Who are we as embodied arts teachers, and what has our path actually looked like?
This month we make room for the honest story behind the bio: who we are in this work, and how we actually got here. We’ll ease in with a short guided qigong practice, offered by one of your peer teachers, so our bodies arrive before our words. Then we’ll speak in pairs and in smaller groups of four, and return to the full circle for shared reflection and open forum. You might explore where your teaching roots itself in memory or sensation, what first drew you toward embodied work, how the word teacher, guide, or facilitator fits you today, or what your path is asking of you next. No right answers; only your experience.
Embodied arts teachers shape lives through movement, voice, touch, sound, and witnessing. Our roads wind through studios and clinics, schools and living rooms, lineages and sideways arrivals. That diversity is the point. This circle is a place to be honest about the calling and the questions, the joy and the weight, with people who get what it is to teach with the body in the room. Join your peers and see what wants to be said.
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What emerged in this circle
We spent this session with a simple but roomy question: who are we as embodied arts teachers, and what has our path actually looked like? A peer teacher opened with qigong so our bodies could arrive before our stories. From there we moved into pairs, and then carried the conversation together in one circle rather than small groups.
What kept surfacing was how rarely anyone’s path runs straight. Many of us found embodied practice sideways or later in life: through movement that stopped working, a community gap that needed filling, a partner’s invitation, or students who asked for something we had not yet learned ourselves. Childhood memories still showed up as roots: picture books told to children who did not share a language, an eclipse that gave someone chills, a fairy portal under a bush. The thread to today is often tangled, not tidy. Several people said it was deeply moving simply to hear that becoming a teacher can be slow, unplanned, and still unfolding.
A theme of connection ran through the whole session, with shelter animals settling under breath and touch, with workshop partners sketching seasonal offerings together, with peers who found practice after yoga or Pilates and are still finding their footing. Jennie named what many of us feel in the room: this work is fundamentally about landing, connecting, and meeting.
Settle within flow — and making room for not knowing
When we turned toward where the path is pulling next, the word settle kept appearing, not as flat stillness, but as something alive inside movement. One teacher described lying on the earth and watching the whole night sky, not trying to go anywhere. Another admitted, with some relief, “I don’t know,” unusual for people who tend to overachieve and always have a next step in mind. The group touched something wuji-like: the silence between words, the space before something has fully revealed itself.
Jennie offered an image: a slow-moving river with a little eddy along the bank. The water never stops, but in that pocket the silt can settle and you can see clearly to the bottom. Several people recognized that feeling as medicine.
Jennie had framed the forward-looking question through abundance rather than scarcity: what would help you blossom, not what you lack. That opened an honest tension many teachers live inside. We live in an age that rewards gathering information, and responsibility can make us feel we must master more before we are allowed to guide. And yet students often arrive wanting a fix or a schedule, then quietly shift toward “I’ll just do my practice” when someone holds space instead of flooding them with answers. One teacher described her own rhythm: a gathering phase — books, teachers, inner listening, the slow-moving river — and then a letting go, finding a natural thread. Lately that thread sounds like forest and waterholes for a summer qigong series. The circle wondered aloud whether collecting knowing is what makes us teachers at all. Maybe the real abundance is the eddy: stepping out of the flood long enough to be present.
Who we are when we teach
We also played with words beyond teacher, facilitator, guide, someone who simply inspires. Jennie said her sweet spot is not having answers and exploring with the room. People named the everyday craft underneath that: how much silence to leave in a class so a student can have their own experience (even when it comes out yellow and you thought you were offering blue); how hard it is to stop talking when you are used to cueing nonstop; how strange and tender it is to guide embodied work through a screen when you cannot quite put your hands through the glass.
One participant, getting ready to teach a seasons workshop, shared a north star she is carrying from Chinese medicine: the doctor is paid while you are well, not when you are sick. Coming from nursing — years of medication lists and repeat surgeries — she is stepping toward energy work as a kind of health abundance. It is a paradigm shift that can unsettle people or open a door, and for her it is simply the next chapter of a path she has been walking for a long time.
If you missed us
You might sit with a few questions on your own: What early-life thread, even a tangled one, still connects to how you teach today? Where is your path asking you to settle within flow rather than rush to a finish line? What might shift if you taught from the eddy, a little less information, a little more presence?
Our next circle is July 2, when we will explore teaching format: how we choose the shape of our teaching for the transformation we are seeking.
We would love to have you in the next circle to continue this exploration.To be posted following our circle
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Articles
1. Who Am I When I Am Teaching? Self in Yoga Practice — Konecki 2022, The Qualitative Report (open PDF)
https://nsuworks.nova.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5469&context=tqrQualitative study of how yoga teachers experience the self while teaching — directly on this month’s theme of who we are in the room, not only what we know.
2. A Rationale for Teacher Change from a Bodyfulness Paradigm — Education Sciences (MDPI, open)
https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7102/11/9/460Argues for bodyfulness as a frame for teacher development and change — useful when reflecting on how embodied awareness shapes identity over time, not just technique.
3. What We Do and Who We Are: Music Therapists’ Personal Music Cultures — González (Barcelona Publishers PDF)
https://barcelonapublishers.com/resources/QIMTV6/GONZALEZ.pdfExplores how therapists’ personal relationship with music lives inside professional identity — a cross-modality mirror for anyone who teaches from a lifelong practice.
4. Unlocking Qigong: Reflection on My Teaching Experience — Jehanne Bening, An Itinerant Scribe (April 2026)
https://itinerant-scribe.com/2026/04/21/teaching-qigong-my-first-experience-and-lessons-learned/First-time qigong teaching in an SCA barony: butterflies, willingness in the room, and the shift from performing perfection to inviting people into a shared experience — close to what many of us named in the circle.
5. I am a fraud (or, how i learned to teach) — Karen Schwisow, Mindfulness Northwest (February 2026)
https://mindfulnessnorthwest.com/1practice-format/text-practice/i-am-a-fraud-or-how-i-learned-to-teach/Honest essay on imposter syndrome, “Who am I to teach?”, and discovering that the practice itself does the transforming work — pairs well with our thread on presence over information mastery.
Videos
1. 5 Things You Should Know If You Want To Become A Dance Teacher — Rasa Pauzaitė / Dance With Rasa
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGDLqm-lZ40Practical talk on dancer versus dance-teacher vocation, mentorship, and burnout — a straightforward companion to calland becoming on a non-linear path.
2. Feeling Qi Energy | Qigong & Taoism with Mimi Kuo-Deemer — Mark Walsh / Embodiment Podcast (video)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Mu52vxmRGEConversation on qi, Taoist lineage, and teaching through embodiment — useful for teachers situating their path inside a tradition while staying accessible across modalities.
Podcast episodes
1. Embodiment Podcast — Body-Mind Centering with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen & Don Hanlon Johnson (Mark Walsh)
https://embodimentunlimited.com/483-bonnie-bainbridge-cohen-and-don-hanlon-johnson-with-mark-walsh/Wide-ranging dialogue with two embodiment pioneers — lineage, somatic education, and what it means to pass on a body-based path without reducing it to information.To be added following our circle