The moment before the dance begins…
There’s a particular kind of tiredness that doesn’t come from doing too much.
It comes from doing too much that didn’t come from you.
There’s an old story that maps this almost exactly.
It’s called The Red Shoes 👠 and most women feel it before they understand it.
A girl makes herself a pair of red shoes.
Rough, handmade, and imperfect, but undeniably hers.
When her mother dies, a wealthy woman takes her in and the homemade shoes are taken away because they’re not “appropriate”.
Later, in a shop, the girl chooses a different pair of red shoes which are polished, beautiful, and designed to be admired. She puts them on, and at first nothing feels wrong.
Then the dance begins 💃
At first it feels like aliveness. Then it becomes something she can’t stop. The shoes dance her through fields and woods until her body begins to fail.
When I read this story properly for the first time, I recognised my hands.
Not the shoes, the pattern.
The body moving without me.
The compulsion that lived underneath what I thought was just a habit.
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The dancing that wasn’t dancing, it was a nervous system that had not been taught how to stop, and underneath all of it, the moment I missed for years.
👠The moment before the movement began.
👠My hand on its way up to my face.
👠A yes already forming in my mouth.
The lean forward that started long before I noticed I was leaning.
This is what The Red Shoes is mapping, not the dance itself, the override.
The quiet turn from what comes from me to what will be approved of, what will keep me moving, what will keep the feeling at bay.
By the time the dancing begins, the override has already happened.
The work isn’t in stopping the dance. It’s in catching the moment the choice begins to leave your female body.
💃The yes before it’s spoken.
💃My hand before it lifts.
💃A doing before the doing starts.
That moment is small. It can feel like nothing. But it is where your capacity lives.
Not in stopping everything or getting it perfect, but in staying with yourself just a fraction longer than you did before.
This Thursday in my Circle, we’re moving through the whole story together. Slowly.
With space to feel where it lives in your own body.
There’s a somatic practice at the end for finding the pause before the pull.
You can join live tonight, or come to the replay whenever the timing is yours.
Whatever you do with your week, see if you can notice it once today.
The moment before the movement.
The breath before the yes.
The hand before it lifts.
That’s where it begins.
Have courage, dear heart,
Charli ❤️🦁
If you love to explore the archetypes, here is a link to the beginning of the 13 archetypes: The Winter Witch
