Dr. Lindsey Berkson: Waltzing to Your Wildest Dreams

– a note from Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo

I am delighted to have as a guest blog contributor today, my dear friend, colleague and mentor, Dr. Lindsey Berkson.

For the last three decades, Dr. Lindsey Berkson’s focus has been as a nutritional consultant with a specialty in women and hormones. During this time, she’s run nutritional and hormone tests on thousands of women, worked with their doctors, and consulted with them about nutrition, food, and exercise choices.

I met Lindsey over a year ago at a continuing education class she taught on hormone balancing and we instantly became fast friends.  We partnered to bring the 5 week course, The Secret to Being Sexy at Any Age , Get Your Gut in Gear and have plans for more joint endeavors.  We both have a passion for helping people to overcome health challenges and recharge their energy tank so they can live their life with passion and purpose.

YOU CAN DO IT!!!

– by Dr. Lindsey Berkson

Who knows where life takes you if you face your edges and push them back with all your might?

Yikes!

I never thought being well into menopause I would be flying high on some gorgeous man’s shoulders and doing back flips 6 feet off the ground, but here I am. Ritamarie and I were supposed to have a meeting yesterday and I told her, “I just had this two and a half-hour dance rehearsal, and I could barely put the key in my front door and turn it to let myself in.”

I told her why.

Several weeks ago when I was moving back into my home and going through boxes that had been moved and stored and moved and stored, I found an old tape cassette of a song for which I had written the words and music, had professionally produced, and then eventually forgot about.  Once I found this tape I ran to see if, with all the years in storage, it even still worked.

And it did!!!

Though my professional work as a hormone specialist now occupies my time, I am also a dancer.  A social dancer.  Though I haven’t been dancing very much the last 4 years with everything going on in my life: dealing with my mother’s dementia, taking care of her, living with her in the lock down dementia unit (which prompted writing the book My Mother Who Worse Her Purse as a Shoe), getting engaged (and unengaged), handling a year of the 3 M’s – mold, men and moving, and publishing 7 books (one – Safe Hormones, Smart Women, which bumped me fairly solidly off the dance floor).

Wow I thought. A real dream, before I die some day, would be to dance and perform to my own song. Wouldn’t that be a ‘died and gone to heaven’ kind of deal?

So I had the song (called Walking Through Rooms and professionally sung by Ellis Hall) transposed to a CD 2 two weeks ago and contacted one of my favorite dance champions, Mike Topel, from right here in Austin, and played it for him. He said, “Let me choreograph this; I think we can come up with a lovely performance.”

The song is a waltz.  Writing a waltz was easier for me, and it was one of my earlier songs. But I am not really a waltzer.  Considering that I am a medium to advanced social dancer, I just blazingly thought, I can do this… Why not? (Little did I know….)

I called up Sherry Reynolds, a dance champion who is part owner of Uptown Dance Studio in Austin, and it turns out she is hosting the Lone Star Dance Invitational Saturday, August 13^th, which gave me around 10 days to put something together and perform it at the dinner show.

“I had no idea,” I told Ritamarie, begging off our business meeting as I could hardly walk or move after my third rehearsal, “that performance dancing was such a totally different animal than social dancing.”  I had no idea that I signed up for:

• being dragged (not the correct dance term I am sure) on the floor, him grabbing my arms and me rolling across the hard wood dance floor, lying down, while he walks through my legs
• holding his waist while my legs whip around at chest height
• grueling ballet pliés and seemingly endless lunges
• kicking legs up in the air (and if they are not straight and high enough one looks like an idiot)
• being up in the air balancing only on my abdomen with head high, then back flipping out and snaking across his abdomen and down through his legs back onto the floor.

Now I work out daily, but all this “waltzing” requires incredible core strength.  Lots of it. Thank god I down chia seeds and green drinks!

The whole time Mike is giving me directions I have two loud dialogues in my head:

1. What the F… am I doing? Am I nuts? I can’t do this! I am scared to death! What if I fall? My old bones–yikes–I am out of my mind!
2.  I can do this! I can do anything! Why not? Sure, cool.

Soooo much distraction; I’m sure Mike was wondering why I kept asking him, “What did you say again?”

Two concurrent dialogues — faith versus fear.

But that has pretty much been my entire life: pushing the edges of fear and having faith that it will work out. Who would have thought that even though I am older, this theme has not seemed to have slowed down? Yikes.

Have I mentioned yet that this physical and mental marathon all has to be done in a long, floor length skirt, which I have NEVER worn let alone danced in. We had an argument as I insisted I just simply could NOT do this in a long skirt; he replied that with dance regulations I simply could not NOT do it in a floor length dance skirt. So that was that.

Will I get to do this next Saturday at the cabaret dinner dance in front of the hundreds of dancers and judges? I am not positive. If we decide we need some more weeks we may dance it somewhere else, or feel it is finished enough to perform next week. We are working our b…. off to try to pull next week off.

But I do know that age is just a number. Stretching oneself physically and emotionally is part of the de-acceleration process of anti-aging and staying younger no matter the numbers that keep (thankfully) ticking away. You truly are just as old as you fight back the demons of fear and go for things you never dreamed of even in your 20’s–if your adrenals, blood sugar, lifestyle, and food choices are watching your back.

You just take a deep breath, pull those shoulders back, and say, “Hell yeah, I can do this!”

My website is in a new construction phase, and Ritamarie felt I needed to say all this, even here in her blog, to get this out to all your sisters and brothers as a message of hope from a crone-ish cougar doc, so I am writing this to share with you. I want to remind you, “We can all do it. Whatever you have held as a dream in the corner of your consciousness, no matter how wild and hanging out there by a dental floss string it may seem to make you feel, now is the time. Go for it. You can do it!”

LindseyBerkson.com