Say The Real Shit.

I use to try so hard to talk fancy and with “spirit” until I realized it was more effective to just be me and speak my truth about movement and breath. This comes from learning, immersing and integrating. I stopped trying to memorize (recycled) cues and inspirational phrases, and started seeing the bigger picture of what I was offering, what I was teaching. This gave me much more content which meant endless, authentic ways to articulate it.

There’s nothing wrong with being eloquent, but the pressure is off.

SAY THE REAL SHIT. From Livia Cohen-Shapiro.
Metaphor, poetry, lofty words and aspirational spiritual lingo. The kind of words that strung together sounds lovely. Oh, ever so lovely. But when strung together, no sentence is made. No true lexicon at work.

Prayers, intentions, fancy words that our collective culture has decided are beautiful and awash with "spirit” make manifest the projection that Spirit is something you can buy and sell.
If you have ever left a class confused because the teacher said beautiful things but somehow nothing at all, you are likely on point. After all those words that streamed forth sounding so illustrious, no real substance actually added up.
There was nothing there.
Smoke and mirrors.
Words, like painted walls, can be just an aesthetic.

Some words and teachings might be aspirational. Sometimes we teachers need to say them to believe them and to make them real. That’s partly how matrika works. We say to make real.

But we are also responsible for making sense. For saying real shit. We are being charged with the task of offering substance. And for creating environments where the substance can be felt, found and transmitted. Instruction needs direction and accuracy. Not so that students do what you say, but so they can understand in their felt experience what you are trying to say. And then choose. Engage self-agency. Explore possibility.

It is very hard to explore safely when nothing makes sense. When words don’t add up. When language does not match expression and intonation.

We can get very lost in our words you know. There are many reasons we turn into talking heads, trying to believe what we are saying.

I invite all of us as teachers to drop down another inch, right into the space that motivates our word choices. What are you actually trying to say, to convey? Keep asking for real shit.