I have said many times that Nia is constantly changing and evolving. In the past I have felt that Nia has remained BASICALLY the same, but has moved forward when new knowledge has come to light, I recently saw something on FB that had me looking at some of the new material and I realized I should probably do some updating to my information. I am hoping to discover that I won’t need to change too much, but we will see. We will also see how far I get as it seems that other things tend to pull my attention away.
I don’t have the desire to update every single post that I have ever written regarding Nia but in the quick look I did, I saw some things that I would like to update.
For awhile I have felt that Nia is trying to tap into more of a “self-improvement” or “self-development” type of market. When I took my White Belt in 2008 they were at the start of re-vamping the training with triads and new verbiage, but I still felt there was a strong emphasis on teaching the participants how to tap into movement sensation in order to teach. In subsequent years, I remember having conversations with White Belt graduates about some of the teaching techniques I was taught and the graduates were not familiar. Then when I took it again in 2020 there wasn’t that much emphasis on teaching the teacher.
In 2022 Debbie Rosas, one of the founders of Nia, hosted an online event called “the global Nia Wisdom Summit”. She wanted to “explore Nia White Belt Principles from a new perspective.” She was looking to change the Nia White Belt training into something other than a teacher training. And after the meeting Nia has revamped the Nia White Belt training into “Nia Art of Sensation”, saying it is somatic movement education. So things are a little different. The principles look like they have been rearranged a bit and the verbiage throughout the “Art of Sensation” manual is – to me – more complicated and less user friendly. At first glance it looks like a lot more bells and whistles with more graphics and pictures of people moving. But as always it is evident that a lot goes into Nia training material so we will see.
I am going to try to go through it and hopefully update a few things. Stay tuned.
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