Passing the Torch Mentoring Program

I am so grateful for the opportunity to share and mentor from the rich experience of my lifelong journey to awaken my own unique inner teacher. I hold this journey much like the creation of a precious gemstone. It takes eons to make a gemstone - extremes of heat and cold, and the passage of time. Likewise, to create a life and career of "passion, purpose and vitality" (this has always been my mantra) requires a willingness to ongoingly discover knowledge of self, and unearth the wisdom of one's inner voice, all while enhancing the perception, skill, understanding and commitment to act on this wisdom.

This Yearlong Mentoring Program is for those who:

• Have a longing to dive into a transformational way of being with ourselves and others to be inspiring, creative, passionate practitioners while developing a deeply nourishing personal practice.
• Want to cultivate their deep curiosity and are willing to investigate limiting perceptions, beliefs, and habits to discover new ways of supporting themselves and their clients.
• Are committed to listening for and evoking the innate wisdom of their clients and what they, especially those “difficult or complex” clients, have to teach us.
• Are curious about deepening their awareness and facility for engaging in a profound conversation with their body’s language - allowing their own body’s wisdom to teach and guide them ongoingly, rather than just doing what someone else tells us to do.
• Are curious how embodied movement can be bodywork and social nervous system co-regulation when based on principles of practice that inform somatic movement and bodywork disciplines.

In your Yearlong Mentoring Apprenticeship, we will:

• Re-inspire your voice and vision along with primal, functional human movement patterns from the 3CoreConnections Embodied Awareness perspective, a self-healing, revolutionary approach to any discipline, i.e, Pilates, yoga, Gyrotonic, etc., through re-orienting fascial matrix awareness from fundamentals to flow.
  
• Ignite the flame of curiosity, from the body’s perspective of “Core as Relationship - with gravity, ourselves, one another and our environment”.
  
• Develop an innate ability to guide and cue clients to become masterful coaches for their own health and wellbeing, along with generating a deep understanding of “principles of practice” for movement as bodywork and social nervous co-regulation.
  
• Experience a transformation in your relationship with the power of “breath”, moving in a vibrational, symphonic concert with your body’s biotensegrity.
• Explore essential multi-sensory (Core to Core -whole person to whole person) teaching skills (speaking, listening, seeing, touching, sensing and cueing), empowering new perceptions that build client confidence, post-rehab to elite athlete, along with your own.
  
• Explore the latest research in neuroscience, energy medicine and fascial matrix awareness, along with the pioneering wisdom from the fields of yoga, somatic arts and sciences, myofascial bodywork, social nervous system co-regulation and embryology.
  
• Develop and refine your personal practice in order to cultivate and continue to mature a practice of movement and stillness.
  
• Support you in creating your life’s work as a thriving, empowering expression of your innermost yearning.
  
• And, of course, we will always seek to lead with the wisdom of our hearts, as we plant seeds that blossom into fresh, new growth, all in the embrace of this amazing body of work, and with each other’s amazing selves. Oh, and developing lifelong friends, and joining a community of Embodied Explorer Graduates around the world while having so much fun together!
  

Program Overview

Our Passing the Torch Yearlong Mentoring program will officially begin with a 2-hour introductory virtual group meeting in July, followed by monthly virtual group coaching calls throughout the program.

PHASE I – LIGHTING THE TORCH (July – Nov). In this initial phase, we will return to our roots to rekindle the spark that ignites a passion for our life’s work, inspires a fresh curiosity, and challenges our edges.

PHASE II – SUSTAINING THE FLAME (Nov- April). Here, we will explore what it takes to keep the torch lit, that sense of “being in the zone” in our practice and teaching, as an ongoing creative act.

PHASE III – PASSING THE TORCH (April -Aug). Finally, we will examine what it takes to powerfully share the “magic”, to inspire and empower ourselves, our clients and our colleagues, and in doing so, reconnect with principles of practice as a transformative way of being.

Throughout our year together, as we travel through these Phases as Embodied Explorers, you will have extensive personal access to Wendy, both on and off-site, supported by three week-long in-person immersions, journaling, special studies, monthly zoom meetings, and the opportunity to receive 120 NCPT CEC’s.

Intended Audience

Graduates of a comprehensive teacher training program with a minimum of 3 years of concentrated teaching experience.

Philosophical Foundations of My Work

I’d now like to share with you the philosophical underpinnings of my 3CoreConnections Embodied Awareness perspective, that forms the contextual framework for my Yearlong Mentoring Apprenticeship.

