NOELIA CRUZ PINK HOUR (pH)

I am a Certified Personal Trainer, violinist, performing and visual artist impacted by chronic pain and fatigue. My journey into finding ways to feel better has led me to welcome gentle light, gentle movement, empathy-led personal training, coastal water-lands relationships, validation, and pacing as ways to practice Restorative Wellness. These inform and inspire Pink Hour (pH). This name comes from that atemporal window of pink light that appears in the skies of the Great Lakes during Nautical Twilight. It is not day, nor night, so the body doesn’t have to be anywhere; it can be with itself, looking for relief.

When I started suffering from chronic pain, over 20 years ago, I started receiving physician instructions to “exercise” without being shown or welcomed into a path that led to a place that understood how my body was feeling. I couldn’t find a way that worked, or a voice that could talk to me or guide me that understood my pain and energy fluctuations. After a while, I started experimenting with movement, all movements, from dancing, to hiking, to stretching slowly, all the way to becoming a 2017 Golden Gloves Boxing Champion while fighting chronic pain and disability.

All these versions of movement helped me understand that the body was inherently powerful, but constantly fluctuating in pain and energy levels, and so movement approaches and programs had to be like the dune grass that inspires so much of this platform: flexible, but with strength so undisputed that it keeps an entire coast from collapsing. And so, in Pink Hour, movement can be ripples in a day, surf another day, swell any given day, or still water, but inherently powerful; because we, too, are bodies of water.

Now that pain has led me to become a Certified Personal Trainer, I want to be the voice I wish I could have listened to when I was told that I had to “exercise”, and I want to welcome my community of chronic pain patients and tell them: Welcome to Pink Hour. It’s not exercise; it’s a movement.