Lessons from Yoga: Approaching Difficult Conversations

I used an analogy from my experiences from practicing Bikram yoga to help a group of students process through dealing with discrimination and misinformation.

Through my journey with my yoga practice I have learned that when our body is injured it will create a callus to protect us from hurting. I learned this because I had a neck injury and when I started to go to yoga I started to feel the neck pain again when I hadn’t felt it for months.

I started to think that I was doing something wrong, that I had pushed myself too hard, or that the yoga was causing the pain or reinjuring me and that I needed to stop.

I spoke to the yoga instructor and she explained that, though counterintuitive, I needed to keep coming to yoga to heal the pain from the injury instead of having my body compensate to mask the pain. I needed to work through the callus that had built up in order to get to the other side of the injury.

That meant having patience with myself as I couldn’t stretch as far as I previously did and couldn’t get into or hold postures for as long. I felt the impact of the pain outside of the yoga studio as well. I had to make the decision to either stop going to yoga and let the callus form again or go through the journey towards healing.

I used this wisdom with a group of students I was advising. Coming together as a group and talking through the situations of misunderstanding, assumptions, and microaggressions didn’t inherently seem like the right thing to do to them. It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t comfortable.

They feared the potential that things shared during the conversation may hurt and the process of talking as a group could be claimed to be the cause for that pain instead of the original injury. This was similar to my fear that my having gone to yoga was the cause of my pain when really the pain was there all along just masked by the callus.

I shared my yoga analogy with the students and advised that if they went through the conversations slowly together with my facilitation that yes, they might feel pain in the moment and maybe afterward the group discussion however it would be for the best in the long run. By work through trying to understand one another and understand what was said, what was meant, and it’s impact without judgment as a group people heal rather than holding onto the pain and not addressing it. Though some students were never as close as they once were they all grew from the experience and decided what was best for them.

I hope my sharing was helpful to you. I’m not sure who needed to hear this but I felt compelled to share this example. It has helped me a lot when I am questioning inner thoughts and have to hold myself accountable to do the counterintuitive thing, the developmental thing, the thing that might cause some hurt in the short term but some relief for the long term.

Mahalo!

~Dr. Shauna T. Sobers

www.shaunatsobers.com