Does personal empowerment exist without benefitting the tribe?
Does personal empowerment exist without benefitting the tribe?
An appeal for change in the student-teacher relationship.
Movement is one of the most powerful tools we have in a journey of personal empowerment. This is what I know to be true through 17 years of exploration. Along the way, I came across a life changing question in Chip Conrad’s book, Are You Useful: “Does personal empowerment even exist without befitting the tribe?”
This question penetrated my body, a quiver rippled from my spine, I felt the fire in my belly reignite. Why? Upon contemplating, I realized no, of course not, personal empowerment simply cannot exist in a vacuum. Simultaneously, my body shifted into gear. Abracadabra! A force beyond anything I knew thrust me back into my journey toward teaching. Which is something I tried and failed at (okay, less failed, more got distracted from) more times than I can count.
From all my previous attempts, one of the greatest lessons I learned is that the most effective teachers are masters of knowing what to leave out. What goes in is important, yes, absolutely… yet without space for the imagination to unfurl — to poke and prod and explore the possibilities— no real learning happens. Real learning, I would argue, is learning that invites the student to go find out for themselves, rather than blindly believe what a so-called authority figure tells them is true; effective education invites us to “live the questions,” as Rainer Maria Rilke would have us do.
Live the questions — Rainer Maria Rilke
Within any educational context, there is a fine balance to strike between freedom and discipline. In the realm of movement education at large (which from my perspective isn’t really education, so much as obedience training), this balance seems to be woefully askew. And it just so happens that I care a great deal about this imbalance, since my personal mission is to help you become empowered through movement.
How I arrived at this mission has been a long and winding journey. And I wonder if you might be wandering along a similar road.
Take, for instance, my initial foray into the realm of becoming a movement teacher: my first 200 hour yoga teacher training. When I enrolled, I thought, “This is it! Here, in these 200 hours, lay my empowerment.” I wish I could tell you it went that way. I wish I could say I felt vibrant and alive and connected and that I breathed deeper and formed lasting friendships and that my whole life opened up. I wish the marketing hype were real. But it wasn’t.
The reality was this: three days a week I went to the studio, practicing in a 100° Fahrenheit room, learning to instruct the same 30-some poses in the same order with the same robotic cues. And three days a week I was given text after text to read, which could've been useful were they not covered in opaque layers of strict “yogic” rules to follow. Ways I should eat, ways I should breathe, ways I should move, ways I should think, ways I should behave if I wanted to be a “good yogi.” That’s a whole lot of “shoulds,” huh?. By the end of the training, my body was stiff as a board unless I was in that heated studio, I was already unhealthily thin and now, eating progressively less, and I felt less connected to myself and the world outside me than I ever had. This yoga teacher training drove me deeper into an already abusive relationship with my body.
“But yoga is an ancient tradition full of thousands of years of wisdom,” you may be thinking. “How could that be?” Au, contraire, my friend. Yes, many of the yogic texts are old, yet the physical practice — the asanas that we mostly associate with yoga and tend to think inherently have some sort of magical powers — are actually relatively new, and came not from India, but from the modern sport of gymnastics, which originated in Sweden before spreading through Europe. So, there’s that.
The word, “yoga” means to yoke, to bring together — it’s that whole union of mind and body thing everyone in the world of movement talks about, but few, it seems, actually understand. Especially in the training i was part of, we seemed to be cut off at the heads. “Do what we tell you, regardless of how you might feel or what your body might want to do” was the overarching message. I’m no rocket scientist, but isn’t that the opposite of union?
Why are we so willing to place all of our power in our yoga teachers’ (or personal trainers’ or crossfit instructors’) hands? Does the label teacher, or worse, “coach,” (this word is so overused it’s all but lost significance) mean the person in that role has ultimate authority over us? And if they do, how could that possibly benefit the tribe in the grand scheme of things? How could it benefit anyone other than the person in charge?
The way education insidiously instructs us to give our power up is a systemic issue. We are told in many ways and from many angles to OBEY! Starting in grade school, ``listen to your teacher” Or in the family, “listen to your father. Good girls wouldn’t do that.” And then, as adults, we are addicted to the need to obey, and we get our fix through abusive relationships with our bodies and exercise (which is really a reflection of how we relate, in general). We listen to commands telling us to “do these exercises in this specific way for this amount of time and… well not really for any reason except to get a 6-pack and be a little more fuckable.” We are told to eat this, not that. To never gain an ounce of fat. And worst of all, to leave any sense of empowerment we felt when we were in the throes of movement bliss (which might’ve actually been the cognitive dissonance of our delight in suffering) at the gym or with the one who was telling us what to do. Even if it’s just an app on our phones. Which honestly, is kind of scary.
