I cannot help but wonder: How often is it our own judgement that stands in the way of our experience?
Natasha's voice
I was watching a woman in ropes, almost breathless. There was something extraordinary about the way she received impact: fearless, curious, completely open. She wasn't trying to be tough or impressive. She was simply herself. It made me wonder how much of our own experience we lose to judgement, performance and the endless effort to become someone we think we should be. What becomes possible when we stop standing in our own way and allow ourselves to be exactly who we are?
The moments I have felt most seen in ropes were rarely the most technically impressive ones. Often, they were the quiet pauses when nothing happened. We tend to believe that first we master the technique, and then we become free to play spontaneously. But presence is a different capacity, one we need to cultivate alongside technical skill. Mut nichts zu machen — the courage to do nothing — means learning to stay with uncertainty long enough for something authentic to emerge.
We all have a stubborn “little bone” inside us – something our bodies learned to protect a long time ago. In somatics, we speak about conditioned tendencies: patterns of resistance, dissociation, shrinking or fighting that appear when we feel under pressure. They may limit us today, but perhaps before trying to get rid of them, we should understand what they were protecting. That stubborn little thing might also be the place from which we love, create and remain unmistakably ourselves.
The more experienced we become in ropes, the earlier we sometimes know: this is not going to work. But what happens when that knowledge gets in the way of the experience itself? When anticipation replaces feeling, corrections replace communication, and both partners end up frustrated? Perhaps the practice is not to know less, but to trust ourselves enough to stay with what is actually happening – until there is something real to respond to.
A newbie rope bottom told me that a rigger had stopped tying them because they were “not educated enough”. That sentence stayed with me. When did we start believing that we need an education before we are allowed to experience our own bodies? There is much we can learn in ropes – but perhaps we should be careful not to let knowledge replace something we already carry: our capacity to feel, respond, enjoy and say no.
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