Dr. Christine Hale always enjoyed the diagnostic side of medicine. She loves diving into an issue and figuring out what is wrong. During her training at Johns Hopkins and Duke universities, she spent much of her time in the emergency departments, triaging patients and quickly getting to the bottom of issues. After earning an MBA, she landed a job as a consultant and later in healthcare administration.
However, when the lifelong dancer began experiencing several overlapping symptoms, physicians struggled to diagnose her illness. In the end, she learned she had Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS), where the immune system attacks healthy tissue for unknown reasons, and a collagen disorder.
Meanwhile, a coworker introduced her to aerial yoga, which was neither tedious nor painful on her joints. “The first time I hung upside down, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is the most fun I’ve had,’” Hale says.
She started attending classes in Dallas with an instructor and found that her dance and Pilates experiences prepared her well for artistically hanging from the fabric. She has since performed at private events like weddings and once donned sparkles to swing from a trapeze at Smithy’s on Henderson for a New Year’s Eve celebration. Hale has also choreographed performances to accompany chefs who prepare tasting sessions for small parties.
Hale is also the owner of SOAR Creative Studios, which started as a space for her aerial gymnastics class to practice but has taken on a life of its own as an event space and creative hub for artists, creatives, musicians, and more. Spaces include multiple dance studios, kitchens, a great room for events, and more.
“There are artist resources and communities in town that cater to a lot of the nonprofit troops and things like that, but if you are an up-and-coming artists that doesn’t have a ton of resources and you’re not able to fundraise, it can be very hard in this area of the country to find resources and space,” Hale says. The multidisciplinary warehouse has become a community as well as resource. “People always walk in and say it looks like an art gallery, but it feels like home.”
Even though the aerial class eventually left SOAR for another space, Hale continues to train. What she didn’t know at the time was that her passion for aerial yoga would be part of the treatment for her health issues. She needed to build muscle, but her blood pressure dropped every time she stood up, making regular exercise difficult. As it turns out, exercising while upside down uses gravity to her advantage and keeps her heart from overworking by pumping blood up to her brain.
“I wish I could say I was smart and intentional about it all,” Hale says. “But it was just the one kind of exercise where I didn’t feel completely wiped out at the end, so I kept doing it.”
