Butte to Billings - Nia in Helena


Nia at Gentle Healing 

Butte to Helena is a relatively short drive. I allowed myself two hours and was plenty early. 
We parked nearby and sat in the sun until it was time to head to class.
Kathryn Kelley, who set me up in her space, had a client and couldn't be in my class, but she was there to greet me and introduce me to the class, and I had a designated assistant, so all went smoothly. 
We had a full room and a lot of moving centers. 
No pictures. 

One student was a sister of someone who had taken my class in Hayden the day before. She called her after my class and told her she HAD to come. She did, and she said afterward that she loved it. "It was exercise and it felt good!" I think she might have become a regular at Gentle Healing.

And there was also a guy in class. He was glad to see me, and I was glad that he was a part of the Nia community there, in Helena. And I think they like getting some male energy in there for balance.

The long part of the drive was ahead. From Helena to Billings is a long haul.

I broke it up with stops every two hours or so.

About an hour out, I stopped for lunch in Townsend and River and I ate in the pristine Veterans Memorial Park.

I stopped two more times at rest areas we both walked and stretched and shook and ran and peed (in different places) drank some water and relaxed in the grass under a shady tree.

The smoke-filled air made for a pink-and-orange sunset as we pulled in the familiar Motel 6 in Billings. I'm not sure if River realizes it when we go back to locations we've been at before. And if he does, how it affects him.

I feel it. When we pulled into this one it felt a lot more homey. Of the three Motel 6s we've visited so far on this trip, this is the first one that we've stayed in before.  So I can compare the feeling of driving up and explore a new location, and the feeling of driving up to a place that looks familiar before I even get to the property. I recognize the neighborhood and start to feel all welcome. I'm not saying the exploring feeling is better or worse than the comfortable feeling. But they're different. And I don't really notice any behavior in River that would indicate its a big deal for him either.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nude Stretching

Image
I never thought I’d do something like this. But over the years many people have suggested that I make a Nude Stretching Video.  I guess the fact that I’m comfortable with nudity and with my body and that I’m a fitness pro with a passion for helping people made it seem like a no-brainer that I create something like this.  But I’ve been resistant to doing it for a long time; for fear (I guess) of what the more conservative people might think.  Now, finally, I’ve succumbed to the requests and put something together.  You conservative people will just have to look the other way. :) Now, I haven’t made an X-rated video here; I'm just nude and I'm stretching.  It's completely natural. This video blends a smart, educational stretching session with  “Warhol-like” video interludes accentuating an eroticized appreciation of the male form.  My intention was that it could be enjoyed on two levels. The free-style, hand-held segments demonstrate the positi...
Read more

Routines From the Vault

Image
I’ve been teaching Nia for 16 years now. And most of those years, I’ve gotten four new routines from Nia. That comes out to over 60 routines over the years. I’ve also created quite a few of my own routines. And along the way, certain routines have fallen out of favor for one reason or another.  For example, a great routine called Commitments, which uses the music from the soundtrack to the movie of the same name, is one of my first ones. I learned that routine so long ago that I have the music on cassette tape and I watched the routine on VHS. It has been retired “To the Vault” for many years. Ditto for routines called Genesis, Roots and Adagio. Some routines have been taken apart and used to build other routines. For example I took all of the Angelique Kidjo songs from the classic, Agolo, and put together a routine using only songs from her album, Aye (which means "LIFE" and is the name of the routine as well.)  I split up the songs from the repetitive routine Fi...
Read more

Food Purist

Image
I tell people I’m a food purist. And I say I’m gastronomically conservative.  Sometimes these terms are misunderstood. These terms that, as far as I know, I’ve made up; I don’t see them commonly used this way, but I could easily have picked them up subconsciously and adopted them. When something is so universally true, as I think food purism is, you often see the same or similar permutations of the concept showing up in different places. Anyway, being a food purist doesn’t mean that I only eat the foods that offer the best nutrition per calorie, or the foods with the highest antioxidant levels or the most enzymes or the least fat or the lowest glycemic index, etc. etc. That’s all popular science and I don’t get bogged down in it. All of that is changing constantly, anyway: One day eggs are good for you, the next day, you can only have whites, then they’re good for you again, then you find out they’re bad for you. Not that I’m saying anything about eggs right now, but this...
Read more