“Where Should I Feel This?” Trauma-Informed Thoughts on Empowering Yoga Students

Yonnie Fung, yoga therapist and 300-hour Trauma Sensitive Yoga facilitator, wrote an article about empowering yoga students and then spoke at length in a Connected Yoga Teacher podcast. I have to admit, once I heard she was a Center for Trauma & Embodiment grad, everything clicked into place, because I *already* agree, at least in theory, with what she’s talking about (and have been accepted into this 300-hour training starting in September!). Still, below is what I really liked about her article – plus a few tips examples of how I try to embody a similar approach in one not-particularly invitational  setting I teach in.

Podcast host Shannon Crow started by mentioning two common challenges to empowering students:

1. Some (perhaps most?) people come to class wanting to be told what to do and

2. Common practices in yoga might undermine student empowerment, for instance, cuing in a way that offers commands rather than suggestions or invitations.

One of the main ways Yonnie identified that yoga instructors might actually disempower their students was participating in a power dynamic. This dynamic is to a large extent already set when you arrive as an individual teacher – you didn’t create it, but simply by teaching as people expect you to, you participate in it. Aspects of a power dynamic include, for instance, that the teacher is the one who talks. The teacher decides the sequence, “what I do with my body, if I use props, when and what props, where my fingers go in Warrior Two … and I’m not allowed to ask why.” (approximation of Yonnie’s words in the podcast). This dynamic disempowers students as they aren’t positioned as experts on their own bodies, which they are, or encouraged to move in any way the teacher doesn’t specifially direct.

I will say that in my experience, one of the settings where this power dynamic is most commonly “upset” by, for instance, students talking, asking questions, engaging with the teacher and doing things things the teacher hasn’t offered is not where you might expect: Cook County Jail. And many people talk about this…student talkativeness? as if it’s a negative because it makes it “harder” to teach (and sure, it IS in fact harder to focus, but I don’t think this makes it a negative). In my opinion, getting out of a traditional yoga environment actually makes it easier to do this, and so does working with participants who might not have spent much time in a yoga studio. Granted, my own approach may invite this sort of dialog more than others – I have had questions asked in “regular” classes, though far fewer – but I do suspect the non-traditional environment is part of it.

Point two: It’s hard to be embodied (to honor our own feelings and move in a way that actually suits us in a yoga class even if asked) when as children we are told not to, when we learn in schools that also don’t favor this approach, and when our society endorses some people as experts on other people’s bodies. Yonnie gives examples gleaned from comments to her young daughter such as “don’t be sad” and “Give me your prettiest smile!” What if you ARE sad? If you aren’t smiling, it may well be because you don’t feel like smiling. Children, and adults, are encouraged to act in ways that don’t reflect how they actually feel. Prescriptive language, that is, the language of commands, is taught in many yoga teacher trainings, and used in schools and other teaching settings, so it’s not surprising that it’s hard for yoga instructors to just spontaneously break away from it. As the podcast points out, this mentality took generations to create and it will take time to depart from it. 

In the 2000s, I was fortunate to encounter a volunteer tutor role (in the US, no less!) with an organization that informed tutors about Paolo Freire’s critical pedagogy (to the extent something like that can be learned in a weekend training!) and his criticism of the “banking model of education.” This banking model of education in many respects sounds a lot like a traditional approach to teaching yoga: positioning students as “empty vessels” or blank slates that the teacher fills with knowledge. In a not dissimilar way, the (British-created) Cambridge Certificate of English Language Teaching to Adults I completed in Budapest, Hungary, also encouraged EFL instructors to utilize students’ own strengths and knowledge to put together patters or rules in language, rather than simply reading out those rules first, and to encourage communication of actual information between students during speaking activities, rather than rote memorization or drilling. And it’s considered (probably researched to be) more effective for learning when people actually engage with the material themselves rather than turn off their critical thinking and somehow absorb information from another person or source. So it’s not unheard of in education to empower learners, but it is rare. And, like in yoga, students are not always down with it … even though this approach is intended for their benefit.

One of the most striking parts of the interview was when Yonnie and the host kind of laughed at the (common) student question and, to be fair, teacher instruction: “Where should I feel this?” (“You should feel this in your XYZ”).

They both laughed, because it IS funny that someone would move, and then ask *another* person how something SHOULD feel, rather than assessing how it actually DOES feel for themselves … but this happens because it is SUCH common lingo in yoga classes!  Recently an instructor *told* twenty some other students and I that bending our back lower to the ground, though still without touching, makes crescent lunge “more comfortable”. I would beg to differ that “comfortable” is my experience when I do this – it doesn’t mean no one ever should – but one person telling twenty some others how they are feeling right now didn’t seem to strike people as unusual.

