When I travel to teach workshops on the road, I often go a day early and stay a day or two afterward to do what’s called Guest Teaching. A traveling teacher is a bit of an oddity in most Pilates communities and there’s great curiosity about what she’s like and how she teaches and most folks are interested in at least watching her teach if not actually booking a session and being taught by her.
A traveling teacher who makes herself available for Guest Teaching works with clients of the host studio, clients from local studios and teachers from the local community. My current rate for Guest Teaching is $150 for a private and $95 per person for a semi and during the session, I encourage whomever I’m working with to use the time to problem solve any Pilates issues either in their own work or problems they have with their clients. Sometimes, people ask me to do things like teach them every which way I know how to teach Stomach Massage or we work on progressing through flexion all the way to a Roll Up or Teaser. I always ask them to come with 5 or 6 issues because we almost always fix their first 1 or 2 in about 10 minutes. It’s like a mini-workshop all their own.
Guest Teaching is fun.
Guest Teaching is different.
Unlike my work in my own Seattle studio where I haven’t taken new clients in a couple of years and everything with my standing book of business has become very predictable within a predictable unpredictability, on the road I get everything thrown at me but the kitchen sink.
I’m on Delta, Seat 5A. I have traveled on Delta so often in the past couple of months they spiffed me a free upgrade so I’m up front and loving it, I’m 2 Bloody Marys and 1 Vodka rocks into the flight and I have a new best friend, he’s my seatmate and he’s wearing a T-shirt that says “I’d rather be complaining” and when he took his seat, I said “tell me now if that’s true, I’ll find out soon enough,” his name is Martin Dean but I persist in calling him Dean Martin and we’re going to have dinner together on his next trip to Seattle in 2 weeks – talk to strangers! It’s fun! I married a man I met on a plane and we were married for 10 years. I digress!
We’re at 37,000 feet under a crescent moon and clear skies and I’m winging my way between Atlanta and Seattle on my way home from an absolutely fabulous workshop at Signal Mountain Pilates, that’s on Signal Mountain (duh) about 10 minutes up slope from Chattanooga. My first full day in town, I taught two Master Classes and right after the second one ended, I hosted an Open House at Signal Mountain Pilates. We drew about 30 folks and we had a great time.
At the Open House, we had show and tell.
I always travel with Chuck Rapoport’s beautiful photography book containing the pictures he took at Joe’s studio the day he shot the Sports Illustrated piece in 1961 and, most importantly, my treasured first edition Return to Life and the marketing materials and Christmas Cards from Joe & Clara that were inside the book that they’d given to their receptionist, Phyllis.
Day 2, I taught 6 Guest Teaching sessions and the highlights of them included getting a client’s back that hadn’t moved in a while to move, helping a teacher come to Jesus over her tucked pelvis and helping a professor/runner find her primary hip flexors and strengthen her ankles.
Day 3 – 8, a full, luxuriously long 40-hour Pilates Excel, which is my finishing school where I teach what the fabulous, sexy and uber brilliant Vanessa Pinkam termed Stable Datums. Stable Datums are the rules of the road in Pilates, the processes by which you can accurately assess and properly solve virtually any problem that arises in the bodies of your clients.
The Signal Mountain Pilates Pilates Excel workshop was booked in early December, we had about 5 weeks to promote it and I was astounded by every one of the 8, count ‘em 8, fantastic teachers who changed all manner of big heavy plans, pulled money out of their hats and found a way to go to Signal Mountain for 5 long days of Stable Datum Pilates with me. God Bless them all and each!
There was an ageless gorgeous goddess of a woman who’s also a dentist who specializes in cranio mandibular release and I saw she and her husband at a restaurant near the studio after the open house and when I visited with them at their table, her husband adjusted my jaw and although my left jaw has cracked for years, it hasn’t cracked since. Isn’t it funny how Pilates teachers are always so eager to let people do things with their bodies? I am always so happy to give myself over to someone who is in charge and large in their industry, ready for new, ready for better, ready for change. Every day, I hope for change. Every day, I hope for new. Every day, I’m ready for it all. I digress.
I’m still on this goddess of a woman who works with her husband putting people right and together for over 25 years they’ve published a technical journal for their industry. If I have anything to do with it, they’ll be presenting at PMA in the future.
Back to the group.
We had a massage therapist who, strangely enough, went to the same primary training center Heidi and I did in Seattle and I must say, she was the most surprising, most unexpectedly wild and sexy and edgy part voyeur, part vixen. I did not see that coming yet what a sight it was!
There was a beautiful young marathon runner who is super well Pilates educated and works in a Virginia studio where I’ll be teaching workshops in July. She had a turned Ilium, just like me, and through an elegant and deep engagement (no touch, just talking her through it) we turned it back so now it’s where it’s supposed to be.
There was the smart, fast talking and funny new mom who’s danced all her life and teaches dance to little kids.
We had another dancer, with impeccable technique, a loving spirit and heightened energetic sensitivity – a gift through and through.
The studio owner and my gracious host, Sydney, was a lovely, perfectly perfect picture of perfection from start to end. It was an honor to teach side by side with her on my two Guest Teaching days and I hope I can always call Sydney’s studio my east coast home. Good Lord, she’s precious.
I could write a book about the firecracker of a gal from Kentucky who is nothing less than an ass-shaking, ball-breaking fun fest of a party disguised as a Pilates teacher and, it seems scary now looking back on it, she was also my roommate for 5 nights and I do believe I shall never rid my psyche of the image of her pole dancing without the pole to Beyonce’s All the Single Ladies at home late one night when I was helplessly held in the vice-like grip of the deep and thorough exhaustion that comes after several days of non-stop teaching compounded by the brain death of 3 strong Margueritas at Taco Mamacita’s where I mercilessly hit on a 28 year old waiter named Billy and somehow came away with not one but two serving trays stuffed into my bag as souvenirs, 1 of which was personally presented by the manager who seemed to be facilitating my blatant exploitation of Billy. I’m going to up my life insurance policy limit before I visit this def-con-5 of a friend in July after I finish up in Virginia. She promises Kentucky Bourbon, pedicures and a manual physical therapy session with her husband. I digress.
Another student is perhaps the most gorgeous being on the planet, she embodies the very essence of grace and kindness, she also had a turned hip from a childhood skating fall (just like me!) and we turned it back through a gentle but strong muscular engagement (no touch, just talking her through it) and solved virtually all the mysteries her body has held for lo these many years. She had to leave a couple days early to teach at a community Yoga event and to attend the Fur Ball, her local Humane Society fundraiser. Don’t you love the South? The Fur Ball. If I attended a Fur Ball, I’d wear my mink. Or my squirrel. I’m serious. I have a squirrel coat. I’m at the top of the food chain and I love the view. I digress.
All in all, it was another unbelievable group of talent, graced upon me undeservedly so, and they’ve all, one by one, reported that they’ve immediately begun sprinkling their Stable Datums into their teaching, to great success and one, the Fur Ball Queen, has since even given her very own Pilates 101 in a Walmart.
Pilates People, my work is done.
But I have a new rule. The Tennessee Rule.
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