When knowledge becomes teaching
On mentorship, remaining a student, and the time it takes to make knowledge your own.
"You are Ana from THE podcast"
Last September, I was in Glasgow taking Lift Off with Cara Reeser and Jeremy Laverdure when two Pilates teachers recognised my voice.
"You're Ana from THE podcast! We love your voice!"
This was slightly surreal. It was the first and only podcast I had ever recorded, so the definite article seemed generous. And, like many people, I don't particularly enjoy hearing my recorded voice. English isn't my first language, and on a recording it sounds considerably more nasal to me than it does inside my own head.
The podcast they were referring to was a conversation about Pilates and mentorship I had recorded with Cara Reeser for Pilates Professionals of the Netherlands. By then, I had known Cara for several years. I had studied with her, completed her Pilates Heritage Training and Movement Science Made Simple courses, and eventually started taking regular private sessions with her.
But the reason I kept studying with her began much earlier.
What I was looking for
I first met Cara when she came to teach at Smartbody. Alongside taking her workshops, I had the unusual opportunity to observe the private and duet sessions she taught over those two days. What caught my attention wasn't simply how much she knew, but what she did with what she knew.
I had moved gradually from contemporary art into Pilates and found myself missing something from both worlds. In contemporary art, I had sometimes missed practicality and immediate application. In Pilates, I was missing intellectual depth: a willingness to look beyond familiar explanations about why the method "worked" – that something was simply "good for your body", worked "deeper muscles", or that if we trusted the method, bodies would somehow be fixed.
Teaching is a very practical test of knowledge. We may read, study and think extensively, but when someone stands in front of us for an hour, we have to decide what matters now. Somehow, what we understand has to become an experience from which another person can learn.
This was what I recognised in Cara's teaching.
Context before content
When Cara later returned to Amsterdam to teach the Pilates Heritage Training, I was interested not only in Kathy Grant's work but in the context around it.
At the beginning of the training, we sat in a circle and Cara asked each of us why we had chosen to study Kathy's work. I gave an answer and listened as everyone else spoke. When we had finished, I realised I hadn't said the thing I actually wanted to add. "I also want to honour that Kathy was a woman and a Pilates elder of colour." Cara simply said, "Thank you for that."
Context turned out to be central to the Heritage Training itself. In our podcast, Cara explained that after Kathy's death, people became interested in individual parts of her work. Cara resisted simply passing those pieces on without the history and larger body of work around them. If the videos and exercises were going to be shared, she wanted the story to accompany them.
That mattered to me. I didn't want to inherit a collection of exercises, cues or stories and reproduce them because they belonged to an important teacher. I wanted to understand where the work came from well enough to think with it and eventually make it my own.
Knowing what matters now
I remember another small moment from one of our workshops. I began a detour through the history of posture, moving from ancient Rome through Louis XIV towards ideas about posture inherited from the Victorian period.
Cara listened for a moment and said, "You should write a book."
And then we returned to the workshop.
I remember it because it was such an economical teaching intervention. She acknowledged that there was something worth pursuing without allowing an interesting digression to take over the limited time we had.
I think about this often when I teach. Knowing a great deal isn't the same as saying everything you know. Teaching requires selection. What does this person need now? What information helps? What can wait?
Sometimes the most useful thing a teacher can do is leave something out.
Knowledge needs time
My initial curiosity became a much longer course of study. I completed the Pilates Heritage Training and continued through the Movement Science Made Simple curriculum. I also began taking regular private sessions with Cara, something I continue to do today.
In the podcast, I reminded Cara of something she and Jeremy say at the end of their courses. After spending a weekend learning new material, don't rush home and immediately change the way you teach. Let the new information work with what you already know.
Cara described herself and Jeremy as lifelong students. Learning, she said, needs to be digested. We need time to practise, to "wobble", to be in the unknown with new information and allow it to affect our own practice before trying to teach it to somebody else.
I think this distinction between knowing something and being able to teach it is important.
Being taught regularly has probably influenced my understanding as much as any individual course. Ideas become less abstract when I experience them in my own body. I can question them, struggle with them, discover something unexpected and gradually find ways of making them my own.
I also get to experience teaching from the other side. What does a particular question make me notice? When does an explanation help? When does it get in the way? What happens when I'm given enough information to discover something for myself?
One size doesn't fit all
There is another idea running through the podcast that has become fundamental to how I teach.
Kathy Grant famously said, "One size doesn't fit all." Cara described how thoroughly Kathy applied that idea. Where someone sat on the equipment, which springs they used, which exercises they did, how they breathed and the imagery she chose could all change according to the person in front of her.
Even language had to be personal. In our conversation, we talked about Kathy asking how she could explain "piano arms" to a truck driver. An image that makes immediate sense to one person may mean nothing to another.
For me, this is where knowledge and teaching meet. The more we understand, the more possibilities we have. But we still have to decide which possibility is useful for this person, in this moment.
Remaining a student
Towards the end of the podcast, our conversation moved beyond Pilates. Cara spoke about her own yoga and meditation practices and about continuing to study with people whose work informs her.
Our own sessions have also long since become conversations as well as Pilates lessons. We talk about teaching and movement, but also about work, friendships, disappointments, meditation and whatever else happens to be part of life at that moment.
That, too, has shaped my understanding of mentorship.
A mentor isn't simply someone from whom we accumulate more knowledge. The relationship can give us somewhere to question what we think we know, encounter another way of looking at something and gradually become clearer about our own.
Which brings me back to Glasgow and those two teachers who recognised my voice.
Perhaps being recognised through a podcast shouldn't have felt quite so strange. A podcast is, after all, a conversation you allow other people to listen to. The conversation with Cara that we recorded began long before we switched on the microphones and, in different forms, has continued ever since.
Perhaps that is what I value most about mentorship: learning from someone else's thinking can help us become clearer about our own.
If you are new to Pilates Incorporated we recommend experiencing the method by starting with our Trio intro series. You can buy the package and book your 3 classes with Ana Nikitovic in Amsterdam West.