This month, Matt travels to Tuscany to begin an apprenticeship with Yoga for Dancers creator Hilary Cartwright.  Co-founder (with Juliu Horvath) of the original White Cloud GYROTONIC® studio in New York, Hilary teaches and choreographs all around the world.  This fall, October 9-11, she will offer a workshop in Portland!  Read about Matt’s Yoga for Dancers experience and his excitement around diving into this material:

“In 2013, I was recovering from major surgery when I got the invite to work with Hilary Cartwright during her visit to Portland.  Local GYROTONIC® instructor Erin Muñoz, who had worked with Hilary in New York, was bringing her to town for a three day workshop.  I was intimidated.  I was healing from a vertical incision through the entire length of my abdominals, my yoga experience was not extensive, and my battle cry through years of Pilates and GYROTONIC® training had always been: “I am not a dancer!”  Learning choreography is a skill that has taken me a long time to acquire, and the years I spent running, weightlifting, and playing sports earned me a very different set of hips than the ones I saw moving on ballerinas.  I read about Hilary’s goal of getting dancers to move with less tension (dancers!), and I remembered how, during one of my early GYROTONIC® trainings, the rest of the class (all dancers) struggled to get me to do anything without my legs turning into clunky blocks of steel.  When they looked to our teacher trainer (also a dancer) in desperation, he said (in his thick German accent): “Don’t try to change him.  He cannot do it without that.”  Nevertheless, I had been told by several mentors in my field that if I ever had the chance to work with Hilary, I had to take it.  So I signed up.

Each day of Hilary’s three day workshop began with a three hour class.  We took a break for lunch and then reconvened for a two hour session, breaking down the material.  Some of it was familiar from my GYROKINESIS® experience, and some from the occasional yoga classes I’d attended over the years.  Much was new.  The breathing exercises were particularly challenging for me; I had not realized the extent to which surgery had diminished my breathing capacity.  I had been prepared to modify the abdominal exercises so as not to set back my recovery with a strain or hernia, but I found that the sequencing of the movements, her descriptions, and the emphasis on the breath helped me connect into a new strength.  I felt deep adhesions and scar tissue start to loosen up, and by the third day my hips, which had felt both tight and weak since surgery, were moving better than ever.  After the last day I was stunned to see that the angry red scar tissue on my abdominals was considerably lighter and softer.

Oh, and Hilary- it’s hard not to gush about her.  Let’s just say she and her assistant Magali were wonderful to be around.

Since pretty much everyone else who took the workshop was as awestruck as I was, Hilary and Magali decided to return a couple months later to work with us again.  The second workshop was even more powerful for me.  At the end of the last day, I noticed I felt no more restrictions from post-surgery adhesions.  I could move in any direction and felt only suppleness in my abdominals.  The only remnant was the even fainter scar on the surface.  I found myself standing on my yoga mat, transfixed by the sensation of energy flowing through my body.  I was familiar with meridians and fascial planes throughout the body, but I suddenly felt that I had a map of every route from my feet to my head and everywhere else, and that all these lines were clear and bright and open.  I could wiggle my toes on the ground to massage my own shoulders; I could open turn my eyes and feel a spiral down to my tailbone.  I stood there for at least half an hour.  In periods since then, when my teaching schedule pushes me towards burnout, or my satisfaction with my personal practice hits a plateau, the memory of this experience gives me a steady stream of refreshment.  Many of the teaching tools that I rely on today were born spontaneously in that moment.

Now that Hilary has begun a teacher training program, I’m entering into what she calls an “old fashioned and generally slow” apprenticeship.  While I do hope to teach the material, mostly I’m excited to be a student for a while, and to experience more of the wonder I did last time!”

For more information about Hilary Cartwright, visit her website: http://hilarycartwright.com/.

For information about our October workshop, visit our Workshops page.