise."
How did you get interested in mindfulness?
"My mom’s always been a huge proponent for meditation. Through her own practice, she started to recognize the power of the brain through mindfulness teachings, so her whole foundation is about that. What she’s created for these kids in schools is phenomenal, which goes to show that [finding] useful tools to settle in, to focus, to get a different perspective of your emotional reactivity is life-changing. My mom never shoved it down our throats as kids; it was sort of like, “This is something that would be helpful for you.” I finally started doing it maybe two and a half years ago more consistently, and I think that’s where I began to see the biggest improvements in my life. I started with the Deepak Chopra chakra-balancing meditation, which is on audio. Just his voice alone is so nice to listen to. I’d gone back and forth with certain kinds of chanting, and then I realized that I needed to be quiet—because that was hard—so I got into TM, transcendental meditation. I can be impatient, and it just sort of slowed me down a bit."
Read the full interview at Vogue.
No comments:
Post a Comment