I’m very grateful for two healings I had during my career as a ballet dancer. These have meant a lot to me, not only in the freedom they brought, but also in the lessons I learned from them.
One day during rehearsal, I landed in the wrong position after a leap, and there was a loud popping sound and pain. As I hobbled to the side of the room, I immediately thought of what Mary Baker Eddy says about accidents on page 424 of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures: “Accidents are unknown to God, or immortal Mind, and we must leave the mortal basis of belief and unite with the one Mind, in order to change the notion of chance to the proper sense of God’s unerring direction and thus bring out harmony.”
I was glad I had learned this passage years earlier as a student in the Christian Science Sunday School. It helped me turn away from what the material senses were telling me—that by chance I’d made a wrong move and was now seriously injured. Despite the swelling, I was able to put on my lace-up boots and walk the three blocks back to my apartment, praying all the way.
When I took the boot off at home, I found I was unable to walk. I refused to focus on the appearance of my foot and ankle. Instead I sat down and studied that week’s Bible Lesson from the Christian Science Quarterly. One of the citations included the question “What is man?” from Science and Health. The answer begins: “Man is not matter; he is not made up of brain, blood, bones, and other material elements. The Scriptures inform us that man is made in the image and likeness of God.… Man is spiritual and perfect; and because he is spiritual and perfect, he must be so understood in Christian Science.… He is the compound idea of God, including all right ideas;…” (p. 475).
The angel message came that if I really understood the truth—that an accident had never happened, and that my spiritual being as God’s child was still intact—then I would get off the couch and take a stand.
In my small living room, I walked around the coffee table while I reasoned prayerfully with these ideas. At first it was not walking, but taking a step and dragging my other leg. But when I finished praying, I realized I was putting weight on the foot again and it was not as painful.
I had come to a clearer perception of God as the only creator, and of myself as His spiritual likeness—as obedient to God as a mirrored reflection is to its original. I saw there could be nothing material or limited about my true selfhood. The problem was not my foot, but a false sense of myself.
I stuck firmly to the spiritual facts and refused to listen to any suggestions to the contrary. Two days later I returned to ballet class. After four days I was jumping again, and in six days I was able to dance in pointe shoes. During this recovery, the more I did, the better I felt. I was able to perform three weeks later, and I even auditioned for another dance company. I got the job, and the director told me she could not tell which foot had been injured.
This healing was proof to me that there is only divine Mind’s ever-present, harmonious action. Anything else is an illusion with no substance, power, or reality.
Later in my career, I was asked to do a photo shoot for a billboard ad. There was no time or space for me to warm up, so I did the photo session cold. After doing the same set of turns on the same foot 72 times (we were working with a film camera), I found that my pointe shoe, which had been new when we started the session, had broken down by the end. When I went to the ballet studio afterward to rehearse the rest of the day, there was stiffness and pain in my ankle.
Despite my prayers over the next few days, the ankle didn’t improve but rather grew worse. Once the ankle was warmed up, the pain and stiffness would recede, so I was willing to tolerate the problem as long as it didn’t keep me from dancing. At times when the pain worsened, I would pray again and experience relief, but I never persisted with prayer to the point of seeing the unreality of this condition. I settled for just getting by.
Eventually I had trouble walking without a limp, and I could barely stand when I got out of bed in the morning. I began to contemplate retiring from dancing because the pain had become intolerable.
During the three years I dealt with this problem, five other dancers in the company had surgery for what appeared to be the same condition. They would often talk about the location of their pain and weakness and proudly display their scars from the surgery.
One summer on a vacation with my family, we did a lot of mountain hiking, and this aggravated the condition. But later I attended my Christian Science students’ association and was so inspired that afterward I suddenly realized I had walked around freely for two days without any pain.
However, the pain and debility soon returned and then were worse than ever when we started the dance season in the middle of July. I frankly didn’t know how I could continue. Then I read an article in the Christian Science Sentinel by Barbara Thiel Johnson, “Parasites can’t feed on you” (May 11, 1998). This showed me I didn’t need to allow a material misconception such as disease or injury to sap me of my vitality or become part of my identity. I could root it out of thought—and out of my experience—by understanding it was not a reality but a false suggestion. I didn’t have to play host to it, and nothing could be taken away from my God-given perfection and completeness.
At that moment I knew I was healed once and for all. When I returned to work the following morning, it was as if the pain and weakness had never existed. That season I went on to dance with renewed freedom and joy, and I was promoted to the highest rank in the company. This healing serves as a reminder of how quickly we can awaken from material beliefs and experience ever-present harmony.
In the years since these two healings, both feet and ankles have functioned normally with no residual effects from these injuries. I’ve also had many other examples of God’s protection and care in my life as a dancer. I know that I could not have had the full, rich career that I had without Christian Science, for which I am extremely grateful.
Kristen Wenrick Graham
Louisville, Kentucky, US
