Maybe models simply don’t feel they get much out of workshops? Maybe we underestimate how much we, as bottoms, can actually learn while someone else is practising (on us)?
Natasha's voice
Riggers need models to practise with. But what's in it for the models? Some personal thoughts on workshops, learning together and why being someone's practice partner can be a practice in itself.
What if the things we struggle with most in relationships are simply skills we haven't learned yet? Trust, communication, intimacy, surrender. We expect ourselves to know how to do these things, even though many of us never had good teachers. But if they are skills, we are allowed to be bad at them. We are allowed to learn. Even after fifteen years, I'm still learning how to follow someone I deeply trust. Perhaps we could meet ourselves and each other with a little more compassion along the way.
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.
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