The header on my main page states: "I teach nothing".
What do I mean by this? Isn’t this somewhat of a pretentious statement? How can I teach nothing? However, I don’t mean the mystical south-east-Asian nothingness. "I teach nothing" should simply be read as "I don’t teach anything”.
But why would I say something idiotic like that, when it is clear from the other content on my site that
I do actually teach something?
It is my small revolt against all the I-am-ness in this
world, against all the names and distinctions. I wanted to express that I am tired of trying to explain
what I do.
Being an I means giving a name. It means explaining what you do, in order to make things clear.
Building walls that separate you from the other. To be an individual.
I am not sure if I
actually do something, often I rather feel that I am being done. I am part of a process happening. If
I’d have told you yesterday what I do, today I might not be able to use the same words anymore, because
things are constantly changing. What we do is constantly changing. Evolving, you might say,
because it makes it sound like there is a direction. I do feel like there is one, but I refrain from
making statements about there being an actual evolution. I feel safer using the word change.
When I say that I teach nothing, I attempt to say that I struggle to explain what I do, and that the
more I think about it, the more I feel like I am left with a complete destruction of what I do, with
nothing. I feel I would rather say "nothing" than XY, because it keeps the world open. After
every single time I explain what I do, I think to myself "what have I done?” I destroyed
everything, I put into words that which should not have been put into words. I threw everything into the
meaningless pond of clarification. Clarity, clarity, people lust for it so much. Most of the time people
just want a name. When it has a name it becomes harmless. When people in the street ask us what we are
doing, I can invent any name I want and they will be happy, they don't want to know anything
further. It's a bit ridiculous.
Clarity puts clear ends to things. I refuse to be clear. It kills. Clarity is the murderer of the living
process. If someone is extremely clear about what they are doing, I stay away. It is a toxin. Clarity is
to be used in the right dosages. Then it can be very healthy. People who have little clarity languish
from the lack of it; people who have too much crystallise and harden.
Often I feel like after I
have given an explanation of what we do, people actually understand less of what we are doing. By doing
so I have put clear borders around it and cut the imagination short. Thus, I usually prefer to explain
the concepts and principles rather than try to summarise the actual practicalities. I encounter the same
problem when people come for their first training. I call it „the first training bias". Let’s say
we do a lot of stretching in a session. The new person will often ask at the end: "so are you
always doing a lot of stretching?". The exercises we practised in the first sessions etch
themselves into their brain and create their ideas about the training. But simply, the problem is that
one training is not by far enough to have any understanding of what we do whatsoever. To be realistic I
think it takes around three years before you will have something like an understanding of what's
happening. After the first training the participant will actually know less than they did before,
because they will think that they know now what’s happening. But if you could understood, what we are
doing after the first training session, it would mean only one thing: That the training was crap.
I still struggle with the decision if it should be "We teach nothing" or "I teach nothing". I don't like the "I", so I use "we" as often as possible. I went with "I" on the front page. For now. For no reason that I would know how to articulate. The decision is a bit unclear.