Communicating Consciously

Lessons from yoga teacher training

Coming into the final week of my seven week Yoga Teacher Training, I’ve been reflecting on the themes and learnings that have been most salient.

As you can imagine, the 200 hour course was filled with a lot of information. Some of it resonated immediately and some of it hasn’t… yet. That’s the beauty of it, though. I never know when a lesson will land.

One key lesson resonated recently and it drastically changed my perception. I’d like to share it with all of you (selfishly, because it will further ingrain into my brain).

Story time!

I was catching up with a close friend when they shared some sad news. The person they were dating and felt really enthusiastic about ended things.

Shame (what Cape-Townian’s say when something is sad).

Like a good friend, my immediate reaction was to console and offer words of encouragement. I said something along the lines of:

1. I’m sorry to hear that, I know you had high hopes.

2. It was a great learning experience, though, and now you can take those learnings into your next relationship.

3. It’s all part of a greater plan… when it’s your time to be with someone, the universe will make it happen.

A longer dialogue ensued, but the friend thanked me for my support and we both moved on.

While there was nothing inherently wrong my response, it was my typical approach to offer support and one that I never questioned.

After a ton of non-deliberate reflection throughout the weeks (that’s the beauty of a longer part-time training), I realized my approach needed improvement. Specifically, the three parts of my response highlighted three lessons from YTT:

1. Empathy/Attunement

2. Toxic positivity

3. Spiritual bypassing

They’re all loosely related but I’ll break them down separately.

Empathy/Attunement

One of the first things I learned in YTT was the importance of attunement.

In a studio/teaching setting, this looks like meeting the class where they are. If everyone in class was low energy and I came into the room buzzing with an intense playlist, there would be incongruence. This was easy for me to see.

However, at the individual level (one-on-one interactions with people), the lesson was not as straightforward. It was on empathy — something I erroneously thought I understood.

The empathy framework taught (or “offered,” because everything was an “offering” we did not have to accept) was the following:

1. Take in another’s perspective

2. Listen without judgment

3. Connect with something in myself that knows that feeling (to truly feel the feeling in my own body)

4. Communicate understanding

This was novel.

And over the next several weeks, it caused me to examine how I had (or hadn’t) empathized with people in the past.

As it related to the conversation with my friend, the lack of empathy demonstrated by the first part of my answer was very clear.

My answer…

“I’m sorry to hear that, I know you had high hopes.”

… actually did the opposite of empathizing with them. Rather, I expressed sympathy, which may have made my friend feel worse. By expressing sympathy, the implicit message I gave was: it’s wrong to feel the way you’re feeling and I feel bad for you.

When receiving upsetting news, my first instinct had always been to meet it with an apology like “I’m so sorry to hear that.” I had been conditioned to believe it was the appropriate response and blindly accepted it. I never truly examined the language I was using.

I’ll let that sink in for a second because it blew my mind when I realized it.

So what could I have said to empathize with them?

(I almost wrote “what should I have said?” but I don’t use that word anymore 😉)

Maybe something like “That’s really tough. I know what that feels like from my own experience in XYZ and I’m here for you if want to talk about it some more.”

With this answer, there’s no implicit sympathy or denial of their experience in any way.

Toxic Positivity

This brings me to my second lesson: denying one’s experience through toxic positivity.

And I REALLY scoffed at this when I first heard it. My immediate judgments were something like “what kind of woke nonsense is this? How could positivity be damaging? Why allow negativity in your life?”

Judgements aside…

Toxic positivity is when one exclusively looks for the positive (silver lining) in a situation. It’s often done with good intent (to make the person feel better), but it ignores and therefore denies someone’s experience of feeling a negative emotion.

Similar to the implicit meaning behind apologizing, toxic positivity sends the message that it’s wrong to feel those emotions and that they should not be felt.

There is nothing inherently “wrong” about these emotions, though. Feeling these emotions in our brains and bodies is what the human experience is all about. As a society, we’ve labeled these sensations in the body as “bad” or “wrong” because we don’t like how they feel.

After deeply reflecting on this, I realized I was being toxically positive with my friend…

“It was a great learning experience, though, and now you can take those learnings into your next relationship.”

… and this was how I always responded — I’d look for a positive spin to the story.

Why, you might ask?

Societal conditioning was part of it, but that’s a cop out answer. The real answer is that I did not want to sit with those uncomfortable feelings myself. And prior to YTT, I was completely unaware of this behavior.

By sharing something sad with me, my friend passed along those emotions. And because I was uncomfortable with how it felt in my body, I immediately looked for a positive to change the tone and make the both of us feel better.

I’ll also pause here to let that sink in on the chance that it blows your mind 🤯 as much as it did mine.

True empathy and attunement is to hear someone, feel what they’re feeling, and then sit in that with them — regardless of how uncomfortable it might be. And I believe that’s how deeper connection and understanding forms.

Spiritual Bypassing

My last learning is another way of denying someone’s felt experience… spiritually, though, because I’m spiritual now (whatever that means).

Spiritual bypassing is when you use a diety (the universe, God, etc.) as a scapegoat to deny one’s felt experience. A simple “everything happens for a reason” counts too.

And in the third part of my stellar response, I did just that:

“It’s all part of a greater plan… when it’s your time to be with someone, the universe will make it happen.”

While my intention was pure, I again denied my friend’s experience by making it seem like everything was okay… that it was all part of a divine plan.

My friend was not okay, though. That’s why we were talking. They didn’t need me to console them… they wanted to be heard and understood.

It may have been a part of a divine plan, but that was irrelevant in the moment.

Shame.

I now see that I used spiritual bypassing as yet another tool to avoid pain. A spiritually glorified way of distracting myself (and others), if you will.

Closing Thoughts

I want to be explicit to you all (and myself) that none of this is wrong.

It’s not wrong that I used to respond to challenges in a way that may have (unintentionally) made the situation worse.

I was working with the tools I had at the time to do what I thought was right.

I’m not saying this new approach is right either, though. It’s simply another way of approaching a challenging situation that might lead to more authentic connection.

Maybe you find some of this thought provoking and start to examine your own language or relationship to uncomfortable emotions. Or maybe not — you don’t have to do anything at all, remember?

Love you all,

Jacob

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Some things I’ve done

• Went kayaking and saw sooo many dolphins 🐬

• Saw whales 🐳 on a random walk along the promenade

• Went to a Jewish deli for the first time in Cape Town and had a solid bagel

• Bought some outrages garb for Afrikaburn

• Started drinking Chai tea (not lattes)

• Started doing Trauma Release Therapy (TRE) and it’s been WILD

• Practice taught an hour long yoga class for the first time

• Survived a nasty stomach bug that wrecked me for four days

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Pics

Dolphins not pictured

9am on a Monday

Fun colors

Afrikaburn shopping extravaganza: