The value of training in community

What’s the value of training with other people? In the context of Turtle Power Fitness, we’re not just training to become stronger and more flexible - strength is not the only metric. We’re also training, in part, in order to become better communicators, to more easily be able to express ourselves, move towards things we want and move away from things we don’t want. Framing a movement practice in these terms means that we need feedback in order to learn. We need the input from other people to help us recognize when we communicate effectively and when we don’t. We need to play with collaboration and competition, learn about our habits and our patterns, (physical, emotional, and interpersonal) in order to see which patterns serve us and which ones don’t.

These reasons for training in community are realized in the Movement Play classes. These classes are all about nonverbal communication in ways that we don’t really get to practice in everyday life: roughousing together, dancing together, playfighting together, freeplaying together. Lots of animals do this all the time, it’s a pretty normal way for pack animals to relate to each other. The fact that our culture has pretty much stopped doing this is a weird thing, as well as a real loss in my opinion. Playing together in this whole-body, are-we-collaborating-are-we-competing-who-knows-it-doesn’t-matter kind of way is great for your body and your sense of being an interconnected social animal. Provided you’re playing at the appropriate level for your age and physical ability, of course.

Also, in the context of Turtle Power Fitness, in addition to working on becoming stronger and more flexible and good communicators, we’re also working on developing our Qi Gong practice. Qi Gong, as explained elsewhere, is a self-healing practice. It’s the practice of Qi Cultivation. Because Qi cultivation is a subtle thing, the state of mind you’re in while practicing, along with the quality of attention that you bring to your practice, really determines the quality of your practice.

For anyone with a regular meditation practice, if you’ve ever sat with others in a meditation hall, I imagine that was a very different experience than sitting alone at home. Practicing with others is powerful in a unique way. Not that it’s better than practicing alone, just that it’s different, and equally important. 

This is also why some of the Qi Gong classes are held outside, in order to share our practice with the wider community: the Earth, trees, sky, etc. It’s easier to feel our connection to this bigger practice community when we’re outdoors. 

None of this is to say that it’s bad to train alone - just to say that it’s incomplete. Moving, playing, training with others is an essential part of growing and evolving as a mover, both in terms of developing your ability to communicate with others outside of yourself as well as developing the internal sensitivity that is the foundation of any self-healing practice.