In most settings, this sort of language is so common it’s not funny at all, and my impression is that often, if an instructor doesn’t answer in a way that the student is expecting, students will assume something negative about the teacher (they don’t know what they are doing!). Occasionally a student will actually ask where they are supposed to feel something. I’ve heard the suggestion to re-direct the question and rather than answer, ask the student where they do feel it. Not bad, but what if they don’t feel anything? If we do want to encourage people to raise questions and engage, it also pays to be mindful of how our responses come across – and in a group setting, having a question re-directed may come across as sort of shaming, or at least as an encouragement to shut up! Also not what I’d want to communicate.(Read on to hear what I do).

To be fair, human beings use a lot of language that is shorthand for something else (“you should feel this here” versus ” the intention of this posture is to stretch x and strengthen y because I’m going to offer a posture that requires that sort of engagement later” especially if students don’t have the language of anatomy… setting aside the topic of why we would offer a posture with an intention like this). We  also do use a lot of language out of habit without necessarily thinking about its implication. Not all language like this is necessarily intended to be disempowering, of course … so what a great benefit to have this article spell it out so we CAN consider the implications of our language!

I do teach in a more traditional than invitational way in most settings I teach in currently. I am many times over more invitational than the vast majority of the instructors I work with in the main studio setting, and probably in most settings, as this is something that really speaks to me and I’ve worked on for a long time. You don’t have to identify as a trauma survivor to be one, and you don’t have to be a trauma survivor to benefit from the more introspective aspects of yoga.

But on top of working in questions and multiple options to my cues, I sometimes drop in things like, “We don’t actually know what other people feel, or that what you feel in half split is like what I feel”. Or ,”the physical intention of half pigeon is related to a hip stretch (rather than “you should feel this in your hip”), but there are more intentions than a physical one, like offering something a bit more restorative than the rest of what you have been up to. There are a lot of things you could be doing now OTHER THAN half pigeon that also meet that intention.” To plant seeds. And so I don’t come across as totally uninformed and clueless. And I do try to offer what’s on the schedule. Heated power vinyasa is a style I teach, a style that has been tremendously helpful to me personally, and yet is probably not the most conducive style of yoga to try to offer a fully invitational approach as we might with a much gentler and slower paced class.

Talking on a podcast, or speaking with people who agree that invitational language is the right way to go is very different than talking to teachers who cue in a traditional way, and worry about misalignment … and to students who have only ever come across this one way of teaching. So…what if people put their foot on their knee in tree and push? This comment prefaced a very real and very lengthy argument in the 20-hour TCTSY training I took. I don’t have a full answer, but I do think yoga instructors want to feel the knowledge they have, which quite often IS very largely focused on alignment, qualifies them to do what they do, and saying that knowledge isn’t helpful, or that sharing it with students actually disempowers students, is considered a threat to yoga instructors on some level.

I’d suggest that (particularly in trauma informed settings) instructors need to be comfortable offering more basic movement that won’t hurt people if they do it “wrong”. On the one hand, I would understand if the focus of this podcast is not on persuasion…on the other, I think it would be so much more powerful if it could address one of the biggest counter arguments yoga instructors make to invitational and trauma informed approaches. Once we are in the realm of avoiding dramatic postures that make injury likely with misalignments, we can explore how making decisions about one’s own body actually has more value than losing agency and getting the “right” stretch or doing the posture “perfectly”.

The topic of hands on assists also came up, in part in the context of inappropriate touch, which really is a separate blog post ..or whole separate encyclopedia entry. But in light of the topic of this post, Yonnie said something like, “How can we learn to move our town body if somebody else is arranging it?” And often even teaches who do perform a number of hands on assists would agree that yoga can potentially help people learn to move their own body.  I would add: 

– in my experience, studios sometimes emphasize hands on assists because “everyone loves them”, which by definition is not a yoga reason! It’s a customer service reason. Having a customer service reason for a practice does not necessarily make it wrong, but it may divert us from engaging in a practice which IS actually more yogic and ultimately more beneficial for students.

– I’ve heard students refer to assists as “fixing” people, which is certainly not the impression most yoga instructors would want to convey, at least, I hope not, and may well be a reason to minimize or avoid assists.

– it’s very possible students don’t understand the reason an instructor assists them (if the assist is alignment related) which in my view almost defeats the purpose of finding better alignment long term. For instance, it is not uncommon to assist someone out of “misalignment’ on the right side of a posture, only to have them promptly “misalign” on the left side.

Clearly, I have a lot of thoughts on this topic. How has yoga been empowering to YOU? And how to you work to empower your students?