Here’s a thought for you all.
Yesterday, one of my students arrived for a lesson in the shoes he had had on at his last lesson. I took an immediate fancy to them and told him so – desert boot-style suede shoes that I used to Iive in when I was about the same age as my pupil. Mid-life crises no doubt.
Yesterday, after a week of deciding to get some for myself and, knowing that he’d got them online was a little concerned that it’s hard to get shoes that fit just by size number alone, and that if I just went ahead and bought some they might not fit. That would be a bore…… So, I asked him if I could try his on, after he’d taken them off for a table turn. They were a size 10, about my average size for shoe, and though a touch on the big size, I decided there and then that I would get some. Same colour as well!
What struck me, though was that this as a first for me. I had never ever tried a pupil’s shoes on before. Come to think of it, I had never tried anybody else’s shoes on before either. I had misjudged my professional boudaries I worried afterwards, but at another level I had helped my pupil in my efforts to help him and understand how to ‘properly get him on his on his own legs’.
At some difficult to define level, then, I had just got to know my pupil much, much better. His relationship with his support system and also his habitual groundedness. It was really an experience that is difficult to put into words.
I’m not sure if I would recommend it to everyone; heaven forbid it would transgress rules of conduct for the psycho-therapeutic industry in a moment; but isn’t this something we all do, unconsciously, if not as a matter of conscious intention – perhaps, especially with pupils, (clients if you prefer): get a sense of what it might be like to inhabit a person’s form and moving? Mirror neurons and all that jazz!
Yesterday, then, I put myself, literally, into someone else’s shoes. Shoes, perhaps unlike other items of clothing tell such an intimate story.