Don't Forget About Common Sense

There are many instructions given to students of yoga. They are not all created equally. Some are supported by evidence, some are not. Some are historical, some are contemporary. Some are in favor of physical health, some are in favor of a liberation in a metaphysical sense. Some draw from science, some draw from religious text. You get the idea... 

Yoga can, and often does, carry the weight of tradition. This means we are keen to accept instructions we hear because we believe them to be in some way to be ancient, informed, proven or magically powerful. Because of this, we have to be careful. 

While it is perfectly reasonable (in most cases) to try an instruction given by a yoga teacher, it does not mean that it is always a quality instruction. By that, we mean the following: not everything said in yoga classrooms makes sense, has evidence, is accurate or is useful.

​If you do not understand something, it is certainly possible you are new to it and you need time to make sense of it. However, it is also possible that your misunderstanding is due to the fact that it doesn't make sense! The problem can be the instruction, not your ability to understand it.  

For example, imagine you are standing in Chair pose. Your quadriceps are burning and your legs feel tired. (This is reasonable because those are the muscles holding you in position. It is a lower body posture.) You hear the teacher talking endlessly about the arms. You feel confused. You can focus on your arms but they are not what you are feeling in the posture. In this instance, you get confused. Your common sense is leading you one way and the instructions are leading you another. 

Or imagine your abdomen is tightly engaged in the position pictured above. The instructor says "take a deep inhale". You feel a sense of tightness or even panic because you cannot maintain the position and deeply breathe in. But this is not because you are doing it wrong or are not good at it: this is because it is muscularly impossible to breathe in deeply while the abdomen is engaged. The physical reality of breathing and abdominal engagement means the instruction you were given is not useful, and your common sense about how it feels is correct.

In a perfect world, all yoga teachers would give informed, precise and useful instructions at all times. However, this isn't the case. As students of yoga we should do our best to learn from quality teachers and certainly stay open to the process of making sense of things we do not yet understand.

However, we should remain alert to the fact that there are less than ideal instructions being confidently delivered to students regularly. If you hear something that is in conflict with your common sense, take note.

​Learning is not believing everything we hear. It is a process of keeping our minds open as a humble students, seeking information, yet filtering it for quality, reliability and usefulness.