Soisci Porchetta learned through apprenticeship. She studied with specialists, went deep into competitive Brazilian jiu-jitsu and Thai boxing, attended Fighting Monkey workshops with Yosef. She describes this intensive model — mentorship, immersion, sustained depth — as how she learned best.

And now she tells her students not to do it.

“For the majority of people, I really am this — a supplement. Take these organic fresh herbs and go and thrive. But you have to go and hunt your own meat and vegetables and forage and have your own thing.”

This isn’t modesty. Porchetta is drawing a line between two kinds of students and insisting most people are on one side of it. Apprentices — people who want to become movement teachers — can spend the bulk of their time with her. Everyone else should treat her work as supplemental by design. “You as a student cannot be spending 90% of your time with me,” she says.

The instruction seems generous. A teacher who tells students to spend most of their time elsewhere is working against her own financial interest. Every student who takes the guidance and leaves is a student not buying the next workshop. Porchetta frames this as integrity — “not taking ourselves to be more important or dominating than we really need to be with the role that we play.”

But there’s something she doesn’t address. The generalist who tells you not to over-rely on teachers is herself the product of exactly that kind of reliance. She didn’t become a “99% generalist” by sampling broadly from the start. She got there through years of deep specialist study, through apprenticeships she describes as her best learning. The cross-disciplinary insight she now offers — the ability to meet a 90-year-old and an 18-year-old in the same session — was forged in the narrow heat of specific disciplines.

So what is she actually describing? If depth produced her, but she prescribes breadth to others, there are only a few ways to read it.

One possibility: she’s describing a phase transition. You specialize first, then generalize — and once you’ve made the crossing, you recognize that the next generation needs to make it too, but on their own terms. The teacher can’t hand over the depth. She can only hand over what depth produced: principles that transfer. What she calls “universally valid principles” — patterns that work across practices — are the distillate, not the process. The student gets the output without the input.

Another reading is less comfortable. Maybe the advice contains a contradiction she can’t resolve. Porchetta draws an analogy: “If you dig deep enough into the earth you eventually hit water. But what a lot of people end up doing is they just dig a ton of potholes.” She’s arguing for depth — stick with something long enough to reach the water. But she’s simultaneously saying don’t go deep with her. Go deep with a practice, a discipline, a craft. Just don’t mistake the teacher for the well.

This distinction — depth with a practice versus depth with a teacher — is doing a lot of work, and it’s worth pressing on. The MMA fighters she references spent a decade or more in a single martial art before integrating into a more complex environment. They didn’t just sample jiu-jitsu and Thai boxing and wrestling. They went deep enough in one to hit water, then carried that knowledge forward. Porchetta herself did this. She was competitive in jiu-jitsu and Thai boxing before retiring from competition and becoming the generalist she is now.

The uncomfortable question is whether you can separate the teacher from the practice that cleanly. Porchetta learned from Yosef at Fighting Monkey. She went home after his workshops and rewatched Kung Fu Panda because he’d pointed her toward it, and her appreciation for the film as a movement teacher “was really, really deep.” That doesn’t sound supplemental. That sounds like exactly the kind of intensive teacher-student relationship she’s cautioning most people against.

Maybe the answer is that she’s not pulling up the ladder — she’s describing what it looks like from the top. From where she stands now, with the water already found, the teacher really is just seasoning. The principles really do transfer. The supplement really is sufficient. But that’s the view from after the digging. The student standing at the surface, pothole-deep in three different practices, might need something she can’t prescribe without contradicting her own formation.

The paradox doesn’t resolve. It might not need to. But it’s worth noticing that the most honest thing Porchetta says in this conversation is also the most self-undermining: “That’s more like an apprenticeship, which is how I learned best.”

This field note references the Movers Mindset episode “Faith – with Soisci Porchetta,” published November 15, 2023.

This work was produced using AI language models directed through an editorial system designed by Craig Constantine. The author selected all source material, designed the creative framework, directed the editorial process, and made all acceptance and revision decisions. The prose was generated by AI under sustained human editorial direction.