a dialogue begins.
It has been a real gift these last weeks and months to restart a teaching journey in Switzerland once again after being away for four years. It has also been very interesting to come back to a certain place and to a certain set of humans, with all of us having changed in one or more ways in these last four years. For me personally, there has been a massive transformation within myself. And perhaps because of that transformation it feels like everything else has transformed as well.
One of the things I have so enjoyed (when I have created the conditions for it to go well) in recent times is giving space for students in my classes to share what they sense and feel as we work through something. As someone who has taken thousands of yoga and movement and other body/anatomy related classes over the decades, I have found it is a rare space where students are really allowed to fumble around in their own experience of whatever it is they are learning. There often isn’t time in one hour or even 90 minutes to build dialogue into the general arc of a class… and also many teachers tend to take a top-down approach to their classrooms.
However, it is in this tinkering and fumbling space that students can begin to feel what is actually practical for them personally. What is also unique and amazing about this kind of space is that students often have much more insight than we as teachers (this includes much of my previous personal experience) generally give them credit for.
In the past, I also took a top-down approach and led vast numbers of students through hundreds of hours of classes within a very old paradigm that I am the “knower” and they are coming to learn “from me”. And of course, like most teachers, I did this with the best of intentions. A part of me believed that I did know more and that what I could impart would be useful and beneficial to them. Of course, there is the truth that I likely have thousands of hours of training and experience in theories and methodologies that they might not have. But what is also true is that each student has thousands of hours of experience that I will never have: experience of their own bodies and minds. I cannot begin to know what it is to inhabit each of my students’ experiences and this is where our dialogue really begins.
It is a beautiful thing to me when I pose a question for students to feel what is actually happening inside their bodies by observing muscle activity or pressure changes within themselves… and getting answers back that help me to know where they are… as well as help me understand that they have the capacity to actually feel themselves in incredible detail. For instance, if we turn the body in one direction standing in a “hip-width”* stance, the pressure we feel in our feet should take a certain pattern. When we learn this pattern, we begin to form a template to check ourselves against… If we don’t have the same pattern on both sides, or one side doesn’t take that pattern at all, it is great information to come away with. As students begin to sense themselves against a general template of “optimal” mechanics, they then begin to form a library of where they are versus where they could be. They start to form a clearer description of where their blind spots may be.
And when they can sense where they are blind or a space is dark and murky, they can then use our elemental tools of yoga to start to shine a light in and awaken their vision: Awareness, Action, Patience, Curiosity, Discernment. And when they are not sure where to begin, this is where I can perhaps be helpful. But this is very different from me “knowing” and the student “absorbing”. It is, instead, a conversation that springs forth from their own inner wisdom.
When a student can sense where she is different right to left in a small movement, and I can also see (at least some of) the reasons why as I observe her… it is a sweet moment when I share what I see while she shares what she feels. I am like her mirror rather than someone who is handing out information with a spoon. The experience then starts to integrate into her being. She is being given information from me, but most importantly she is experiencing that same information in her own body, first-hand.
This is the beginning of a tremendous and deep dialogue. The dialogue may begin between me and the student in these small moments of noticing and feedback, but it then becomes her conversation to continue in all of the ways that she is moved to do so. A lifetime of uncovering and unraveling can await!
*hip-width can mean many things depending on the context, but here it means stacking the hip joints (where the femur meets the acetabulum of the pelvis) above the ankles or calcaneus bones (heels).