What Tango Taught Me About the Difficulty of Teaching — The Origin Story of KaradaNaoru (12)

It has now been fifteen years since I began dancing Argentine Tango.

The journey started when my wife and I moved to Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina.

At the time, I had two goals.

To learn Spanish.

And to learn Argentine Tango.

I studied Spanish for five hours every day, and within two years I was speaking at a near-native level.

But tango was another story.

No matter how much I danced, I never felt myself improving.

Honestly, I was lost.

My first teacher was an Argentine woman named Stella.

Even now, I consider her the best teacher I have ever had.

What made Stella exceptional was that she never gave up on slow learners.

She repeatedly taught the importance of dancing with the music.

Of moving with the rhythm.

Again and again.

Because of her persistence, after about a year and a half I finally felt comfortable attending milongas.

A milonga is a social tango gathering.

In Buenos Aires, they are held almost every day.

At first, I went with great hesitation.

But gradually I became comfortable, met many people, and began to truly enjoy the experience.

Looking back, the fourth and fifth years of my tango journey were probably the years when I enjoyed milongas the most.

Back then, I danced with anyone and everyone.

I believed that simply accumulating experience would make me better.

I was wrong.

I attended countless group classes and private lessons.

In terms of cost-effectiveness, it was terribly inefficient.

Eventually, I realized that improvement required something much deeper:

understanding how to move from the center of the body.

How to use the core.

Reaching that understanding took an enormous amount of time and money.

But detours are part of life.

Tango taught me something important.

Mastering anything takes time.

A great deal of time.

And perhaps that is exactly why it is worthwhile.

When it comes to languages, I have developed a learning framework.

Because of that, I feel confident that I could learn French, Italian, Arabic, or many other languages with enough effort.

But when a framework is missing, people can spend years wandering in circles.

Disciplines such as classical ballet, jazz dance, or flamenco have well-developed teaching structures.

Teachers can show students a path.

Tango is different.

It remains a deeply personal and highly individual art form.

I studied with many world-famous tango dancers.

Yet the person who taught me the most was still Stella, my very first teacher.

The qualities that make someone a great dancer are not the same qualities that make someone a great teacher.

Many people never realize that distinction.

Teaching is extraordinarily difficult.

Today, I teach tango.

I also teach the methods and philosophy behind KaradaNaoru.

Perhaps because of that, I feel the difficulty of teaching more than ever.

Fortunately, through many years of training programs and workshops, I have had countless opportunities to confront the question of what it means to teach.

And now, I genuinely enjoy it.

Watching someone do something they could not do before.

Seeing understanding appear where confusion once existed.

Being present for those moments is a profound joy.

And there is no end to this path.

We continue to grow.

We continue to learn from one another.

And we continue to discover new things.

Tango is like that.

Bodywork is like that.

Teaching is like that.

To have found something worth dedicating a lifetime to—

that alone feels like extraordinary good fortune.