Words (can) matter

I’ve been thinking about language and definitions a lot lately. A big part of the challenge ahead of me lies in describing yoga postures effectively, in learning how to ask for exactly what I want from my students. It will be my responsibility to safely guide any number of people through an hour-long physical meditation, and I want to be sure we are communicating well.

That’s why they call the speech I’ll be giving a dialogue and not a monologue: Though I’m the only one talking, I’m also listening. My students are conveying understanding and giving off nonverbal energy; their actions are in direct response to my words.

We all respond to words; that’s why they’re so powerful. This became especially apparent to me over the weekend, when my training class split off into groups and attempted to define what yoga is. One thing we realized quickly is that answers depend on who is asking questions: Are we attempting to explain the basic essence to the uninformed? Are we delving into every possible subtlety as a course of philosophical debate? Is brevity of importance?

My cluster of seven or eight worked together well for the most part, though I came into conflict with another student. I am learning to be more comfortable with conflict, but in general I prefer to avoid it. However, I am passionate when I believe I’m right, and I felt strongly in this instance that my perspective was correct.

We argued over the word “can.” A portion of our group’s definition was that yoga “can cultivate balance in all aspects of one’s life.” The concept of yoga cultivating balance resonates strongly with me, so strongly that I found myself insisting that we remove the word “can” from the definition.

I was bursting with certainty: Yoga DOES cultivate balance in your life, whether you ask it to or not. Just like if you water a seed a plant will grow, if you practice yoga the balance will come. That’s the truth I have discovered for myself, and the one I want to share with everyone. And in that moment of group discussion, it felt vitally important to eliminate all doubt of possibility: “can” implies there is a “can’t,” that yoga could change your life, but it may not. I say it will, for sure.

It was right about the time I was wielding my professional copyediting experience as leverage to get my way when our instructor interrupted all the discussions and asked us to “go inward.”  He’d already done this a few times that morning and I was getting the hang of instant meditation. Sort of like the yogi version of a pop quiz. This time, the instructor asked us to pay attention to what we were feeling:

Do you feel the same as you did five minutes ago? Did you want the discussion to continue? Were you relieved to have the discussion stop? Did you feel strongly about convincing the others to agree with you on any points?

A sheepish wave of awareness crashed over me at that last one. Because I was a hundred percent definitely trying to convince anyone who’d listen that my point was correct, and that everyone in the group should agree. The instructor didn’t offer further insight, only suggested that we observe our feelings, and then reminded us that we didn’t have to do anything about the feelings we were having unless we wanted to.

Like a good therapist, the instructor got me thinking about my own motivations, and it felt good to pull away from my ego and remember that my viewpoint is a subjective perspective–it’s necessarily true that everyone else in the group experienced our interactions differently. And though all of us have gathered with the shared desire to grow and learn through yoga, we all have individual reasons for going through training, and that is a beautiful thing.

I love how yoga provides a common path for individual improvement. Whether you would just like to be able to touch your toes or you are striving for inner peace, the flow of postures will take you where you want to go. And while the specific wording of the dialogue I teach will differ from that of my peers, we share the intention of nurturing personal evolution, and that’s what really matters.

(Though I still felt satisfied when we eventually decided to drop the “can.”)