I Almost Barfed in the Studio. Here's What Marie-José Blom Said

I've never been the most flexible person in the room. My mentor, Marie-José Blom, knew that about me and she never let me off the hook for it. Every session, she'd find some new way to challenge my range of motion, always with that beautiful, elegant, dancer's ease she carried into everything she did.

Meanwhile I was over here with my full background being cheerleading and drill team. Knee-high white boots, kick lines, the whole thing. It was awesome. It also did not prepare me for what she was about to ask of my hamstrings.

I worked with MJ privately, once a week, for over five years. These weren't just workouts. They were an hour and a half of dedicated, one-on-one training, and I was pregnant, inventing, and opening studios through it all. The way I teach today is still MJ, filtered through me.

One particular session, near the end of our hour and a half, she had me on the Cadillac in a stretch that was, frankly, obnoxious. My left leg extended long in front of me, and she was behind me with her hands, encouraging me deeper into it (some might call it pushing!). Deeper into my hamstrings. Deeper into my lower back. Deeper than I wanted to go, at the end of a long session.

I looked over my shoulder and said, "MJ, wait. I need to go barf."

And in that glorious Dutch accent I still can't quite do justice to, she said, and I quote:

"Yes... But first we take the other side."

I did not throw up in her beautiful studio. Mercifully. And I did, in fact, take the other side.

I think about that moment more than almost any other from our five years together. Not just because it's funny, although it is. I think about it because of what it taught me about what I'm actually capable of. I was so sure I had hit my limit. My body was telling me it was done. And MJ, without missing a beat, without even really acknowledging the drama of the moment, just moved us forward to the next thing.

She wasn't dismissing how I felt. She was reminding me that how I felt in that instant wasn't the whole truth of what I could do.

That's stayed with me in the studio and everywhere else in my life since. We can often do more than we believe we're capable of in the moment we're convinced we can't. MJ was always behind me, quite literally that day, pushing me forward and asking me to learn more so I could serve more people with it.

Every time I catch myself deciding I'm done before I actually am, I hear her voice. Yes. But first we take the other side. If you need your own version of that voice today, my YouTube channel is full of workouts (like this one below) to help you find it.

 

WundaLove,

Amy