How to Start: Curiosity as Teacher
By Azure Bourdeau
The experience of being new is at the heart of childhood. There is a wonder and enchantment that is inherent to our exploration of the world, an ease in curiosity. It’s also about what’s not there: resistance or understanding of consequence. When I think of childhood, I think of climbing trees with a fearless attitude, jumping from one branch to another with no intention other than to experience the world from a different perspective. As we grow older, we begin to collect shame, fear and a sense of “not being good enough.”
Before you know it, the idea of being new is an impossible feat. The tree becomes a mountain.
I come from a background of teaching yoga, a spiritual and somatic practice originating from the East that has been repurposed for Western workout culture with a priority on aesthetics and performance. The number of times I hear from students that they aren’t “good” at yoga saddens me. The practice of yoga doesn’t exist on the binary of good or bad; it is simply a practice. A practice not as in “practice makes perfect,” but a framework to remind practitioners that each day brings with it a myriad of factors that might impact the physical, emotional or mental outcome of time spent on the mat. Instead of arriving with expectation, we arrive with the mindset that we meet ourselves where we are today, with openness and curiosity. So much of what I teach isn’t about the quality of movements, shapes or patterns, but about the act of removing judgment.
Walking into my first Aerial class, I couldn’t help but recognize that tension of being new. After having worked behind the scenes at ICS for months, the constant exposure to grandiose videos and images of incredible circus artists and performers made it hard to imagine myself leaving the ground. Eventually, as I managed to hang from the back of my knees upside-down on the hoop, painfully aware of my lack of supporting core muscles and coordination to sit upright with any sense of ease, the defeat of not being good enough started to set in. Here I was, not so different from my own students. I closed my eyes and just let my body hang there and breathed into that moment. I was brought back to being a kid, hanging upside down on a tree in the heat of the summertime, the curiosity of what it feels like to be exploratory… the hoop, not so different from a tree in my childhood.
It takes courage to start something new— to stand in front of a new medium and not let the distance between you and where you imagine yourself to be so terrifying. Instead of imagining a fixed outcome, a linear trajectory, I look at time spent practicing as a spiral; each loop of effort builds towards the next beginning.
Starting something new is a reminder to lean into what feels curious. A familiar feeling of being upside down, a new way to experience my body in space, an unfamiliar form of expression.