I’m not saying all the information teachers communicate is bad (though in the fitness industrial complex (FIC), much of it is) but that the frame it’s delivered through is broken.
I thought through my teacher training I’d connect with myself, find a creative voice, tap into the fire in my belly. I thought I’d feel confident in sharing this practice with others. What actually happened? I was overwhelmed and confused by the amount of obedience expected. The only time I felt free was when the cool breeze grazed my skin as I thrust open the doors of that sweat soaked studio, but just for a moment, because eventually I remembered who had the authority, and it was not me. It was the teacher and her rules.
Rather than practices, ideas, and movements to play with and explore on my own, I learned there were specific “right” ways to be. There was no wiggle room. If I wanted to be a proper yoga teacher, a respected yoga teacher, one who learned from a good lineage, well, this was simply what I had to do! It was a classic case of spiritually branded copy and paste.
Let me ask you something that might be a little grating. Would you really want someone who believed their authority rested in a guru or a yoga teacher manual or in the NASM personal trainer test they crammed for in one single month to be the one teaching you anything? Do you really think they could deliver valuable lessons in strength and empowerment?
And what about this. Have you ever contemplated what strength really means? Like, to YOU?
Being young and naive, I didn’t question the not-so-subtle policing in my training. I thought it was the way things were supposed to be, so I invested all my faith and power (uh, and money… more on that in future posts) in the studio’s owner and her dictates. Screw what any of it meant to me. Screw my personal journey. After all, she was in charge of this place. So she must’ve known what she was doing. Right? Well, she definitely knew a thing or two about marketing. Freedom, though? Empowerment of the tribe? I’m not so sure.
After the training, I stuck fervently to the yoga routine, eating just so and breathing just so and moving just so, for several more years, but something always felt off. There was a grave dissonance between my mind and body. The truth was, my body had other ideas. Other than whatever the teacher was saying, no matter how seasoned they were. Yet class after class I obeyed orders, doubting my own creative sparks. Doubting the wisdom of my own body. And most of all, doubting myself as a teacher, because I just didn’t want to follow that damn formula!
See, I didn’t understand what teaching was. All I’d learned to do was give orders in a breathy voice that made them seem a bit less harsh. Eventually, I started to get the sense that maybe I was convincing myself “yoga” was what I believed in simply because I had invested so much energy in it. And that maybe it was okay to deviate a bit.
Lying bored and restless in the heat one summer afternoon, I followed an urge to lay two yoga mats across one another in an X and explore moving around on this new shape. I wondered, why had I never traveled outside of that too-small overpriced rubber rectangle? What was so special about that rectangle, anyway?
Soon after, I stopped attending yoga classes like it was my religion, and started to explore movement on my own. I realized, I actually didn’t need someone else to tell me what to do, and from there, my practice grew in all sorts of unexpected directions. In the bliss of my own company, I felt free to roam around in circles and break into random cartwheels. When a song came on that particularly struck me, I let the flow of my energy carry me from downward facing dogs and chaturangas to dancing my way around the living room. Here, free of any guaranteed “success” or known path laid out before me, I began to feel the sense of empowerment I had been seeking all those years earlier.
Which leads me back to this earlier contemplation: how does a teacher empower a student?
When it comes to our bodies, on a mechanical level, there are ways to break the machine, and ways to make it stronger. A good movement teacher will be aware of these powers of breaking and building, and help you become better at building than you are at breaking.
However; even in the realm of movement, the teacher’s role has the potential to become more metaphysical than physical. With a good teacher, the physical begets the metaphysical. The movement is simply the container for the greater lessons that the student will learn through their own explorations.
So what might some of these lessons be, if not simply how to do a deadlift or a downward facing dog in the pursuit of a nice ass?
Building a solid foundation of self awareness and connection of body, mind, and spirit is FUN-DA-MEN-TAL
Speaking of fun, PLAY (freedom to explore) is absolutely necessary
Obedience and discipline are not the same. And education that promotes obedience over all is not useful. If you are a teacher, it is your responsibility to know if you are teaching from a fear of being wrong. This encourages cognitive dissonance and does not empower anyone to take their own journey.
No word is final. There is no one “right way.” Everything is always changing. Every student is unique.
It’s all about context.
And a final thought: a teacher’s most important role may be to empower the student to discern, for themselves, what is useful and what is not; to teach the student to think for themselves, and thereby move, create, and LIVE, from an authentic place.
xx Faye