Lessons that taught me about Empathy — 3 of them — and then they were 2!

I am back to talk about another lesson that led me to empathy.

My Yoga Practice is no 2

The power of words is in our hands. There are so many ways to say what you don’t like without making others feel they only belong in a ‘hated’ box.

The harshness of a truth may sound like something we need sometimes but when is too much is exactly that — too much!

Quite often I hear people making extreme statements: ‘I hate when people ask to be followed’, ‘I don’t like immature people’, ‘I run away from people emotionally unstable’ ‘I hate it when I see grammar mistakes’, and other strong wordings that make me feel bad and inadequate.

Does it mean that if I ask people to follow me, I am a lesser person, I cannot be a kind person and I cannot be in the run to save the world and that is bad? Nobody is asking us to ‘like’ everything, that would be silly! But do we need to make a strong wording statement to express our view?

We are all different in one way or another, we all have our quirkiness, faults, or defaults. At the end of the day, we must learn to be happy within ourselves, and accept who we are and what we are and once that happens we succeed in accepting others as they are as well.

This is where yoga comes in.

At one point a few years ago I decided to take my personal yoga practice to a different level, ie — get certified and be a yoga teacher. That was a new journey that showed me some facets that I could not make out before.

Quite often my minutes of meditation ended in stress-release tears followed by a deep peace. That was a feeling I wanted to share.

The first sentence that sounded strange to me as I heard it from my teachers was:

It’s not about being good at something, it’s about being good to yourself.

It took me a while to get the idea. I pushed myself at 50 yo into intense yoga practice wanting to perform certain asanas. It was the ego, can I do a split at 50? I succeeded with the cost of some injuries and I realized that with or without that asana I was still me and being angry at myself for not being able to do it and hurting myself, it was not helpful.

Each physical body is different, we are not the same and we can’t perform the same.

As I was about to find out when I started yoga classes for beginners they all had a problem, an illness, an ailment, they all had an ‘imperfection’. Each person has a weaker point (or stronger for that matter), which could be flexibility (or not!) in the hips, pain in the knees, difficulty breathing, and so on.

As I learned from my own body, I had to open my eyes, get out of the teacher mode, see what that was, and be able to show it to them in a nice way, so they could let go of the ego that pushed them to practice against what their body tried to tell them.

If we think a little about our life, it is made of imperfections, the perfect things are not quite real life, are they?

Increasing your body awareness is by far the most sought benefit of yoga. Being aware of how your body feels, and bringing your mind inside your body to investigate and find new things, is what yoga is - a unification between mind and body. It is something that we can all use off the mat as well. When you walk, when you eat, when you read — whatever you do if you are aware of it it means so much more.

I stopped looking at my students in a judgemental way.

In my first classes as a teacher, I looked at my students critically. How they choose their place in the class, how they sit, how they dress, how they practice, how they try to cut corners, how they look at the person on the next mat.

Then I understood, that was my first job — to accept them as they are and help them be good to themselves. My focus changed to the right place — teaching and helping.

How many of them rejected the breathing exercises? Or the meditation? I cannot meditate, it’s not me, I cannot stay still, my mind is racing, I cannot stop thinking about my kids. So many reasons and excuses for not doing it or to tell why they are not good at it maybe?

And I judged them.

Then I let go.

And showed them how to.