The other day, in a seated wide-leg flow, I heard myself say it.
We introduced this a few weeks ago and I almost can’t do a class without it anymore.
That made me laugh.
Peggy and I have been at this a long time. RiversZen opened in 2012. What we teach started years before that. Training. Traveling. Classes. Workshops. Thousands of hours with people. Thousands more messing with movements ourselves.
You’d think we’d have finished it.
We haven’t. I don’t think we’ve ever been farther from believing we would.
Things we taught for years barely show up now. Things disappeared and wandered back. Peggy steals what I do. I steal what she does after she’s given it the stink eye for six months.
Bird Dog has been doing that lately.
Not new. Hands and knees. Opposite arm and leg. We used to do it. Then we mostly stopped. No meeting. No announcement. It just left.
Now it’s back. Slower. Different intention. Hooked to other things we’re already doing. I like it. Enough that it keeps landing in class.
That’s still the part I trust about teaching. I can change my mind. So can Peggy.
She changes things constantly. Same movement, somebody turned a few degrees, a different support, and the thing tells us something it didn’t tell us last week.
Not long ago she said in class, same thing we do on our back, same thing as pigeon, just a different angle. Then: I feel different every time you come into a different orientation.
Same body. Different angle. Different information.
We could have spent fourteen years stacking exercises until this place needed a manual. We went the other way. Less. Watch closer. Try it. Keep what helps. Change what doesn’t. Every so often open a box and find Bird Dog in there.
I’m suspicious of people who have the body figured out.
The same movement that makes one person say oh God that feels wonderful makes the person three feet away look at us like we betrayed them. So we adjust. Then the adjustment teaches us something. Then that changes the next thing.
Fourteen years in, I’m still putting something in a class and a few weeks later I can hardly teach without it.
I don’t want the day we know the 37 correct movements, the proper order, and the one right way everybody should do them.
That isn’t teaching. That’s a finished product.
Somebody else will walk through the door. Some old thing will come back. Something we’re sure of today will make us wonder what the hell we were thinking.
I want that.
RiversZen isn’t done.