After 40 years of teaching, I am clearer than ever that true learning does not happen from the outside-in. True learning doesn’t come from an informational download, or from proclamations of “the truth”. True learning is transformational, and it comes from deep personal exploration in the partnership of well-traveled guidance and wisdom. To be transformed is to emerge with an expanded awareness, a clearer vision, a renewed sense of oneself, and our relationship with our living environment. When we shift our attention to nurturing awareness, rather than getting our clients “to do it the right way”, we create a safe, empowering, illuminating space for them to discover the real possibility of an embodied approach to movement in their lives.

My vision is founded on studies with treasured mentors who taught from a coordinated trinity of body, mind, and spirit. Principles of practice, rather than exercises, lived for them in a much larger vision, which cultivates our own inner wisdom, our ability to self-heal and reconnect with the vital forces that constitute our true nature.

Standing on the shoulders of this embodied legacy, we will ground ourselves in deep roots of sound, breath, and movement, nourished by universal principles that form the foundation of all great bodymind disciplines. This will form the context for our deep dive into our natural, primal way of moving, honoring the uniqueness of each participant.

To bring forth this vision, we will first learn to distinguish between: re-examining the current way we assess anatomical problems from a biomechanical “pieces and parts” approach, as distinct from a biointelligent “whole body living architecture” perspective. This will give us a unique portal into the body’s understanding of itself in relationship with the gravitational field. This whole body approach invites us into a dynamic exploration of the true nature of how we develop and move. This contextual way of seeing, sensing, and touching will challenge everything you think you “know”, and empower your personal practice and teaching in inspiring and profound ways.

Some Closing Thoughts

Perhaps more than anything else, my journey has brought this realization: one can “master” every move of advanced exercises, and know how to teach them, and still come up far short of making the kind of lasting and profound impact that is possible in our visionary work.

For without the ability to create space, to get underneath the conditions, circumstances and mindsets that stop us and our clients, such that an opening is created that propels us/them to grand, new possibilities, we will not have mastery. Because mastery is not just about lighting up a room, but the ability to light up another, in essence “to pass the torch” of possibility, where little or none was seen before.

Marry this with a deep understanding of the principles and practice of an embodied approach to movement and life, and then you have real mastery. This is what lights me up, empowering people to discover their own true voice, their “inner mastery”. This is the “container,” so to speak, within which my 3CoreConnections Embodied Awareness perspective lives.

About Wendy LeBlanc-Arbuckle

Wendy is an international leader in embodied movement education, with a 45-year background in holistic health and lifelong studies and collaborations with distinguished pioneers in Yoga, Pilates, Structural Integration bodywork, somatic arts and sciences, dynamic breathwork, embryology, energy medicine, and perceptual ontology.

Inspired by the diversity of their teaching expressions, Wendy has studied extensively with five Pilates' Elders - Romana Krazanowska, Mary Bowen, Kathy Grant, Ron Fletcher and Lolita San Miguel. Along with her extensive yoga background, she credits her mentoring with pioneers in the art and science of somatic movement and ontological inquiry... Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, Emilie Conrad, Susan Harper, Judith Aston, Tom Myers, The Guild for Structural Integration, Hubert Godard, Phillip Beach, Jaap van der Wal and Werner Erhard… for the profound revelations with breath, fascial matrix and ontological awareness that have given rise to her own “biointelligent" voice.

Wendy’s vision has always been to illuminate and unify the universal core principles that underlie great somatic practices, enabling students and practitioners of any discipline to discover their wholeness through cultivating their own voice and vision, through the portal and brilliant guidance of their innate biointelligent wisdom.

• As Co-Founder of the Pilates Center of Austin (1993), she has, along with her husband Michael, over her 30 +year tenure, built it into one of the most respected Pilates centers in the country.
• She is also a Founding Member of the Pilates Method Alliance (PMA). She was on the original Role Delineation Committee for the PMA National Certification Exam, and has held a certification (now referred to as NCPT) since it was first offered in 2005. Wendy is, likewise, a Founding Member of the Fascia Research Society and the International Association of Structural Integrators (IASI).
• Her CoreConnectionsPilates® Teacher Training Program (1996-2006) was one of the most extensive, rigorous and valued Teacher Training programs available anywhere.
• Wendy is honored to be a Wellsprings of Continuum Practitioner. She is a regular presenter for Pilates Anytime and Fusion Pilates EDU.

She is currently writing a book for Handspring Publishing on the body of work that comprises her 3Core Connections® embodied perspective, scheduled for publication in the Spring of 2025. MOVING BEYOND CORE: A Somatic Exploration Through Whole Body Relationships.